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Hey, this is Greg Stier.
I don’t come from a typical, religious, church-going, pew-sitting, hymn-singing family. I come from a family filled with body-building, tobacco-chewing, beer-drinking thugs. 😁
Although I was raised in one of the highest crime rate neighborhoods in our city, I was more like Young Sheldon in the hood. I was a nerdy, anxious, quiet, fatherless kid who was both scared of my own shadow and scarred by the trauma of the violence around me.
Just when things seemed utterly hopeless, God sent a hillbilly preacher nicknamed “Yankee” into our family and everything began to change. Yankee shared the gospel with my toughest family member, my Uncle Jack. Not only did Jack put his faith in Jesus, my entire rough-and-tumble family eventually came to Christ.
As a young man, I went to Yankee's youth group where he trained me to share my faith. There was one person the Holy Spirit burdened me to reach with the Gospel right away...
My ma.
My guilt-ridden, shame-fueled ma never thought God could forgive her for the wild life she had lived. After all, she had conceived me after a short tryst with a guy she met at a party. When she found out she was pregnant, ma drove 2,000 miles from Denver to Boston to have an illegal abortion far from home.
Thankfully my Uncle Tommy and Aunt Carol, who lived in Boston at the time, talked her out of it.
For years I wondered why ma would burst into tears when she looked at me. When I was 12 my grandma told me the whole messy story.
It was that same year that I learned how to share the Gospel effectively. Almost immediately I began to talk to my ma about Jesus and the salvation he offered to all. I wanted her to know the joy and power of Christ's forgiveness through his shed blood on the cross.
It took 3 years and lots of Gospel conversations but ma finally accepted Jesus. In her words she was going to heaven, "Cigarettes and all."
This all happened because Yankee equipped me to share the Gospel with clarity and confidence.
He inspired, equipped and mobilized hundreds of teenagers to declare the good news of Jesus to everyone.
Eventually, I planted a church with my life-long friend, Rick (who also was deeply impacted by Yankee's ministry.)
A few years later I started @dare2share with my old theology professor, Jonathan Smith. Dare 2 Share was launched with the mission of energizing the Church to mobilize youth to Gospelize their world.
I was planning on preaching at the church and leading Dare 2 Share for the rest of my life. But, after the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, I resigned from the church to take on Dare 2 Share full-time.
I won't stop until "every teen everywhere (all one billion of them) hears the Gospel from a friend."
In 1990 I married the love of my life, Debbie, and, over the last 34 years, with God's help, we raised two amazing, Jesus-loving kids, Jeremy and Kailey.
Jeremy is working hard to become a police officer and is married to the one-and-only Kat (she's a huge answer to our prayers!) Our daughter Kailey is attending @my_ccu where she studies music (check out her Spotify album, Stuck on Repeat.)
I love traveling the world, working nun-chucks, hanging with the family, drinking coffee, hiking the Rocky Mountains, rooting for the Denver Broncos, watching movies, taking long walks with my wife and working out.
But more than anything I love Jesus and long to "know him and make him known."
Like the hillbilly preacher who reached my family, I believe in the power of the Gospel and the potential of teenagers.
Oh yeah, my two latest books are Radical Like Jesus and, my memoir, Unlikely Fighter, both of which you can find on Amazon and Audible.
Follow me on Insta, X and/or Facebook to be encouraged to share your faith and challenged to mobilize the next generation to do the same.
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