I recently posted a tweet about Ron Luce making a comeback with his new ministry, Generation Next. A woman named Shannon commented on my tweet, which led to us having conversation about her experience in Ron’s previous ministry, Teen Mania. The reason this is of interest to me is because I have a first hand experience with Teen Mania Ministries, and am always interested to hear stories of other people who have been involved with them as well. Shannon was eager to share her experience and I am glad that she is allowing me to tell her story.
WHO IS Ron Luce & What is (Was) Teen Mania Ministries?
Ron Luce received his bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Theology from Oral Roberts University and his master’s in Counseling Psychology from the University of Tulsa, along with an honorary doctorate from Jerry Falwell of Liberty University. Ron, along with his wife Katie, started Teen Mania Ministries in 1986 when he claims to have heard the voice of the Lord say, “Build an army of young people who will change the world.” Over a nearly 30 year period, Teen Mania evolved into four areas of ministry; Acquire the Fire conferences, Global Expeditions mission trips, Extreme Camps and it’s internship program, the Honor Academy. At the height of it’s success Teen Mania was holding over 30 events annually around the United States with reported donations of over 35 million dollars. In 2015, Teen Mania Ministries filed for bankruptcy and is no longer in existence.
Shannon's Story
Shannon became involved in Teen Mania Ministries through the missions organization branch, Global Expeditions. I want to use Shannon’s own words in this post because I feel it’s an important part of understanding how Teen Mania manipulated young people into believing that they were elite, special and above other Christians. Once this mindset was in place, it allowed TMM to spiritually abuse them and exploit them for profit.
Shannon’s experience with Teen Mania began back in 1992, when she was 16 years old.
The cost of these mission trips was not cheap – $3000.00 to be exact. Remember this was back in the early to mid 1990’s, so that was a lot of money for a teenager to have to raise for a summer mission trip. Shannon did this 3 summers in a row by fundraising and working.
Shannon’s first mission trip, to Hungary in 1992, was during the time that communism had just fallen and evangelistic efforts were at a fever pitch. It was an exciting time to be on mission behind what was once known as ‘The Iron Curtain.’ While her overall experience on the trip was positive, she can now reflect back on how she was beginning to be indoctrinated with Teen Mania’s ultra-legalistic rules,
During her 2nd trip to India the following year (1993), Shannon believes that Teen Mania did not plan properly for the trip by anticipating the conditions. She, along with several of her team members, became very ill – some were transported to local hospitals due to deydration.
Teen Mania’s lack of planning and diversion of funds
Because of the many hardships that the team endured on the 1993 India trip, Shannon believes that her and her teammates became closer through ‘trauma bonding’:
Shannon stated that it was obvious that Teen Mania made a concerted effort to deceive the parent volunteers by choosing to show certain aspects of the trip as more appealing:
1994-3rd (and final) Mission Trip
In 1994 Shannon had just completed her first year of bible college and had signed up to go on a mission trip to Nepal with TMM. She was excited to go to this location, since it would be the first time that Teen Mania had scheduled a trip to this country. Unfortunately, two months prior to the trip. TMM cancelled it, so Shannon decided to go back to India. Prior to the trip, Shannon was short of funds:
During this trip, Shannon was a ‘Missionary Advisor’ (MA), which carried more responsibility (not a break in the cost of the trip, however), similar to a camp counselor. Teen Mania told her that this position made her a ‘world changer’, ‘special’ and ‘elite’ – which in my opinion is how they manipulated these young people, or as Shannon described it, a ‘big love bomb fest’. She was responsible for enforcing all of the rules of Teen Mania for her group of female mission team members, such as making sure they didn’t have any ‘contraband’ (i.e.; non-Christian music, other items of ungodly influence) and monitoring their relationships with the opposite gender.
Evangelization
Teen Mania used a method called Drama & Cultural Contextualization to communicate the gospel message during their mission trips abroad. It was a ministry tool customized to the culture of the country they were in, in an attempt to communicate a message in a way that the audience could understand. Shannon believes this went horribly wrong in India:
Recruitment for the Honor Academy
Although Shannon had already completed a year of bible college, she longed for the intense spiritual highs that she experienced at Teen Mania events. According to Shannon, her college classmates and friends, “seemed boring in contrast to how ‘on fire’ everyone was at TMM and they were not part of the ‘elite’ group that I was part of. Ron Luce told us that this would happen.” Shannon said they were encouraged to ‘stay connected’ by attending Acquire the Fire conferences and attending reunions after the mission trips that Teen Mania organized. She now believes that these were simply just fundraisers for Teen Mania, because at the reunions they sold ‘yearbooks’ for $70.00 each!
(Interesting note – the Bible college that Shannon attended later became one of the campuses that Teen Mania ran the Honor Academy from- formerly Bethany College of Missions – of which Dave Hasz has risen in the ranks over the past few years. She wrote them and told them they were making a mistake by employing Hasz, but they never responded.)
