The day after we lost Jan Peterson, we lost Charles Gordon Strom, a father figure to me whose influence at a pivotal time in my life has left an indelible mark.
My first encounters with Gordy were really with his two youngest sons, Bernd and Gerd. We were little blond kids running around Lakeside Bible Camp, making mild mischief. It was in my high school years that Gordy exerted his influence.
For roughly a dozen years, Gordy (backed by his wife Margaret) led a program at Lakeside called Training in Christian Leadership (TCL). A unique discipleship program for kids in the last half of their high school years, it combines hard work and service (doing the dishes, cleaning toilets, doing maintenance jobs) with in-depth biblical study and prayer. As a 15-year-old kid heading into my junior year in 1983, I’d never worked hard and hardly read my Bible. But not only was doing it for the first time stretching, doing it in the company of ten girls and nine other guys for a full month stretched me even further.
At that point in my life, I wasn’t sure about my future within Christianity. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe anymore. It’s that I didn’t find Christian faith to be engaging or relevant. I had no role models and therefore no imagination for how being a Christian beyond high school might look. But Gordy and TCL caught my imagination.
On the first full day at Lakeside, Gordy talked about work and the mundane details of life and how they could all be done to the glory of God. We would be studying Paul’s letter to the Colossians and Gordy quoted, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving“ (Col. 3:23-24).
That blew my mind. My work was for Jesus. All of it. Even the menial stuff. And therefore, all of it had true, lasting significance.
The next thing I knew, Gordy had assigned me, along with Jorge and Katherine, to pick rocks out of dirt patch. For three hours.
But a switch had been flipped inside me. I wasn’t just picking rocks out of the dirt, I was serving the Lord Christ. And so I became the absolute best rock picker I could be.
I learned how to paint from Gordy. And while we painted, we sang a tune he taught us: “Painting the wall. Painting the wall. Living for your Glory, painting the wall.” It was a terrible little tune, but the lines could be changed to whatever task we were doing, and I learned that I could love God and sing it out no matter what I was doing.
Living for the Glory was classic Gordy. So, too, was Bible memorization.
Gordy’s association with the Navigators and their topical memory system caused him to soak in the Scriptures more than almost anyone else I’ve ever known. The sheer number of verses of the Bible he committed to memory was staggering. You could give him a pair of numbers and he almost always had a verse or a list of verses matching that pair. Give him a 10 and a 13, and he’d quote 1 Cor. 10:13.
He wasn’t big on showing off. But he was big on encouraging us to make the Scriptures a living and active part of our daily lives.
A third thing he taught me, beyond living for the Glory and soaking in Scripture, was the need for companionship in this life of faith. We’re not meant to do this life of following Jesus alone. We need mentors. We need traveling companions. His key verse for this was Prov. 27:17 — “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” And so, every day of TCL started with time alone in the Scriptures and then time talking with a fellow TCLer in what he called Iron-on-Iron. The number of younger men he met with and mentored over his lifetime is vast.
But not only did Gordy teach me those three lessons, he welcomed me into his home and family and heart. During those last years of high school and throughout my college years, the Strom home was my home as well. He referred to their house as the Nestwärme, and it did radiate a nest-like warmth for me.
For the past several summers, my wife and I have been directing the same TCL program Gordy led so many years ago. And I am always aware of following in his footsteps, showing TCLers the beauty of living and working to the Glory of God, sharing with them the richness of the Scriptures, and encouraging them to find good traveling companions in this life of following Jesus.
If I do things right, my legacy will merely be an extension of Gordy’s legacy.