I’m willing to bet that you’ve heard Louie Giglio speak at least once, especially if you find yourself in the American evangelical world. Let’s face it, Giglio is downright prolific and he’s one of the most gifted Christian communicators of the last 20 years. You know him from his work with students through Passion and other events, sixsteprecords, and the new Passion City Church (a new Atlanta church plant featuring Giglio and Chris Tomlin). Last year, the Passion team not only took their act on the road, they took it global. The Passion World Tour was an amazing worship movement that brought together university students in some of the world’s most historic cities. On the tour, Giglio shared a compelling message of redemption that is available on the new DVD, Fruitcake and Ice Cream. Giglio was kind enough to talk with me about his experiences on the Passion World Tour and the spiritual significance of fruitcake and ice cream.
COLLIDE: Tell me about the Passion World Tour. Where did the idea come from and how did it go?
LOUIE GIGLIO: Well, if people don’t know, for 12 years we’ve been doing events for university students in the States, and our one excursion outside of our borders was to Toronto a few years back. But we’ve been getting a lot of feedback from students around the world. There are 18 million university students in American today but there are 150 million university students around the world. And they find us through a DVD or a podcast or a CD and they end up emailing us on the Passion website, and it’s pretty amazing.
For years now, we’ve been getting emails from places like Manila and Hong Kong, and they’re from students saying, “Hey, I found out about Passion. Is there any chance you’d ever come do something in our country? Do you ever bring Passion to the Philippines?” And we’d love to, but it’s hard to get David Crowder and Chris Tomlin and Matt Redman all on the same schedule and on a plane and in the Philippines. So, we couldn’t figure out how to do it because we wanted to go to so many places.
But, it’s the simplest ideas God gives you, and the simple idea was if you just go, say, to London, then you might as well just keep on going while you’re there. And so, we planned out this 17-city tour. We did it over three months, three one-month legs, and we hosted free or low-cost events for university students, which, in many of the countries we’ve been to, had never been done before. University students just fell in that great big category of “young people,” which is anybody from 13 to “I’m not married, yet.” And so, we went, built teams with local leaders, local pastors, local campus ministers, and hosted these events, and it absolutely blew us away.
We started in Kyiv, Ukraine, back in May of last year and did a free event at the Sports Palace there and it ends up that 4,000 university students turned out from seven nations around Ukraine. And then we went to Stockholm, Paris, London, Jakarta, Manila, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, São Paulo, and Vancouver. It was an amazing journey and, at the end of the day, we got to see it with our own eyes. We’ve been saying for a while that the wave is growing into a global awakening. And I knew it was true, but I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, and now we’ve seen it with our own eyes.
At Makerere University, out on the sports field in Kampala, Uganda, we did a two-day event and in the evening sessions there were 25,000 university students on that field. And their hearts were so for making Jesus famous in their nation, in Africa, and in their generation, and just to see that, it really inspired us and it allowed us to say with confidence that God is moving, the Church is expanding, and the future is really bright.
COLLIDE: There’s a lot of talk about the secularization of Europe and so on. Did you notice a difference between those students who gathered there in Paris and those in the U.S. Bible Belt? What did you notice about the European students that came out to events?
GIGLIO: Well, obviously, there were less of them than we would have had if we’d done an event at Texas A&M or at Auburn University. But I really think, having been around a lot of the universities of America, American universities are pretty secularized, and it’s not much different, honestly, anywhere else. Being in Paris, you’re in a post-Christian world by a mile, and if you go to Ann Arbor you’re getting close to post-Christian world. If you go to the University of Vermont, you’re in a post-Christian world. You go to UT-Austin, it’s as about as secularized as you can get.
And so, to reach these students of the world, you’re talking about a mindset that does not really track along the typical evangelical pathway of thinking. It’s for sure that in Europe there has been a death of the Church. And, obviously, the Catholic Church is very strong, but the evangelical Church has really been shaken, especially in the mainland of Europe, but there is a hunger there. That’s the common thread: There is a hunger in students to want to know what matters most, and there’s the question, “How do I know my life is going to count?”
