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Sunday, June 21, 1998
Promise
Keeper's e-mail ministry helps students
Personalities
- Two years ago, Randy Hunt of Beckley left a Promise Keepers
gathering in Charlotte, N.C., and, because of his job, drove straight to a motel in
Morgantown. That night, he sat in his room, his Bible on his lap, listening for God.
- At the Charlotte event, one of the Promise Keepers speakers
had talked about prayer.
- "Prayer is communication with God, and it's not a
one-way street. God wants to speak to me as much as I want to speak to God,"
Hunt said.
- God did speak to him. "It wasn't a loud voice.
No spooky things happened; it was just God speaking to my heart. And
basically he gave me a job to do."
- The job was to take a message to a church near Beckley.
Through his work with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Hunt had recently
talked with the pastor of the church, who had called to discuss the problems with today's
youth.
- "God said all I did was confirm that there's a
problem. What hope did I offer?"
- After wrestling with the matter for a couple days, Hunt
called the pastor, who invited him to come preach.
- Because of that experience, coupled with several other
things, Hunt began to see things in his life he needed to be rid of.
- "The biggest thing that I did was I started reading my
Bible every day."
- Also two years ago, Hunt was involved with an FCA summer
camp where he became friends with one of the seniors.
- "She was a really special kid. She loved the
Lord and I was real impressed with her and her relationship with God," Hunt said.
- "At the same time, I knew she was getting ready to go
off to school at WVU. God just really gave me a burden."
- Hunt said it hadn't been all that long since he had been on
a college campus.
- I went away to school unprepared. I've been a
Christian since I was 7 years old, but I never got the correct feeding and I never was
shown the right tools to fight the battle that I was getting ready to enter."
- Hunt said adolescents are in a situation wherein 85 percent
of their discipline comes from their parents and their schools, with perhaps 15 percent
self-discipline. When they go off to college, the numbers shift, with 85 percent
coming from self.
- "They're making new friends and you can get in with
the wrong crowd real quick."
- So Hunt started corresponding with the girl via free e-mail
service on the Internet.
- "You could see the battles that were starting to
happen there, and that's really where the whole burden started for the college kids,"
he said.
- "There's no doubt in my mind that the most forgotten
member of the church family is the college student. We put them through Bible
schools and church camps over and over, up until they're about 18 years old and they go
off to school somewhere and they're out of our sight and a lot of times they're out of our
minds.
- The e-mail correspondence to that one student grew into
something entirely different. Soon there were 12 students, and by the end of the
first year, Hunt's e-mail ministry had grown to about 150 students on about 40 different
campuses in 17 states.
- "I started out doing devotionals," he said.
"They would send me prayer requests. E-mail is such a neat medium because it's
instant. It's immediate."
- Hunt would get up every morning around 5 a.m. and spend the
first couple hours of the day reading and studying, and also writing the devotionals for
the students.
- Around the middle of the first year, one of the students
wrote and asked if Hunt had ever thought about writing a book.
- "I said yeah, I have, pray about it."
- That kept happening until he told one correspondent,
"Yes, and I think you just confirmed this. That person wrote back and said they
knew they were confirming something."
- He knew God was behind it because it certainly was not
something he had planned on doing.
- Because the e-mail ministry occurs only during the school
term, over the summer Hunt began putting everything down that he felt in his heart should
be in the book.
- He based the book on II Timothy 1:7: "For God did not
give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power, of love and of self-discipline,"
(New International Version)
- "That's where God really spoke to me, this
self-discipline thing that we all struggle with," Hunt said.
- It was a verse that kept cropping up again and again.
It was a verse that he pounded on when he took his message to the church near
Beckley. "I just held onto that verse. I just loved that verse."
He shared it with his e-mail students'
- On student wrote back and said he understood the power and
the love element, but that the self-discipline element was really tough.
- "One thing I'm very careful about, if I think this is
God speaking to me, I'm not telling anyone about it until I go back in the Bible and make
sure it lines up with everything else. This verse - the power, the love and the
self-discipline - God showed me point-blank that the power is God the Father, and the love
is Jesus Christ and the self-discipline is from the Holy Spirit."
- The result of Hunt's writing is "i tell you the
TRUTH."
- Of that title, he explained, "The emphasis is on the
truth, less on myself."
- Hunt self-published the book, limiting the publication to
an initial 500 books, some of which has has sold, many he has given away.
- The book is available locally through Grace Bookstore,
Jacob's Ladder, Little Brick House, Our Town Crafts and on the Internet @ Amazon.com.
- Hunt's e-mail address is [Randy@truthworks.com].
- He is promoting the book by whatever means he can,
including an upcoming interview on WOAY-AM radio at 1 p.m. July 4.
- He stressed that "i tell you the TRUTH" is not a
self-help book.
- "This is about drawing a kid into a closer
relationship with God so they will have the weapons to fight the spiritual battle they're
getting into."
- Neither does it seek to evangelize nonbelievers.
Rather, it is directed toward someone who is Christian.
- "I'm encouraging the discouraged. There can't be
anything worse that a discouraged Christian. That's a miserable life. I've
tasted that."
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