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Join us as Dr. Jeff Myers, president of Summit Ministries and bestselling author on worldview and leadership, shares the incredible story of how Summit is equipping thousands of young adults (ages 16–22) to stand firm in their faith and engage every area of culture with confidence.

From their flagship two-week summer student conferences to Summit Online courses, the advanced Summit Next vocational training, and a life-changing gap-year program with college credit and internships, discover how Summit is igniting lifelong curiosity, grounding students in Scripture, and launching them into politics, business, medicine, tech, and beyond as courageous ambassadors for Christ.

To learn more about Summit or apply for their programs, visit https://www.summit.org/

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of Classical Christian Education. Thanks for joining us. Today. We have with us Jeff Myers, Dr. Jeff Myers, the president of Summit Ministries. Jeff, welcome.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
Marlin. It's great to be with you. And I love the name of your show.

Marlin Detweiler:
Thanks.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
I was just hearing a song last night that Stephanie was playing when we were listening to some worship music. The Voice of Truth. So I love it.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, I wish I could claim originality. Somebody else gave me the name Veritas. Anyway, Veritas Press and we thought it sounded really cool, so we did that. I think within the classical educational world, maybe in the first people to use it. Now goodness gracious, there must be 15 schools or 20 schools with that name too. So

Dr. Jeff Myers:
Well, I'm glad they're reclaiming something that is a significant part of America's educational heritage with Harvard University. They abandoned it. It's appropriate that other institutions are going to pick it up.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, that reminds me of a story. I was playing golf one day with a guy that I said we ask him after having told him about my business. We were talking. And. So where'd you go to school? And he just looked at me and didn't say Harvard. He said Veritas, meant what he meant.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
That's hilarious. That's hilarious. My next door neighbor is a Harvard Law grad and when he's asked where he went to school, he always says, I went to school back East. In Colorado, that passes for a sufficient answer.

Marlin Detweiler:
That's funny. Well, tell us a little bit about yourself, your family, your education, your career path and what took you to Summit.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
Yes. Well, I'm the president now of Summit Ministries, based in a little hippie town in Colorado right at the foot of Pikes Peak called Manitou Springs. The ministry equips and supports the rising generation to embrace God's truth and champion a biblical worldview. And before doing that, I had the privilege of being a professor at a Christian college, teaching undergraduates and MBA students and also starting several different businesses and a nonprofit organization all focused on leadership and communication training.

That took me often to homeschooling conferences around the country when I was doing that, not so much now with my work at Summit Ministries. But back in that time, but little of my story, I was born in Detroit, Michigan. It was a very rough place to grow up in a rough time. There were riots there that destroyed the city.

They were so bad that in the city of Detroit alone more people were killed, more people went to jail, more buildings were destroyed than in all of the United States put together in the summer of 2020. If you Google magic word. So it was an insecure place to grow up. I was offered hard drugs for the first time at seven years of age.

I remember cowering under my bed as the police and some bad guys had a gun battle in the street in front of our house, and my parents were from Kansas, Oklahoma. So they said the career opportunities here are not worth the difficulty of raising children here. So when I was about ten, we moved back to Kansas and ended up in a really small country church.

People loved us. I knew they loved us. They took care of us, went to their home. They fed us. I'm speaking of my younger brother and me, but their paths to faith did not run through a lot of the difficult apologetic struggles that I felt like were significant. When you're in an environment where it's conflictual. Okay, you know, is there a God?

How do we know that there is a God? How do we know that God is as he is described in the Bible? If God is good, why is there evil in the world? Isn't he powerful enough? You know, creation versus evolution. I had all of these questions. And in this little country church, people's main response having not come to faith through street battles, they said, well, you just need to have faith.

And I picked up the distinct impression that asking questions was doubting and doubting was a sin. Yeah. And so I essentially decided, Marlin, that when I.

