Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. In 1988, Chuck Coulson honored Benigno Aquino Jr., a Filipino opposition leader who stood firmly against dictator Ferdinand Marcos. With the very first Wilberforce Award, Aquana was assassinated for calling for a free Philippines. At that inaugural ceremony, Colson described him as embodying faith in action like the award's namesake, the abolitionist William Wilberforce.
Since that very first year, the Colson Center has stewarded the Wilberforce Award, honoring dozens of other recipients who have also made a lasting difference. And various spheres of influence. This year, Oz Guinness will be recognized as the winner of the 2026 Wilberforce Award. at a ceremony that will be held at this year's Colson Center National Conference in Knoxville, Tennessee. The great-great-great grandson of Dublin brewer Arthur Guinness, Oz was born in China during the Second World War where his parents were medical missionaries.
The first decade of his life was a time of national and global upheaval. War, the rise of communism, a famine that took the lives of his two brothers. Expelled with other foreigners in 1951, Oz returned to Europe. Eventually, he would earn a doctor of philosophy at Oxford University before sharpening both his faith and worldview. At La Brie, Francis Schaefer's home in the Swiss Alps.
In the decades since, Oz has committed his life to addressing the essential issues that face humanity and society all from a Christian worldview. In 1991, he founded the Trinity Forum, an institution dedicated to the cultivation of the Christian mind. An ardent defender of religious freedom and the rights of conscience, Oz was a key drafter of the 1988 Williamsburg Charter, a celebration and reaffirmation of the First Amendment, as well as the Global Charter of Conscience in 2012. Which was presented to the European Union Parliament. In Truth Rising, a documentary produced by the Colson Center and Focus on the Family, Oz argues that this current moment that God has placed us in is what should be called a civilizational moment.
Here's what he had to say. A civilizational moment Is a period of crisis. When a civilization, our civilization, completely loses touch with the inspiration that made it what it is. In other words our foundational inspiration. Our original dynamism is gone.
We've lost it. It is at this point, like all the other civilizations that have come and gone before us. that we face three clear options. Renew the original inspiration? Replace it?
or decline. What is needed in this civilizational moment, according to Osginis, is gospel people with a backbone of steel. That's what he says in his book, Impossible People. In other words, we have to be immovable, no matter how far and wide those around us are being swept away into a cultural drift. And that means, as Oz has also argued in his best-selling book, The Call, Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life, that we must all fully reckon with the seriousness of this hour in which we live.
Only then can we work for the glory and the approval of what he calls an audience of one. Like Wilberforce, Chuck Colson, and many others whom God called to different times and places throughout history, Oz Guinness is a much-needed prophetic voice for this cultural moment. Learn more about Oz Guinness and his story in the Truth Rising documentary or pick up any one of his many books. All of them are essential reading to understand this moment that we're in and how we're called to live in it. Or join us for the 2026 Colson Center National Conference in May, where Oz will be speaking and will also be presented with the 2026 Wilberforce Award.
You can learn more about the conference at colsonconference.org and learn more about the Wilberforce Award by going to colsoncenter.org slash award. That's colsoncenter.org slash award. For Breakpoint, I'm John Stone Street. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Haley Wilson. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast.
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