One of the biggest spiritual battles that's ever happened in the world. I believe a book was just written about it. It came out on September 1st. It's called Marx versus Moody. And it really is a historical accounting of how God works at times when the economy is really changing. In the mid-1800s, we're in the middle of the Industrial Revolution in this country, and people are moving off the farms into the cities, and people were trying to get accustomed to how to work in the city, live in the city, and all of that. And yes, there were some abuses during that time as that transition was happening. And there were abuses in Europe as well. And so along comes this guy Karl Marx, who's got this new view of the world that's really gaining traction. He writes the Communist Manifesto in 1848. People are starting to listen to him. They're starting to listen about the potential of socialism and communism. And he's in England, and that's where he wants the revolution to take place. Highly educated person, upper-middle-class family. Dad was an attorney. Along the same time, this fourth-grade-educated person named D.L. Moody took his ministry to England. And it's amazing how those two people were in England at the same time, and they were purposing two completely different views of the world. It's amazing how God works. And this thing is gaining traction, this communism that D.L. Moody is preaching in front of tens of thousands of people with a fourth-grade education. He's preaching the gospel in one of the most impactful ways any human being has ever preached it. And guess what happened? The whole thing got pushed back. It got pushed out. It came back again in the Soviet Union later. But what's the message there? The gospel message is more powerful than any other message that will ever speak against it.
It was a remarkable example of what's happening today, the Industrial Revolution, and now we've got this AI revolution, and people are concerned about the future of work and how are we going to work and how's all that going to play out, and people are very concerned about our culture as a result of all that. What's the answer? The answer is always the gospel. The answer is always the gospel. I tell our students all the time, you know, if you want to give God a good laugh, tell him what your plans are. Whatever you think you're going to be doing when you're 22 years old and graduating from college, and then where you are when you're like me at 73 years old, I guarantee you, life's an adventure. You have no idea what God has in store for you. I graduated from college. I wanted to be a high school teacher and basketball coach. I did that for seven years. Had a good high school basketball program. I went to a small college, had a small college program. I was a college professor. And I moved to Arizona after seven years, 14 years being in a PhD program at ASU. And one thing led to another. I had three kids, a fourth one on the way. I was making $5,000 a semester teaching philosophy as part of a humanities class. And I came home towards the end of the second semester, and my wife said we needed to talk. I got nervous because I married up, and but it wasn't what I thought. She said, "I have a surprise for you. We're going to have our fourth child." And it's like my life just passed right in front of me, and my plans weren't working. God led me to the University of Phoenix, and I just wandered in there, and they tried to get me to program. I needed a job. I never intended to stay there. I ended up staying there 22 years. I ended up running the whole thing, and I learned two things there: how to use the public markets to get access to capital, and how to use the internet to reach the world. We were the first ones to develop online education. We built the university to 400,000 students. I went from nearly homeless after 22 years to being in a much different place. I had thousands of friends. We had done something that we thought was really useful and purposeful for the world. I was 57 years old, and then Grand Canyon called. And at that time in 2008, Grand Canyon University had less than a thousand students, $20 million worth of debt. 33rd Avenue and Camelback in Phoenix was the worst place in the city of Phoenix from a crime standpoint. And I thought, well, why in the world would I leave this and go here? But I went with a friend, and we walked the campus, and it was dirty and dusty, and the buildings had been built shortly after World War II. But my early life was in Christian schools, as a student and as an elementary school student, high school student. I went to a Christian university. I prepared to be a Christian university teacher, taught history and theology, and then did it at a university. And I thought maybe that was the point all along. God was teaching us something we could have never learned in a PhD program: how to use the public markets to get access to capital, how to use the internet to reach the world. The two ideas that built more prosperity in the history of the world than any two ideas, and it's not close, are the Christian worldview perspective and free market thinking. Free market economy. The free market economy draws out of young people the ambition God put inside them, the passion God put inside them, the desire to make a mark and to