Marlin Detweiler:
Questioned him that didn't sit well with you, that you thought there's something wrong with that.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
Well, I knew there was something wrong with it. I didn't want to try to refute it or go against it. I loved these people. And so I just decided that when I graduate from high school, very quietly and respectfully graduate from church. That's an experience that a lot of young adults today still have. Scott Conwell from McConnell from LifeWay has said that in his assessment of the Baptist churches that he's worked with, that probably 65% of young adults who are significantly involved in church in their high school years are no longer even attending church by the time they reach their mid-twenties.

You know? So I was going to be that statistic. Yeah. It is. It's scary. It's scary for parents. You do your very best to raise your children according to the ways of the Lord, and then watch as the world very quickly takes them over. Well, my parents had heard about this ministry called Summit Ministries. My father had somehow gotten hold of the newsletter from David Noble.

And, you know, they're Kansas conservatives. He looked at it and thought this is crazy. These people are conspiracy. They're talking about communism and things like that. But after five of those newsletters, he said, you know what? This is making a lot of sense. This guy's documenting everything that he says. It's factual. It's not crazy. And then they said, we've got a scholarship for a program.

Well scholarship is my dad's favorite word. So they he said, why don't you go out to this program in Manitou Springs, Colorado for two weeks? Well, if you're in the plains of Kansas, an opportunity to go to Colorado for two weeks has no downside.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
So I went to the program and I found David Noble, the director of the program, and I said to him, I hope you have a lot of answers because I have a lot of questions.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
And he said to me, you know, at some point I was 17, 17. He said, At Summit we aren't afraid of questions. That's all I really needed to hear Marlin. Yeah. I didn't need to know that there's somebody out there who has everything locked down and I would be suspicious if somebody said, I know 100% of what I believe is true.

I'm positive about it. I would have been suspicious because it's very rare in life to be sure of something more than 51 to 75%. Right. So I just knew I'd found my tribe. And I hung out with them. I stayed there for the two weeks. The following summer I went back for another two weeks. I took some students to the program.

I did an internship in Colorado Springs at an advertising agency and stayed at Summit during the summer. And some way or another I have been involved with Summit Ministries ever since. It was through that program that I came to a personal faith in Jesus Christ.

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
So it not only was foundational for me but it established my life trajectory. I went from Summit Ministries back to my college, ran for student government ultimately with Lee, was elected to be the president of the student government at our university. Where did you budget? That was at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas. That led to all kinds of opportunities.

I did a master's degree at Baylor University coaching debate and teaching speech. And then completed and graduated from the doctoral program in philosophy at the University of Denver. Okay. And then became a professor. I taught at Bryan College in Dayton, Tennessee for many years. Undergraduate students MBA students in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as I mentioned started several different businesses related to communication and leadership training.

And David Noble when he retired asked me to take his place as the president of Summit Ministries.

Marlin Detweiler:
So and that was around 2011.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
That was 2011. Yes. So I've been in Colorado ever since leading that ministry and God has shown favor to us. We have been able to have the largest groups of students that we've ever had, more student enrollment. We've started a curriculum program that's used in Christian schools all over the world and many homeschool co-ops as well, based on the Understanding the Times book and series that goes from kindergarten to grade 12. And that program is now studied by 70,000 young people a year.

Marlin Detweiler:
Wonderful.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
God's given us a lot of opportunities to speak in the media, given opportunities to me to write books that have had a lot of circulation. And so it's been a very very exciting thing to be part of watching God turn the hearts of a generation back toward him.

Marlin Detweiler:
But it was such a great story. Tell us what the emphasis of Summit Ministries is and then kind of walk us through the student programs and initiatives that you have. This is your opportunity to have a free commercial.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
Well that is the essential the Core Summit Ministries program. It's a 12 day course of study, 16 to 22 year olds come for 12 days. We connect them with.

Marlin Detweiler:
The summer.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
That's in the summertime primarily. Yes. We connect them with the top Christian thought leaders who are wrestling with the issues they wrestle with. One of our core instructors for example is Frank Turek. Frank Turek. You probably saw him speak at Charlie Kirk's memorial. He was with Charlie when he was killed. Frank is the number one guy traveling to speak and do the Q&A sessions on college campuses.

