Navigating the Media Jungle: Breaking the Addiction to Distraction

After being raised in a home where each parent was married three times, at fifteen, Ron ran away from his mother to find his father. After living the teenage party life, Ron came to Christ a year later and was radically transformed by Jesus. Three weeks later, he found himself homeless when his stepmother proclaimed, "Ron is too much of a Jesus freak. Either I’m leaving, or he has to leave." Ron couch surfed for a few weeks as a sixteen-year-old until his new pastor invited him to live with his family for his senior year of high school (and this was a man of great faith since he had three beautiful teenage daughters). A year later, Ron left California to attend Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and began training for ministry. He met his wife, Katie, at ORU, and they got married right after graduation. Within a year of graduation, they launched a ministry with a mission to reach a generation for Christ and turn them into world changers by sending them on mission trips all over the world. Teen Mania Ministries was born. Traveling across North America in their little car for the first few years, Ron and Katie saw crowds of ten to twenty youth at a time, packing living rooms across America. As more invitations came in, they launched small weekend youth conferences called Acquire the Fire in 1991, enabling multiple churches to invite their youth group for a weekend encounter with God. Over the years, momentum grew as crowds each week increased in size, and the number of youth who went on mission trips each year grew. Ron and Katie then moved their headquarters to a 472-acre campus in Garden Valley, Texas, and continued to grow in impact, hosting twenty thousand attendees over thirty-three conferences each year. Many youth also signed up to go on mission trips. Up to five thousand traveled around the world each summer to make impact, and many would then return for a year of radical discipleship as an intern on their campus in Texas. Over thirty years, some eighty thousand youth traveled to the mission field, seven thousand were interns in their discipleship program, and three million attended Acquire the Fire conferences. During this time, Ron wrote thirty-nine books for youth and parents. All this happened due to much grace from the Lord along with hundreds of excellent staff and interns investing their youthful zeal a year at a time to impact their generation. Ron completed his doctorate in 2019, specializing in strategic foresight, with the purpose of identifying trends that would impact the global church. As he noticed the church aging dramatically, he began to study churches that defied that global trend. Ron curated the best practices of these remarkable churches and documented the trends in his doctoral thesis, which is now the book Faith at the Speed of Light. Ron began training churches worldwide in the best practices using a masterclass called Project 13 and teaching a required course for all master of divinity students at Oral Roberts University. In Ron’s forthcoming book ReMarkable Church, he goes into great detail of how any church can implement the best practices and case studies from churches he has studied around the world.