be productive and do something significant. Socialism will never do that. It suppresses that. It's only the free market system that brings that out of young people. Then if you combine it with the Christian worldview perspective that the needs of other people should always be put in front of our needs, you put those two things together, and you can build the most prosperous society in the history of the world, and it's not even close. But the problem is those two ideas are not being taught today on university campuses all over the country. And so we went back and said, "We're probably crazy about doing this, but let's do it. Let's do it." We resigned after 22 years. We resigned at 2:00 in the afternoon. We showed up the next morning at 8:00 with the idea that Christian higher education is inaccessible to 95% of the population. We've got some great Christian universities, but they're expensive. It's private. There are no funding funds available. How can we make private Christian higher education affordable to all socioeconomic classes of Americans? I told the board we would come, but I don't want to go out and try to raise 10 or 15 or $20 million. You can't do that much with that. If you're really going to do something, we got to have capital. And so I said, we'll come, but we want to go to the public markets to get access to capital, and then we want to use the internet to reach the world. They didn't have much choice. The university was going to close. And so it's not like I was the greatest salesman in the world. We were kind of the last hope. It's unbelievable what God has done. We went to the public markets in November of 2008. Do you remember November of 2008? That was not the time to go to the public markets, but they knew me because of the Apollo Group, and they had done well with that. And I was pitching an idea to them about a Christian university at 33rd Avenue and Camelback in Phoenix, Arizona. Ivy League graduates, MBA, Ivy League MBAs, Ivy League attorneys. And I'm talking to them about a Christian university in Phoenix, Arizona. And they're saying, "What are you doing out here? The world's falling apart. What are you doing?" I said, "No, it's going to be really cool." And then they would say, "Well, can we see pictures?" I said, "You know, you Ivy League guys, you're really well educated and you're really smart. Your problem is you don't listen. I told you that this is going to be a Christian university. You will accept this on faith and faith alone."
It was a miracle. We got it out of $12. They gave us $254 million. We brought that back to Phoenix, and we started building. We were putting hundreds of millions of dollars into technology. We wanted to build a large online campus. There were working adults all over the world that wanted to go back to school. They couldn't come onto a college campus and do it the way an 18-year-old, but they wanted to go back to school. We knew how to do that, and we started to build that out. That was 2008 to 2011. In 2011, we said, you know what, it's time to build a campus. This might work. You know, people ask me all the time, did you see this coming? We had a plan. I could have never predicted what God did. But in 2011, we had to make a big decision. We're going to build this. We're going to build a campus out, a traditional campus for 18 and 19-year-old students. Do you really want to build it out in Maryvale at 33rd Avenue and Camelback, which at that time was the worst place in the city of Phoenix? Most commercial real estate people will tell you, you don't invest in Maryvale. You invest in Scottsdale or Paradise Valley or one of those places. And I thought, you know, we're a Christian university. We have a doctrinal statement. We have a set of ethical position statements. And we're very clear about what we believe. But I want to live this thing out. I want to live this thing out in a New Testament way, in the streets of... I said to people, you know, I think if Jesus came back today and came to Arizona, I don't know if he'd go to Phoenix. I don't know. I don't know if he'd go to Scottsdale or Paradise Valley. I think he'd come to a place like this. Jesus had a mind like a steel trap. He was so attracted to people that were suffering. I tell our students all the time, you know, Christianity is the only major religion in the world that migrates. Every other major religion in the world started and is still centered in that place. Christianity migrates. It started in Jerusalem. It went north into Europe and then across to North America. Now it's going to Central America. It's going to Latin America. It's going to Africa. Why? Because the gospel message resonates with people who are suffering and hurting and need that message. So I said, you know what? We're going to build it here. We're going to build it here. We started investing in 2011. We put two billion dollars into the campus. It has grown from... we started out with less than a thousand students and 100 acres, and now we're almost 400 acres. We put $2 billion into the campus out of all of our cash reserves. It's ranked the 20th nicest campus in the country now, in Phoenix, Arizona, in the middle of this inner-city neighborhood of immigrants. We've grown from three colleges and 100 programs to 12 colleges now and over 200 programs.