Right now he's in the arena so when he teaches apologetics to students, they really listen. Doctor Sean McDowell. Many people are familiar with his dad, the evangelist Josh McDowell is one of our core instructors. Doctor Kathy Cook who often speaks at homeschooling conferences is a tremendous encourager to parents but she helps students understand how they are smart.

They are. One of our core goals is to ignite a spirit of learning and of curiosity among students and then to give them biblically faithful ways to understand God's Word and then to apply it to every area of life. We don't just talk about theology, we talk about philosophy and ethics, science, psychology, sociology, politics, law, economics, history and Marlin.

What happens to the students during that time is extraordinary. You know, about 1% of Gen Zers, this rising generation the ones who are later high school early and in college and in their 20s now, about 1% of them according to the social researcher George Barna have a biblical worldview. By the time the 1%, yes, by the time they finish the program with us, 95% claim to hold true a biblical worldview and then we continue studying them.

We study our graduates one year, five years and ten years out, and even at ten years, 90% still claim to operate from a biblical worldview. So there's something that happens through this experience that is really miraculous, something that God uses to utterly change hearts and minds and firm up students biblical beliefs not only so that they don't fall away from the faith, but that they end up taking a biblical worldview into aspects of the culture, from politics to the military to business to medicine and agriculture and all of these different areas of life.

Marlin Detweiler:
But now that's there are four things that are listed on your website that I was able to glean. And that sounds like you just described as what we would call you would call a student conferences.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
Student conferences. Yes.

Marlin Detweiler:
There are other there are other programs. I'll mention them. And you can nuance them. In comparison, the summit online, the summit next and gap year.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
Right. Those are all programs. Now we do we have curriculum courses as I mentioned that are used all over the world. So our students in a two week program would have a with a 56 hours of instruction in two weeks.

Marlin Detweiler:
And yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
Whitewater rafting, rock climbing, sports. We work hard and we play hard and we develop a community that is so strong that people stay in touch for the rest of their lives. I'm still friends with people I attended a Summit Ministries program with when I was 17 or 18 years of age. Now those other programs you mentioned, summit next is kind of our advanced program for our graduates.

And then the gap year program is offered to about 30 students every year. So they're selected to attend over the course of year over over the course of nine months and have.

Marlin Detweiler:
A school year.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
That is a school year more intensive instruction for which they receive college credit okay. And they focus in on improving their writing skills, their thinking skills, their reading skills and then actual job shadowing and internships and so forth. So that when students finish a gap year it's a wise thing to do for many many students.

I think a lot of 18 year olds recognize in their hearts they're not really ready to go off to college. They're not really ready to start their career. They need a year to really process, be in community, strengthen themselves and so the students a lot of them choose to do that before they go off to higher education.

And a lot of them went off to college and ruined their first year. It's a very common story. And then they come back and say yeah before I go back and I don't want to waste my parents money. I don't want to waste my money. I don't want to waste time. Let me get right with God and develop community, develop my thinking skills.

And it really it's it really helps them academically prepare for making the most of their higher education experience.

Marlin Detweiler:
The how where is you said summit next is kind of a a next level beyond the conferences. How does that further prepare over children, young adults for life.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
The summit next is it's an interesting it's part of a network of things that we do with students who've graduated from our two week program. We don't just abandon them. We continue to provide feed them information through podcasts and newsletters and so forth on current issues of the day and how to understand them from a biblical worldview. And then the summit next is really vocational focused.

Marlin Detweiler:
So interesting.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
What does it look like to have a biblical worldview in your job? The people who've come to that program are you know everything from PhD mathematicians to people who are in the agricultural business, which is an extraordinary business as you know being from Pennsylvania and one in which a biblical perspective is is very much needed. So they work through okay what does this look like on an everyday basis to understand work from God's perspective?