At one point Shannon received a phone call from a ‘recruiter’ at Teen Mania, encouraging her to drop out of bible college to attend Teen Mania’s internship, the Honor Academy. She was unable to raise funds to attend and was heartbroken:
Relationship Rules
Teen Mania had VERY STRICT rules regarding opposite gender relationships. If any team members were caught kissing or pursuing any type of a romantic relationship activity, they were sent home.
Spiritual Manipulation
Shannon believes that Teen Mania used spiritual manipulation to grow their empire, and I agree. They used the ‘us-vs-them’ mentality to essentially isolate young people into their own self-perceived elite world, even if that was thousands of miles away in their own hometown. It was a mindset – thought control – that kept them coming back for more.
Fast Forward 10 Years.......
MY EXPERIENCE WITH TEEN MANIA
Around 2004, when my son was in the youth group at the church we were attending, they attended an Acquire the Fire conference. I was one of the adult chaperones, and to be quite honest, I thoroughly enjoyed it. The music was great, the messages really spoke to the kids and they responded in droves. What I saw was a movement in the making and I believed Ron Luce & Teen Mania were really forging a path for the youth of that generation. As a parent, I was completely on board.
The church youth group attended a couple of more annual conferences, and there was a very strong pitch to the youth that they should go on a mission trip with Global Expeditions or attend the Extreme Camps (summer youth camp). The biggest ‘sell’ was to dedicate a year (or more) of your life after high school to go to Teen Mania’s Honor Academy, which by this time had several campuses in the U.S. Since my son was approaching high school graduation in 2008, he decided that going to the Honor Academy was his next step.
WHAT IS THE HONOR ACADEMY
Teen Mania Ministries had several Honor Academy Campuses throughout the United States. It was an after-high school internship that was set up like a college. I’ll go into a little more detail about it here than I did in Shannon’s story, because I have my own perspective because of how we experienced it first-hand with our son. We, as parents, were told that it was designed for young people that were super dedicated in their walk with Christ (they came just short of saying ‘elite’ – not just average), as a college-type experience. You lived on campus, went to classes (mostly bible or faith based), held down a ministry job and followed a gazillion rules. It was not for the faint of heart. You couldn’t be in any sort of a romantic relationship. It was a year set apart from any worldly influence or distractions. While it sounded very appealing to a young person wanting to pursue God with all of their heart, in reality it was an organization taking advantage of that youthful zeal and using it for profit.
The logistics of it were interesting, and I’m embarrassed to say that we bought into it, because we thought this would be an amazing experience for our son. He felt he might be called into ministry, and we believed that this year at the Honor Academy would certainly help encourage that calling. The annual cost to attend the Honor Academy (which included room & board+meals) was $8400.00. Our son applied for the internship and was accepted. He started during the spring 2009 session.
Now here is where things went sideways.
The Honor Academy was not a college or accredited institution of any kind, so there is was no financial aid available. You had to pay for this 100% out of your pocket. Most students had to fundraise, including our son. You didn’t have to have all of the funds in place on the 1st day, but had to reach fundraising milestones. If you didn’t, you were sent home to fundraise. That ‘ministry job’ you were assigned to was based on an aptitude test, so some kids were assigned to the call center or the kitchen crew; others were assigned to the School of Music and led worship for the ATF conferences & camps. Essentially, they worked for free, and paid for the privilege to do so. My son worked in the Global Expeditions call center – 8+ hours a day-calling kids who had filled out mission trip interest cards at the Acquire the Fire conferences. His job was to convince them to take a mission trip that cost thousands of dollars. In between his 8-hour shifts, he had to attend ‘classes’, meet with core group leaders, go to corporate worship, engage in weekly fasting (nice $ saver) and live in a roughly 10×8 moldy, disgusting room with 3-4 other young men. He was constantly sick, overworked and tired. In addition to those normal day-to day activities, there were events where he had to do things like jump in an icy pond in the middle of February (he dislocated his shoulder), run a 5k marathon, and sleep in a cold squeaky school bus during an out of town trip. These activities were all intended to ‘stretch them emotionally, physically & spiritually‘. It wasn’t a healthy environment. He tried to convince us that this was the purging that he needed to be a better Christian. The guilt and manipulation Ron Luce & HA director Dave Hasz were using to gain a stranglehold over our son was abusive. We began to think that Ron Luce & Teen Mania had taken us for fools and were getting free labor out of our son, and letting us pay for the privilege.
We also started to find out from our son that it wasn’t just the ‘best of the best’ kids that were attending the Honor Academy – there were actually some students there that had been COURT ORDERED to be there! So much for that elite status. More like a reformatory!