The students now are coming from all 50 states. We've got just under 25,000 students, and the plan is to build the university out to 50,000 students. And there's going to be no stopping that. I mean, there's absolutely no stopping that. We have integrated, if you think back to American history and what built this prosperous nation, every university started out as a Christian university. The Bible was the core textbook. You came to learn about the world, but to learn about the world in the context of the real truth about the world, which is told in the biblical narrative. And so those two ideas, the Christian worldview perspective and the free market economy and free market thinking, are integrated through every one of our programs, every one of our colleges, every one of our programs, and almost every one of our courses. We want people to learn, whether they're studying in science or biology, chemistry, engineering, computer science, we want them to learn about those areas and become expert in those areas, but in the context of the biblical narrative of creation, fall, redemption, and restoration, because that's the only way you truly understand God's world. Do we need to scale it? When did... this is a great example of it. When did Christians ever get scared of scale, of size? Read the book of Acts, right? 3,000 were added and 5,000 were added. Once God starts moving, if you let him lead, there's no stopping.
The part of the university story that's inescapable is our neighborhood. While this growth was happening, I took a look around, and the city of Phoenix had no answers. If you go back to the early '60s, Lyndon Johnson, the Great Society, the war on poverty, the welfare system, 14% of Americans live below the poverty line. Today, 14% of Americans live below the poverty line. This thing was just going downhill. When we got there, there were 42 languages spoken in our community. Today, it's 72. I tell our students all the time, you know, they like to go on international mission trips. I support that 100%. But God's bringing the world to us. He's bringing the world here. And so we said, you know, the government just can't fix the problem of poverty in this neighborhood, but if you put a free market entity in the middle of this neighborhood with a Christian worldview perspective, I wonder what God would do. And so we put together a five-point plan that we've been executing for 11 years. A neighborhood like that, number one, it needs jobs. And we've created 16,000 jobs from almost closure. We've created 16,000 jobs. We hire people in the neighborhood. It gives them benefits. They can get salary, benefits, retirement plan. They can send their kids to college for free. We've started 16 additional businesses in the last number of years that employ over 600 people, and we've got 30 new ones incubating in an innovation center. We're going to get those positive revenue and put them in the neighborhood and provide more jobs for the immigrants in our neighborhood. The second thing it needs is safety. 27th Avenue in Phoenix was known as the Blade, a four-mile stretch of prostitution and drugs day and night. We were right in the middle of it. City of Phoenix police couldn't fix it. We have our own police force. So we said, you know what? We've got 82 companies that we have joined now into a group. It's everything on 27th Avenue. It's businesses, schools, and churches. We meet three times a year. We're putting money into this thing. We put 95% of the money into it, and we're going to get the crime out of the neighborhood. If you drive right now that four-mile stretch, you won't see it. It's not perfect, but we're making progress, and we're going to get there. What should Christians be doing? Taking the darkest places in the world and turning them into the lightest places in the world. Right? That's what Christians should be doing.