Because one of the key words for working or serving in the Old Testament of Scripture of Adar is is also a word for worship. That work is a form of worship and worship is work. And so we understand our work that we do as a form of worship to God. And when a young person grasp that yeah they could be in the financial services business or they could be working on Capitol Hill it gives them a reason to go to work every day and work builds their faith. I think it's what Darrell Miller calls Monday church, not just Sunday church.

Marlin Detweiler:
I've never heard it called Monday Church but that's clever. Yeah. We we really need a healthy dose of understanding that glorifying God happens in more contexts than the church building.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
No there's no question. And when young people get that it's extraordinary to watch them. I've just been I'm getting ready this evening to have dinner with summit grad who's been in the energy business and been very very successful and moving into the tech field building these massive data centers. And it's it's extraordinary. I'm very very proud of him as a teacher.

And you know, you've got the heart of a teacher. You want to pull your students up to where you are and then push them on ahead of where you can go. Yeah. And when your students are ten times or 100 times more successful at what they do than you were, that's not a negative against you. That's a sign of success.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Tell me, let's, the program is something I've been familiar with for years and I've known kids have gone through it, and it's it's been wonderful. Let's. In the time that you've been involved, which is obviously decades and a decade and a half as the president, we're dealing with a generation that we labeled Gen Z and we deal with students that probably would be considered younger than that.

I don't know when Gen Z will be closed and we'll have to go to back to double AA. Oh yeah.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
It's already happening. Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
Is it part of the?

Dr. Jeff Myers:
Part of the research that we are doing? We're calling them Gen Alpha. We get to start the alphabet all over again. Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
We didn't start at the beginning. So we still have some we can, you know, like a hurricane. You can't use the name more than once. But if you didn't exist yet, you can still you can do it. Okay.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
So we should be good for a few years.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. But tell me about what? Yeah. Most of the people listening are going to be parents. Tell me how you perceive the needs of the students today, maybe in contrast to your childhood or the 30 or 40 somethings childhood because it seems to me that there are qualitative and significant differences.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
You know, Marlin, I worked with and in the beginning in my work with Summit Ministries, again just helping out, being an instructor in the program, I worked with younger members of my own generational cohort. I'm Gen X.

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
And then millennials and then Gen Z. So this is three generations now. And you do get to see trends over time. I do. I find it very compelling. I think Jean Twenge may be the person who introduced this idea that the way people access technology largely defines not what they think about, but how they actually think, what their thinking processes, their noetic.

Marlin Detweiler:
Interesting. I hadn't thought about that, but it resonates. I'm interested.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
Yeah. Yeah. So we've now got a smartphone generation, while the generation before it was the internet generation. And the way you access or use technology shapes how you think about the world. Well, Gen Alpha is the AI generation, and so how all of these pieces come together. I did actually, this is something that's free and available to anybody who's watching or listening right now.

We did a report called The State of the Rising Generation. If you just Google Summit Ministries, State of the Rising Generation, you'll see this free report. Two Gen Z researchers were my researchers and interns for this last summer. We produced this about a 40 page report to give you a really clear overview of what the challenges are.

Let me state that I think the main difference between my generation and Gen Z is identity. It's a question of identity. Our identity was fairly secure when I was growing up. I mean, we had our rebellion. We had all these different things that we did. But when we would experience something difficult, we would say we're feeling anxious, maybe, if we're honest.

But today, young adults tend to say more things more like, I am anxious. I am an anxious person. It's not just a state of mind that's temporary. It's an actual identity. Wow. And so the question of identity extends to mental health, anxiety, depression, even suicidal ideation. These are much, much more common things than when I was a kid.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yes.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
When I was a kid, the everyday things that kids go through these days would have ended you up with a psychiatrist. Yeah. Now it also extends to gender identity. It's one of the things we really, we really help students with at Summit Ministries is understanding that gender isn't something you have to become. It's something that God made you with. You're male or female.