Luckily our son left there after only four months. He and his high school girlfriend were both interns, and even though they had officially ‘broken up’ to satisfy the no-romantic-relationship-rule, love always prevails and they made quite a little dramatic escape from the Garden Valley campus one afternoon. They married a few months later.
A more detailed first-hand account of Teen Mania’s Honor Academy can be found on this Medium article entitled, ‘I Was a Teenage Maniac‘ by Diane Carol Harder
Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes, “…there is nothing new under the sun.” That includes no shortage of men in ministry reinventing themselves, particularly those who have mucked up famously.
Enter, Ron Luce.
Like most men who run multi-million dollar ministries, he is charismatic, engaging, probably has a keen business sense, or at the very least, an ability to attract large donors. What he lacks, however, is personal character.
Nothing really chaps my hide more than a preacher man that lacks character.
In 2015 Teen Mania Ministries filed for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy due to mounting debt and legal issues. While the demise of a ministry could be the result of many unforeseen or unpreventable factors, the way Luce chose to close out Teen Mania’s final days resulted in people holding worthless tickets for events, another ministry filing a lawsuit for reimbursement, and an arrest warrant issued for Luce himself.
According to a Tulsa World article dated Jan. 2, 2016:
“As Teen Mania’s financial problems grew, Luce lost to foreclosure the ministry’s 472-acre campus in Garden Valley, Texas, and moved in 2014 to smaller leased facilities in the Dallas area.
It lost its accreditation by the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability.
Rallies scheduled this fall were canceled, leaving people holding tickets they had purchased.
Luce was sued by Compassion International, seeking the return of $174,000 the group said it paid Teen Mania to promote its child sponsorship programs at conferences that were later canceled.
Christianity Today reported a Colorado court granted the full amount to Compassion International when Teen Mania did not respond to the suit, and issued a warrant for Luce’s arrest after he failed to appear at a court hearing. The magazine reported in October the judgment remains unsatisfied.”
In this same article, Luce was quoted as saying, “At the encouragement of our board and pastoral leadership, Katie and I are going to be taking a season off from public ministry.”
That wasn’t true. Before the bankruptcy filing in December 2015, Luce was already holding youth rallies in Myanmar under Teen Mania International. From the same Tulsa World article:
“With the ministry in financial trouble, Luce held his first international rally last summer in Myanmar. After that rally, he talked about expanding into international youth ministry, to reach a generation of young people around the world who emulate American youth culture.”
Not only was he dishonest about taking a season off from public ministry, a former Teen Mania staff member claimed Luce knew the ministry was in financial trouble for a long time:
“One former employee put some of the blame on Luce. Cindy Mallette, who was communications director for the ministry until she was fired in the summer of 2014, called the closing of the ministry “very sad, very disappointing. It was a dynamic, wonderful ministry that helped a lot of young people,” she said. Mallette, who worked about two years for Teen Mania, said Luce “put forth the image of a thriving ministry for years knowing that it was in financial trouble. “He knew what was going on,” she said. “I wish he had come forward and come clean a long time ago.”
An audit was done in 2012 by the firm Calvin Edwards & Company, in which they stated Teen Mania was technically bankrupt. Recommendations were laid out in the audit that could have saved the ministry, but it seems Ron Luce did not heed those recommendations, which lines up with what former Teen Mania employee Cindy Mallette was quoted as saying.
My friend Dee over at The Wartburg Watch wrote about Teen Mania back in 2015 when they announced their demise and I recommend reading her post, because at the end she makes a very accurate prediction:
“We wouldn’t be surprised to see Ron Luce launch another ministry in the future. We hope the information provided in this post will be helpful to our readers. We all need to vet the ministries we want to support carefully and protect our youth!”
He's Back!!
In early August 2019, The Christian Post ran an article about an event in the Philippines called ‘Jesus Global Youth Day‘, in which, you guessed it, Ron Luce was the chairman. Turns out, according to the article, ‘ol Ron has started up a new ministry, Generation Next, which garnered some really good publicity from this event. If you poke around the Generation Next website, you could cut and paste the name ‘Teen Mania‘ and it would sound and look the same. Of course all that ugly business about the lawsuit, arrest warrant and Teen Mania’s bankruptcy are conveniently left out of Ron’s resume.
Dr. Phil has a saying about relationships that I think translates well into this situation:
“Don’t start a new relationship when you still have unfinished emotional business.”
Ron Luce had a lot of unfinished business that he should have made right before starting a new ministry. He should have refunded the money to the people who bought tickets to the events that never took place, and he should have repaid Compassion International for the money that he took from them. Instead, he bankrupted Teen Mania, failed to show up for a court appearance for failure to repay Compassion International and now has a warrant for his arrest….is this the kind of man that should be starting a new ministry? I think not. This behavior is more akin to pathological con men.
