Charles “Chuck” Colson, who died April 21^st at the age of 80, was known for many things.

He prided himself on being an ex-Marine as well as being educated at Brown University’s law school. He thrived as the brash, young special counsel to President Richard Nixon. He was known as the unscrupulous White House “hatchet man”, and later known as an ex-con, convicted in the Watergate scandal. But Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson remembers him differently.

Gerson referred to him as “one of the most influential social reformers of the 20th century” and “the most thoroughly converted person I’ve ever known” (Times-Picayune, April 24, 2012, B-5). What happened to Colson?

Two people were influential in Colson’s abrupt conversion. During the dark days of Watergate he went to visit a friend Tom Phillips, whose life revealed a peace and centeredness that intrigued Colson. Phillips was a Christian, and he introduced Colson to C.S. Lewis by reading Lewis’ chapter on pride in Mere Christianity. Colson was especially moved, as he later recounts on Lewis’ words “There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. The vice I am talking of is Pride. . .” (from Chuck Colson Speaks: Twelve Key Messages from Today’s Leading Defender of the Christian Faith [Uhrichsville: Promise, 2000], p. 104). Lewis also wrote that a proud man walks thorough life always looking down on others and therefore cannot see up to that which is immeasurably superior to himself. When Colson left Phillips’ home he felt the power of Lewis’ words, “. . . like a torpedo that hit a ship. Confronted with his words, I could not even get the keys into the ignition of the automobile—I was crying too hard.” The next week Colson and his wife went on a vacation and he analyzed Mere Christianity. “I took a yellow pad, which I am want to do as a lawyer, and I made my columns: There is a God/There isn’t a God; Jesus Christ is God/He isn’t God. I went through the book and came against an intellect as formidable as any I had faced in my life of politics or law—the mind of C.S. Lewis. I became convinced of the truth that Jesus Christ is God” (pp. 104-105).”

Colson spent seven months in prison, and then he began his vocation. He wrote the autobiographical Born Again in 1976 and started the ministry Prison Fellowship. This ministry created the Angel Tree program, in which we at Lake Vista UMC have participated several times at Christmas. Prison Fellowship has had an enormous impact on many, and has expanded to over 100 countries. Through his ministry experience, Colson insightfully observed, “Crime is a mirror of a community’s moral state. A society cannot long survive if the demands of human dignity are not written on our hearts” (p. 12). He has written several insightful books and given lectures that often discuss the West’s loss of a conviction of absolute right and wrong—which explains much of the cultural chaos and violence we see in America today. In a lecture at Harvard Business School, Colson provides the solution to such problems in America: “It’s only when I can turn to the One whom we celebrate at Easter. . . that I can find the will to do what is right. It’s only when that value and that sense of righteousness pervade a society that there can be a moral consensus” (p. 194).

Perhaps one of the greatest legacies Colson has left is one in which we can participate: the Manhattan Declaration. This is a Christian proclamation written and affirmed by Orthodox, Catholic and Evangelical Christians. This Declaration affirms (1) the rights of the unborn, (2) marriage is between one man and one woman, and (3) religious liberty. I have signed this, along with over 525,000. Will you? You can at manhattandeclaration.org.

            Yours in Christ,

     Woody