It's the second thing we know about human beings in Genesis chapter one, next to the fact that we were made in God's image. And God made male and female to harmonize with one another. He made them different on purpose. On purpose. God creates differences as contrast to create harmony because harmony illustrates his nature to the world. And so understanding that male and female are actual categories of being that are biological for sure—there are 6500 biological differences that have been cataloged so far between males and females—but also socially and psychologically, that God designed us to be males and females to harmonize with one another.

But that's a huge question for a lot of young adults. A third of the students we work with admit to feeling gender insecure at different points, and it's very often because they've come to believe what is an actual lie, that gender is a spectrum. You have extreme male here, extreme female here, you know, G.I. Joe, Barbie. And since most of us are in the middle, then we're actually mostly non-binary.

Yeah. You know, and even sources of, you know, a lot of my students still, it's true. 5 or 6 years ago for sure, but it's still even true. They listen to guys like Jordan Peterson and Jordan Peterson even messes up on this. He says, well, there's a little bit of female in every male, a little bit of male in every female he's.

It creates a tremendous amount of confusion for young adults. It's easier. It's easier and more biblical to understand that there's a male spectrum and then there is a female spectrum interest.

Marlin Detweiler:
And I love that.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
Yeah, if you grasp that, then you recognize that the most tomboyish girl has more in common with the most feminine girl than she does with the least masculine boy. Yeah, and once you grasp that and start to understand, you realize, oh, I can have my identity as an image bearer of God. I don't have to have my identity as what the culture says that I need to do.

And there's kind of a victimhood mindset that kind of works its way into this as well. Instead of thinking, you know, we’re kind of we've kind of as a culture moved from being a dignity culture that every human being has dignity as an image of God to a victim culture. And so your status actually rises.

Marlin Detweiler:
To the degree that.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
You're victimized. So if you're not.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hearing incredible irony that we, you know, there's so many ironies and that really somewhat becomes the masthead for all of them, doesn't it?

Dr. Jeff Myers:
Certainly. Yes. And it's easy to find ways that you've been victimized or people have been victimized in the past, and you hear all of these things about the patriarchy, about colonialism and so forth, but for young adults who are growing up in middle class homes who haven't been socially disadvantaged, how are they going to identify as victims?

How are they going to be victims? And so the transgender movement has really risen, especially among young women, because they feel that they need to have something wrong with them. I actually had a student ask me one time, is there something wrong with me that there isn't something wrong with me?

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, that's calculus in psychology. You got it exactly. Wow. Well, I am so thankful to get to know a little bit more about you and the ministry that I've been familiar with from a distance. This is, as you know, that the audience doesn't, my first interaction with you all. And I'm very encouraged by what I hear y'all are doing.

We've had any number of students over the decades that have been part of your program. So we've had overlap there. And it is good work you're doing. I really want to encourage you to continue. And thank you for telling our families about it today, too, because it is a very worthy consideration. We're really spending some time literally.

I had a conversation earlier today with a couple people thinking in terms of how we might help parents build better, more rich attachment between, using the psychology term, but between parents and children. And you guys are really in the thick of it and helping make that happen.

Dr. Jeff Myers:
And we, you know, it's interesting that you mentioned that. We just surveyed a lot of parents whose children have come through our program, and one of the key things they're telling us is that my child came home saying, now I understand, mom and Dad, why you taught me what you did. I get it, I get it now.

And that does build an attachment. But even beyond that, it just creates a much cleaner launch pad for moving into life. And I'd welcome any of your families to participate in our program. We're looking for 16–22 year olds. Just go to summit.org and you can find out about these programs. A lot of young adults today,

One of the big questions they're asking me is, how can I be like Charlie Kirk? And honestly, because Charlie was a friend of mine, he loved Summit Ministries. But they're not saying I want to go out to campuses and do Q and A's or whatever, or be involved in politics necessarily, but they want to know, how can I be a kind of person who is constantly learning and growing, but is growing closer to God through time and is not afraid? Yeah. A person of courage. And Summit Ministries is that program that helps this generation do just that.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, well, thank you for what you're doing. Appreciate, and appreciate you being here. And folks, thank you for joining us on this episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. We hope to see you next time.