Larry Fowler
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Welcome to First Person. I'm Wayne Shepherd, and we'll be talking with Larry Fowler in a few moments. Larry is the founder and CEO of the Legacy Coalition, which is dedicated to challenging and equipping grandparents to leave a legacy of faith.

These weekly interviews are for the purpose of introducing you to people who have given their life to Jesus Christ and seek to use their abilities and experience to serve God's kingdom. Our hope is that you will learn from their faith as you follow God. We have archived hundreds of conversations online at FirstPersonInterview.com and invite you to visit and listen anytime. We've recently made changes to our website, which you can view again at FirstPersonInterview.com.

Well, let's meet Larry Fowler of the Legacy Coalition. The Coalition is a group of volunteers who are deeply devoted to creating a national movement of intentional Christian grandparents. I reached Larry online, and he'll explain more as we talk, but I began by asking him to tell us his own story of faith and calling. Yeah, I grew up on the cattle ranch in western Nebraska. My mom and dad were strong believers, and

And so from the very time I was little, I was taught about the things of the Lord. In fact, uh, I think my mom had me memorizing Bible verses from the time I was about three years old. Um, I trusted Christ as my savior as, uh, when I was about five. And in fact, Wayne, I, I don't even remember that, but, uh, that doesn't mean it wasn't real. I, um, sure was. And then, uh,

Being out in such a rural area and I'm wired for engagement with other people, I was starving for friendship and fellowship with other kids.

especially Christian kids. So for me, the highlight of my year was to go to a Bible camp out there in central Nebraska. Oh, I see. Okay. It was my time to be with other kids, and I loved it and looked forward to it so much. When I was 13 at that camp, I felt like

God calling me into ministry. That's young. I still remember underneath an oak tree, I could probably take you to the oak tree if it's still there, where I stood with my counselor and I prayed and told the Lord I wanted to serve him full time with my life. That's great. And of course, that kept me out of a lot of trouble when I was a high schooler. You know, I had a sense of purpose. I really wanted to serve the Lord. And

Of course, I was far from perfect, but it was a driving force to give me direction in life throughout even my high school years. So I went to college, majored in Bible at John Brown University, and then wanted to get a job as a youth pastor. I kind of thought, well, that's what I needed to do as a young person in ministry, and

Out of college, I tried to get a church. Couldn't even get one single interview with a church, Wayne. And nobody would even look at me. So kind of out of desperation, not knowing what to do, I decided, well, I'll go to seminary. So I went to seminary. My wife is from Southern California. And so we returned to near her home and I went to Talbot to seminary.

And right away got a job as the youth pastor in her church. There you go. And that's where we learned about Awana. We started an Awana club in our church there. It was a little church. And within one year, Wayne, we had more kids coming to Awana than we had people in the church. And that gave us a love for that. And then Awana became the ministry through we expressed our calling,

for 39 years. Is that right? Wow. I was on the staff of Awana for all that length of time. 39 years. So you lived in Chicago for a long while then, didn't you? I did. We were missionaries with Awana for 17 years out here in California. Moved to Chicago in 1996 and were there until 2012. All right.

So it's good to get to know you today. I know you now as the founder and CEO of Legacy Coalition. And tell me how this vision to help grandparents, where did this come from? I know where it came from, but tell me how it came from. Yeah. Well, when my first grandson was born, I didn't think a lot about what I should be doing as a grandfather. I was involved in ministry and

At that time, especially involved in the international part of Awana, so I was doing a lot of traveling and didn't really think a lot about my role. I loved that little grandson a lot. In fact, my first grandson, Wayne, was born on my birthday. Oh, special, huh? Yeah. My daughter says that's the best birthday present she ever gave me, and of course she's right. But after seven years and three little ones, her marriage failed. Oh, okay.

And she and her three kids moved in with us, and I became both dad and grandpa. Mm-hmm.

And that's when I began really thinking for the very first time, so what really should I be doing as a grandfather? I didn't want my grandsons, there were two, a little girl and two boys. I especially didn't want my grandsons to follow in the sins of their father. And so I wanted to step it up and be more involved with them.

Then in about 2010, we were working on a curriculum project at Awana that required me to study all the passages in the Old Testament that had to do with generations. You know, anytime it said generation to generation, I was trying to figure out why and all that. Well, nothing ever came of the project, but the study God used to teach me something I'd never seen before, that the Bible had a lot to say about the role of a grandparent.

And, you know, the word isn't there. Grandparent doesn't even appear in the Bible. But you have all these commands that are for the grandparent role. And I began to see those with new eyes. And it became such a passion that we said, I went to the president of Oahu. I was one of the vice presidents at the time. And I went to the president and said, I got to move.

Our daughter had remarried, moved to Colorado Springs. Those kids were growing up and we knew that they would be, you know, not in their home too much longer because they were young teenagers by that time. But my son was starting his family in Southern California.

So we moved out here for the express purpose of being close to our son and being involved in those grandchildren as he was starting his family. And of course, with Juana, that meant I got reassigned. My new assignment was to connect with children's pastors in megachurches.