That’s true of students in Stockholm—we saw it there. It’s true of students in Paris. It’s true of students in Athens, Georgia. It’s not really whether they are secularized or not, or spiritually-oriented or not. It’s really, are they asking the same question, which is, “I’ve got a life here. How do I know I’m going make it count, and how do I know my life is going make a difference on Earth?” And if you bring the message and the story of God from that angle, I think it helps in a huge way.
COLLIDE: The new DVD in the Passion Talk series is Fruitcake and Ice Cream. That’s the message that you gave on the tour, right?
GIGLIO: It is. What we wanted to accomplish was not just to get Tomlin and myself around to the cities of the world. We had a few things that we wanted to see God do as a result of all the money, energy, and labor that this tour was going to require.
One of those things was we wanted to tell the story of Grace in a compelling way because we were in a lot of cultures where religion was very strong, but where grace might not yet have been heard or embraced. Take Kuala Lumpur, for example; São Paulo, Brazil; Paris, France. And I wanted to share that story in a way that would really draw people in.
Over the last two years—in fact, two years ago today, the day that we’re doing this interview—I met, by email, a student at the University of Florida named Ashley, and she wrote me to say, “I didn’t come to Passion ’07 (which had just happened a few weeks before) but my roommate (Christa) did, and she just moved in with me for the last semester of college.”
And here was Ashley—party girl, hellraiser, didn’t want anything to do with God, didn’t want anything to do with Christians or church—and here’s little Christa coming back from Passion ’07 and she’s got her heart on fire to say, “God make a difference in the world,” and she moves in as Ashley’s roommate for the last semester of college. Well, long story short, Ashley finds the grace of God in Jesus Christ, and the fruitcake and ice cream part comes because Ashley referred to Christa, the Christian, as “fruitcake,” and their common bond together, when they would have their heart-to-heart conversations, was ice cream.
Ashley wrote me an email and she said how she came to faith. We had an email relationship on and off for a few months, but in God’s timing, a few months later, in April, Ashley was in an accident and went to be with Jesus. And in that moment I was sort of injected into her family: her dad, who was an atheist; her mom and stepdad, who were believers; her brother, who is struggling now with losing his sister and his best friend; her roommate, Christa. And I began to share that story and a message, which is also in the Passion Talk series, called “Hope When Life Hurts Most.”
A few months back, Ashley’s dad—he’s become a very good friend of mine—said, “You always say you wish you’d known Ashley better,” and he said, “I’m going send you something.” And he ended up sending me Ashley’s journal.
COLLIDE: Wow.
GIGLIO: She kept a journal most of her teen life, but it’s the journal she was keeping from the November before she met Christ up until the night before she died. And in the journal, now we know, she called Christa “fruitcake.” We didn’t know that before, and with the journal, now, we have Ashley’s own words of this Christian college student moving into her apartment and her own progression of moving to faith. And so, in every city around the world, through an interpreter or not, I would share out of 2 Corinthians 5 that amazing truth hinging around the middle part of it, which says that God was in the world reconciling men to himself through Christ, not counting their sins against them, and He’s given to us this message of reconciliation.
And what I would say in every city was that there’s a common belief in the world that all of the God stories are all the same, and every nation has a God story, every people has a God story, every culture has a God story. And what some people want us to believe is that all those God stories are the same story, just a little tweak here and a little tweak there. But I said, “But there’s a word in the story we’re celebrating tonight that you do not find in any of those other stories, and it is the word ‘grace,’” and then I would just unpack grace from 2 Corinthians 5 for a little bit.
And then I would read Ashley’s journal, literally holding it in my hand, from January 7, the day she got a new Christian roommate, to January 21, the day that she first put her faith in Christ, and in her words. I’m telling you, it didn’t matter what country we were in, what culture we were in, what kind of translation was happening; people would sit on the edge of their seats because you and I, if we tried to, couldn’t write a better story than Ashley wrote. It’s unreal how well she tells a story, and she didn’t know millions of people were going hear her story; she’s just writing in a journal.