The third thing is homes. We have a great partner. We have the largest Habitat for Humanity program in the world going on right now. And we've rebuilt over 600 homes. Our goal is a thousand. We'll get there, and we'll establish a new goal. But there's energy in the neighborhood. There's energy in the neighborhood because the homes are improving. The fourth thing is students. We've raised over $20 million. We've awarded 2,300 full-ride scholarships to kids that come right out of our inner-city schools. We're getting students from all 50 states, some of the brightest kids in America. We have the largest or the fastest-growing honors college in America. Average incoming GPA is over 4.1. They're coming from all 50 states, but we're not leaving the kids in the neighborhood behind. They can't afford it, but they can go to school. They can get a 4.0 GPA because they are. And then they can come and get educated. You don't rebuild a neighborhood through gentrification. You know what you do? You take the kids that were raised in the neighborhood and you get them educated. You send them to college. You get them a job in the neighborhood. And then you have them buy a house in the neighborhood, and now you push back in a way that the government can never push back. The free market system, the Christian worldview perspective are the answers. It's always the answers. It's always less government and more free market thinking combined with a Christian worldview perspective that turns things around. The fifth thing is this thing called CityServe. I won't go into details about it, but it's an amazing project that we have contracts with the major retailers, Walmart and Target and Costco and Amazon, and we're bringing in about $120,000 worth of brand-new goods. We have a 100,000-foot warehouse. We bring in $120,000 worth of brand-new goods. Stuff that got sold and got returned, couldn't be resold. They were putting it on trucks and taking it to landfills. They bring it to us now. We put it in our warehouse. We have 200 points of distribution. Inner-city churches throughout the state, they put in their orders, and we get brand-new household goods to kids that are living below the poverty line. And when we deliver those beds and we deliver those tables and those chairs and those microwaves and those refrigerators and things people don't have but they can use, we do it in the name of Jesus. And it's going to cause a fourth grader to say, "Well, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Why? I've been sleeping on the floor my whole life. I've got a brand-new bed. Who are these people? And why would they care about me?" That five-point plan has then generated hundreds of ministries throughout our neighborhood. Our kids go into the neighborhood five nights a week. A group went to a Syrian refugee camp for two years, a Muslim community, and helped the kids with their homework and taught them English as a second language. And guess what happened at the end of last year? That entire community, that entire Muslim community, walked two miles to our campus and attended a worship service. That entire community.
I think two things are really, really important. When I graduated from college, I went into the teaching ministry, and I got a call. Those that went to the pastoral ministry got a call. And that's fantastic. Everybody else got a job. I've told... And I come out of the Lutheran tradition, which makes that so wrong, because it was Martin Luther who said every vocation is equally honoring in God's eyes. We talk about the fact that God takes care of us, but 95% of the time he takes care of us through other people, right? The farmer that grows the food, the trucker that gets it into the grocery store, the nurse that keeps us healthy. We want every one of our graduates, we graduated 35,000 students last year, number one, to understand their academic area of interest and their future job in the context of the truth about the world, and then take the gospel into the workplace. Listen, we need to crowd into our churches on Sunday. We need that. But we're not going to change the culture that way. The culture gets changed when those people then take the gospel into the place where most of us spend most of our time, into the workplace. We're 35,000 Christ-centered people that are going into the fine arts and the sciences and engineering and computer science and AI and taking the gospel message there that can change the culture. That can change the culture. The second thing I think is so important is Matthew 25. You know, Jesus, his last communication. Basically, it's Tuesday. Lord's Supper is coming on Thursday. The crucifixion. Jesus is going to take literally the sins of the whole world on himself. He abhors sin, and yet he's taken the sins of the whole world on himself. On Good Friday, on Tuesday, he leaves the disciples with one story. You know, I am coming back, and when I come back, I'm going to bring the nations in front of me, and I'm going to separate the sheep from the goats, the sheep on the right, the goats on the left. And the sheep say, you know, why us? Why do we get to go to heaven with you? Because when I was hungry, you gave me something to eat. When I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink. When I was lonely, you came and visited me. When I was in prison, you came and visited me. And they said, "When do we see you?" And he said, "When you did it to the least of these, you did it unto me." I can't explain what's happened to us any other way than that. God put us in that place at that time because he wanted to do a powerful work in the minds and the hearts of an immigrant population that kept growing and kept coming. And I want our students to see that there are only two ideas that, when you put them together, can bring about this level of transformation, this level of prosperity. And it's the Christian worldview perspective and it's the free market economy. But if you put those two things together, there's no stopping what God can do through his people. Thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.