So I would travel around the country and talk with all these different children's pastors in churches that Wayne had about every ministry imaginable for family. And they would invariably ask, so why are you living in Southern California? I thought the Awana headquarters was in Chicago. So I'd tell them about my grandparenting passion. And then I started asking them, so

Has your church ever done anything regarding grandparenting? And 100% of the time, the answer was they never even thought of it.

And of course, these are churches that have, you know, single mom care, divorce recovery. They've got parent classes. They have everything imaginable for the family. But none of them, absolutely zero, had ever thought about equipping grandparents. So I said, somebody needs to do something about this. And I never thought it would be me. But.

But, uh, in 2015, I knew that God was calling my wife and I to a new ministry. And that was a ministry to grandparents. So that's kind of the long background. That's the start of this ministry, which we'll talk much more about here with Larry Fowler. Uh,

Legacy Coalition. Why that title? What's the significance of what you call it? We don't want this to be about a person. We want it to be a coalition of people that are

all passionate about the same thing. And sometimes they're ministry leaders of other organizations. Sometimes they are churches. And frankly, that's where we are getting the most traction right now is that as church leaders,

about this, they understand, yeah, grandparents have a significant role in the lives of grandkids who we need to equip them. So the Legacy Coalition, it's a coalition of churches and individuals that all

All are passionate about being intentional and passing on their faith to their grandchildren. Yeah. And the timing impresses me because obviously we have this baby boomer generation that's aging. They're all grandparents, right? Or most of them are grandparents. And you come along at just the right time for that bubble of older population. Well, I think...

I don't know why us now, and I have no idea why God chose my wife and I, why he called us. But yeah, the timing is significant. On the one hand, Wayne, we could say that grandparents are the youngest they've ever been in the history of Earth. And by that, I don't mean age-wise, I mean health-wise. I understand, yeah. You know, we are...

We enjoy health more than any other generation. On the other hand, the average age a person becomes a grandparent in the U.S. is 49, and more than half of grandparents are 60 or under. So what that means is there's actually more Gen X grandparents now than there are boomer grandparents. Interesting. I did not realize that. That's fascinating. Well, time flies, doesn't it?

There's more to learn from Larry Fowler about Christian grandparenting and we'll continue here on First Person in a moment.

Hi, I'm Ed Cannon. And as you know, situations around the world are changing quickly. Stay current with FEBC's ministry and get a deeper understanding of people who need to find hope. Hear how you can feel the pulse of God's Spirit moving through the hearts of believers dedicated to reaching the lost. Be sure you join me for the podcast until all have heard. Discover how the gospel is making a difference around the world.

Search for Until All Have Heard on your favorite podcast platform or hear it online at febc.org. We're talking with Larry Fowler, who is founder and CEO of the Legacy Coalition. We've got an important event coming up soon that you'll want to know about. And I have some questions for Larry here about grandparenting and the challenges it presents. It was really interesting to hear you talk a moment ago, Larry, about how young grandparents are these days in many cases, right?

And for many grandparents, they have to live apart from their grandchildren. That's just the way of modern life. You have the opportunity to move closer. Some grandparents do, some can't. Can you talk about that challenge? Of course, there are all sorts of challenges to really being an influence in the lives of your grandkids. And we want to help grandparents figure out how to overcome those. So

A good way to summarize the challenges that grandparents face is with the word distance. But there's more than one kind of distance or geographical distance. And that's that's a challenge for many. Then there are the relational distance. You know, what happens if your son and daughter in law gets divorced and he gets custody of the kids and she's mad at your son and she takes it out on you, too? Yeah. So that's relational distance. And then there's spiritual distance.

What do you do if your adult children aren't interested in faith or even antagonistic toward faith? How do you influence your grandkids? And some of those are some of the greatest heartaches of life, really.

So we want to encourage grandparents, and we want to give them hope through ideas that new strategies maybe that they haven't tried so that they can have a greater influence in their grandkids. Well, let's take on that category of spiritually impacting our grandchildren. We want to see them in heaven, don't we? Amen. And what if the parents aren't on board with us with that? How can we overcome that? Well, the Holy Spirit has to overcome it primarily, but...

It isn't right to say we pray first. It's really a very, very important strategy to do that. In fact, I would say don't just pray.

Get a group of grandparents that have similar situations to pray with you. Get a prayer group. There's power in corporate prayer. And frankly, there are lots of grandparents in virtually every church that have adult kids that have abandoned faith walk, if not abandoned faith, and get them together and pray together. So certainly that's number one.

But there's a lot of other things that you can do. One is to check your approach. And maybe you've been the cause of some of that. You know, maybe you were too strong in pushing your own beliefs on them. And they're reacting and they're saying, don't talk about spiritual things because they're remembering how hard you pushed before. We talk a lot about the strategy. It's a Jesus strategy.

of even though Jesus was both grace and truth, you lead with grace with those that are sinners. And if we have adult children, the vocation of sinners, then we need to be like Jesus and lead with grace.