Every night I would share the story of Fruitcake and Ice Cream and we started getting comments on our blog from cities all over the world: “I want be a fruitcake for Jesus.” You don’t know how close your roommate, your brother, your sister, your co-worker is to really wanting to know about the grace of God and the power of God in their life.
COLLIDE: I imagine that that message gave those students a real sense of purpose, of mission, of being a faithful witness in whatever context they’re in.
GIGLIO: Well, it does. I mean, there are two things that happen at the end of it. I mean, there’s an Ashley in every room when we share that story and I would always say, “If you’re an Ashley and if you’re here tonight, I know you’re probably freaking out right now.”
In Vancouver, British Columbia, there were about 7,000 students in the GM Place there, the hockey arena, and I heard later through one of the campus ministers at Simon Fraser University that one of the guys that had come with his friend, as soon as Ashley’s story was over, leaned over to his buddy and he said, “I want the grace of God in my life.” They literally got up, walked out into the concourse of the arena. His friend prayed with him, told him about how he could invite Christ to be a part of his life and to give him life. They came back into the arena not as friends, but both as believers in Christ, both recipients of grace, and shared the rest of the night together.
And so, there was that side of the story every night, and I know there’re probably lots of people around the world right now that know Jesus because of Ashley, but there was the other side of the people just saying, “I counted my roommate out a long time ago. My roommate’s not even sober half the time, they lash out at me any time I mention church or Christianity or believing in God or Jesus, and they cuss at me whenever I’m goin’ to church or Bible study. I just wrote them off.” But the truth of the matter is that none of us can see in people’s hearts.
COLLIDE: Right.
GIGLIO: And none of us know exactly what that the Holy Spirit is doing. And so, I know there’s reality, and when somebody cusses you out because you’re a Christian and says, “I don’t want to hear anything else about your blank-blank faith.” And that’s the language Ashley was using the whole time with Christa,: “I don’t believe in this blank-blank-blank, and I don’t want anything to do with this blankin’ blank, and you can just blank-blank-blank.” When somebody’s giving you that, you don’t just stand there and say, “Well, you know what? I just believe that the Holy Spirit is working in your heart right now, and I think you’re closer than you think you are.” You back up and think, “OK, I think I need to tone it down a little bit.”
It wasn’t the words of Christa that brought Ashley to faith—it was the lifestyle that she lived that piqued her interest and caused her to ask questions and ultimately allowed Christa to open the door and share the story of Jesus. It reminds all of us that we’re going to get opposition, and if you’re on a college campus right now and you’re following Jesus, you’re going to get opposition every day and all day. But if you live a faithful life and you’re not deterred by that opposition—you don’t count that as truth, but you count what God said as truth, which is that He works in the hearts of men—then you just keep living your life, you’re going to see people attracted to the story, if there really is a story, and you’re going to see people attracted to the truth that you’re living out, if you’re really living it out.
To be really honest, I have to bleep out a whole lot of Ashley’s journal when I read it and that unnerves a lot of Christians because they say, “We can’t use language like that.” I didn’t even use the language, I bleeped it out, but they don’t even like the fact that I bleeped it out. And I think it’s a jolt to the Church that says, “Hello, the people that Jesus loves use bad language. The people that we want the gospel to find are people who don’t care and are partying and are intoxicated, and if that offends us then we are going to withdraw into the walls of the Church, and we are going to in-grow and die.” At some point we’ve got to look out and say, “These are the people Christ is interested in. These are the people Christ has patience and tolerance and mercy for, so let’s get over the fact that their language is a little different than what we would like for it to be, and let’s just keep engaging them with truth and with grace.”
So, I think Fruitcake and Ice Cream is going bring a lot of people to Jesus. I know it has and is, and I think it’s going to encourage a lot of moms and dads and brothers and sisters who are praying for that friend or roommate or son or daughter or husband. But I think and hope that at some point it is a huge, seismic jolt for the Church to say, “We’ve got to figure out whether or not we really, seriously want to reach these people or not. And if we do then we’ve got to be a whole lot less offended by their humanity and we’ve got to be a whole lot more willing to extend the kind of grace to them that Jesus extended to us.
To find out more about the new Passion DVD Fruitcake and Ice Cream, visit 268store.com.