I also think Ron & Katie Luce’s profiles on the Generation Next website are telling:
Ron & Katie are now attending Robert Morris’ Gateway Church in Southlake, which makes me wonder if Robert is helping fund Ron’s new ministry the same way it’s rumored he helped Mark Driscoll start his new church in Arizona (The Trinity Church). Fellow blogger Wondering Eagle wrote an excellent post on this here. Morris is featured on the Generation Next ‘endorsements‘ page:
This is why we have to hold these men accountable and call them out when they try to resurface under new ministries!
Men like Ron Luce will try to spin a narrative that their mistakes are in the past…just move on…God has big things waiting on the horizon, in an effort to distract people from their misdeeds and dishonesty; these deeds that, in fact, disqualify them from any future career in ministry. Not only were Luce’s teachings and methods harmful, as evidenced by Shannon’s story and my own experience with Teen Mania, Luce has also proven a significant lack of character by hiding from responsibility, repeated dishonesty, and con-man like tactics of doing business.
All Ron Luce has done is skip town on his debts and rebranded. Shameful.
He needs to be stopped before he does more harm.
I did a global expeditions short term missions trip in the United States, and I observed some of what you’re talking about, but the weirdest thing to me, was what you had mentioned about the food, and the lodging. I had raised a decent amount of money for the missions trip, but we slept on a church gym floor, thankfully I had an air mattress so I slept OK, and I remember that some of our dinners were peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or very small chicken pot pie, like the kind that you put in the microwave. I was… Read more »
Loved acquire the fire. I attended several events as a teen where I dedicated my life to the lord. I have very fond memories of every event and time with my youth group. The bands, the skits, the sermons. It was awesome. Sucks that his previous ministry ran up so much debt and went bankrupt.
I went on 5 mission trips with TM including the 1992 trip to Hungary. Every one of these trips were a positive experience that deepened my relationship with the Lord and gave me a compassion for the those hurting in the world. I got sick on several trips and was taken to the doctor to receive medical care. We had 5 days of ministry, Saturday was a free day and Sunday was worship and rest. Quite frankly, it was some of the happiest experiences of my life and definitely the highlight of my high school years. I don’t doubt that… Read more »
I’m glad you had a positive experience with TM, however that does not negate the experiences of those who were abused within Teen Mania. Ron Luce may have started out well, but he didn’t end well. He was dishonest about the financial integrity of TM, and as a result, defrauded a charitable organization that serves CHILDREN out of nearly $200k. That is a serious character issue which indicates Luce is disqualified from Christian ministry.
I was a January intern in 2009 also though I was older than most everyone else. I hate my time there and I wish I’d had the courage to leave like your son did. I was legit traumatized from my time there and what they did, even while there I hated Ron Luce, his sermons were crazy and he knew what to say to dig into our psychology because of his college studies. I didn’t know he’d gotten away and thought he’d been arrested. I hope he gets what’s coming to him.
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Interesting, I bet insiders in Jesus’ ministry could told reporters of all kinds of psychological manipulation, like telling people “if they didn’t repent they would perish’, your either gathering or scattering, or how dare him him declare himself “the only way to the Father”. Can it get any more manipulative the that ( :
I whole heartedly believe leaders should be held accountable. I do not blame victims for their trauma but; there are different types of victims one that made themselves available to be victimized and others whom for no fault of their own were taken advantage of. I accuse no one in the writing of being either and that is left to be interpreted by the individual reader. Kids are very impressionable creatures and that is why parents need to be gentle as the lamb but shrewd as the serpent. We need to be wise and teach and show our kids what… Read more »
The two commenting detractors, who wrote to essentially blame victims and defend abusers, clearly do not have a comprehension of how power dynamics in tandem with unconsciously traumatized people work. To really understand and appropriately unpack the numerous, systematic, ideological abuses (and neglect) that Teen Mania’s leadership directly caused (whether intentional or not), one really does have to use psychology. *The scary and unsurprising thing read here is that Luce himself had a degree in psychology. But quite obviously, having some technical knowledge of psychology was not enough to heal him of his unconscious and unresolved trauma, which has essentially… Read more »
I appreciate some of the concerns pointed out in your article. I think it’s only right to “test all spirits” to see if they are truly a work of God or if it’s of man. I have my concerns about ministries that avoid transparency and suddenly reinvent or re-brand themselves. I think it is good to be cautious when you begin to feel like you are being sold a load of spiritual garbage. Like somehow attending a particular Bible School makes you more spiritual than others or you have to spend your whole day convincing people to sign up for… Read more »
Just because someone makes mistakes doesn’t mean they haven’t done good things too. Or that they don’t still have good things to offer. Focus on, encourage, and take the good. And leave the bad. Haven’t you, even you reading this right now, made mistakes that were selfish or hurt others either intentionall or uninentionally at any point in your life? Be honest with yourself. Because we all have. “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone”. “For ALL have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and are justified by grace as a gift through Jesus… Read more »