In July, the Department of Education awarded 71Five several grants worth over $400,000. But three months later, a state official notified the nonprofit by email that their grants were being taken back, saying that the nonprofit was disqualified from the grant programs because of its hiring practices.

An Oregon youth ministry is challenging state officials after the state Department of Education revoked several of its grants. Youth 71Five Ministries said officials stripped the nonprofit of its funding because of the ministry’s practice of hiring staff and volunteers who agree with its Biblical beliefs.
71Five is a youth mentoring program that serves young people of all religions and backgrounds through a Christ-centered perspective, said Bud Amundsen, executive director of the ministry, which has operated in the Rogue Valley area for 60 years.
Staff members mentor young people who face challenges such as poverty or a family member’s addiction, providing vocational training and recreational activities in group homes, detention centers, and the ministry’s own centers. The ministry hires employees and volunteers who align with 71Five’s mission and beliefs, he added. The nonprofit’s 30 employees and more than 100 volunteers all signed a statement of faith before joining the organization.
Since 2017, 71Five has received multiple grants from the Oregon Department of Education’s Youth Development Division that support the nonprofit’s work.
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Written by Thomas G. Guarino |
Tuesday, July 9, 2024
From the beginning, Neuhaus and Colson hoped that, by establishing a serious theological dialogue between the two largest Christian groups in North America, ECT would advance unity and fraternity among fellow believers. Both men were concerned that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, was being increasingly relegated to the margins of public life in the United States. They maintained, to the contrary, that the gospel is indispensable for addressing the complex social, cultural, and political challenges facing the nation.

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of Evangelicals and Catholics Together (ECT), the groundbreaking ecumenical initiative founded by Fr. Richard Neuhaus and Chuck Colson in 1994. ECT made quite a splash in its debut, with many wondering how these two groups—frequent antagonists in the past—had now become ecumenical partners. Predictably, some saw ECT as nothing more than a pragmatic political alliance among conservative-leaning Christians. But that shopworn allegation, while still recycled from time to time, was always far from the truth. From the beginning, Colson and Neuhaus explicitly rejected the idea that ECT was based on cultural “co-belligerency.” On the contrary, both men were convinced that any fruitful ecumenical exchange must be founded on recognizing each other as brothers in Jesus Christ.
From the Catholic “side,” this was not a problem. Since the promulgation of the Decree on Ecumenism at Vatican II (1964), Catholics had been engaged in ecumenical dialogue with a wide variety of Christian churches and communities. And the council had taught that all those baptized into Christ Jesus belonged, at least in some measure, to his Church. So, few eyebrows were raised about ECT—at least from a strictly theological point of view.
But from the Evangelical side, there were rumbles of thunder. Some Evangelicals thought—and some think today—that, because of their beliefs, Catholics can never be true Christian brethren. Cultural alliances are fine, indeed desirable, but no union beyond that is possible. Even Colson spoke frankly about his original hesitations. In a 2009 interview with Christianity Today, soon after Neuhaus’s death, Colson noted that he had felt “some estrangement” when Neuhaus converted from Lutheranism to Catholicism, conceding that it was “a bit hard for me to take.” Ultimately, he reasoned that the man who had once been a brother in Christ must continue to be so.
Particularly admirable was Colson’s fortitude in pressing ahead with ECT, even when this was not a popular position in all sectors of the Evangelical world. As the current co-chair of ECT and former dean of Beeson Divinity School Timothy George has written, when this ecumenical initiative began, some Evangelicals reacted toward Colson with “anger, bombast and recrimination.” But Chuck forged ahead despite the attacks.
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The Wailes and Roller families recently joined with another family to enlist the legal help of Alliance Defending Freedom. They filed a lawsuit against JeffCo for refusing to give parents truthful, pertinent information about their children’s overnight accommodations, thus hampering the rights of parents to make informed decisions about their children’s upbringing, education, and privacy. At the core of the school district’s policy that allows this egregious behavior is the idea that the government can raise kids better than parents.

When Joe and Serena Wailes allowed their 11-year-old daughter to attend a trip to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., sponsored by their public school district, they were told she would room with three other fifth grade girls. It wasn’t until their daughter was in her room getting ready for bed on the first night of the trip that she discovered she would share a bed with a boy who self-identified as a girl.
Bret and Susanne Roller live in the same school district in Colorado, Jefferson County Public Schools, locally known as “JeffCo.” When they sent their 11-year-old son on a sixth grade camping trip known as Outdoor Lab, they were told their son would be in a cabin with six to 30 other boys, including a male high school counselor. It wasn’t until their son was in the mountains—away from home and without any means of communication—that he realized the school district had lied. His 18-year-old counselor was not male but was instead a “non-binary” female.
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