But as a parent, Wayne, we often want to just tell them, you know, we want to straighten them out. We want to tell them because we're their mom or we're their dad. Right. And it doesn't work. It often pushes them farther away. So that's an important thing, too. You got to look at yourself and say, what did I do to contribute to the situation? And if you did something, maybe even if you didn't,

You need to start by asking their forgiveness. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about the relational distancing that you mentioned. How to overcome that? Well, understand that if we want to influence our grandchildren, influence comes through a relationship. And so if there's a distance in a relationship, it's not always, you can't always fix it.

But sometimes you can. Certainly when there's a very harsh divorce that takes place in a family, maybe the wounds are so deep that you can't repair the relationship. Maybe it doesn't even involve you, but you're kind of a victim of that. But as much as you can, do what you can to repair the relationship.

because the relationship is how influence comes. If it's a relational barrier between you and your adult child,

then, again, you've got to check yourself first to say, did I contribute to this? Maybe you said some harsh words sometimes. Maybe you think they're the ones that walked away. They're the prodigal or whatever. But it's really good to look at ourselves and say, did we contribute to this and be willing to ask for forgiveness? We want to repair relationships.

When we repair relationships, then that creates a more open door towards having the influence in grandchildren's lives. When it comes to physical distance, of course, there's some great tools these days that past generations didn't have. Video, for instance, FaceTime and that sort of thing, which we use as grandparents. And it doesn't replace a face-to-face time with them, but it certainly helps a great deal.

Other things you've noticed? Grandparents are a little more mobile these days, perhaps. If they have the means to do it, they can travel and visit. What have you noticed? Yeah, it's more about what you do when you do talk with them and what you do when you do visit. You're right. And if you have a grandchild that is a preschooler,

they will probably love to FaceTime with you every single day. When they're a young teenager, not so much. Yeah, right. I understand. Well, we've got a six-year-old, and it's about once a week at this point. So we love those FaceTime calls. Yeah. And one of the things that we practice, Wayne, with our grandchildren that live at a distance, because our daughter's kids are now young adults living in Colorado. We're in California. So we have that opportunity.

When we go to visit, we try to date each one of them every single time we go. We take them out for coffee or for lunch or something like that. We try to make sure we have one-on-one time. Family time is great, but you have conversations.

with with grandkids one-on-one that you would never have in a family family setting and then don't build up you know like 37 things you want to tell them 37 pieces of advice well you can make the list but just pick one listen to them get to know what's going on in their lives

Make it fun for them because you want to be able to do it the next time you come. And then maybe offer one piece of advice. Mm-hmm.

And it's important to be interested in what they're interested in. You know, I might not be a fisherman, but if they want to go fishing, then I'm going to learn how to fish, right? Yeah. In fact, when we were living in Chicago, my wife and I were part of a small group. And I remember the lady who was the host of the small group one time, she was just on fire, irritated at her granddaughter, her 10-year-old granddaughter.

Because her 10-year-old granddaughter was playing a game on her phone.

Now, 10-year-old had a phone. That's a different story. Sure, yeah. But she was just irritated. And she said, if you don't stop playing that game, I'm going to just take you home. And a few minutes later, the little girl was playing the game. And so the grandma took her home. No. And I thought, my boy, that really helped the relationship a whole lot. Right. If instead the grandma would have said, so tell me about your game.

Yeah. What is so interesting in your game? And then if you show me the game for 10 minutes, would you sit at the table and just, you know, have a cup of tea with me? Yeah.

Yeah. Because that's what you want. Great approach. Great approach. Well, one of the reasons we wanted to have you on at this time of year, Larry, is because it is a holiday season and this is a great time to be a grandparent and it gives us an opportunity to be with grandkids more often than not. So that's strategically why we invited you to be here with us this time of year. But you've got something coming up soon that we want to talk about.

Yeah, in February, we have the Legacy Grandparenting Summit. It's the only national conference on Christian grandparenting. We have done it now for eight years, and we're really excited to have another one coming. It will be live in Birmingham, Alabama, but it is streamed to churches all across North America. So for all of your listeners, there will likely be a church not far away from them that

where they might go and they might participate in this conference. Right now, the registration is just very reasonable at all those sites. It's a two-day conference at the live site, one day everywhere else. And you'll hear some great speakers like Ann Graham Lotz, the daughter of Billy Graham, and not only her, but her daughter and her granddaughter talking about generational impact. We get to hear from three generations of Billy Graham's family. Yeah.

Larry, leave us with some scripture. When you talk about being a grandparent and the word grandparent doesn't appear in scripture, I think every time I read now to every generation, I'm going to think of a legacy coalition. But what scripture is on your heart as you lead this ministry? Well, the one that really impacted me was Deuteronomy 4.9. It starts with a command to the leaders of the nation of Israel right before they entered the promised land.

And Moses says to them, by the inspiration of God, watch yourselves, that you do not forget the things that your eyes have seen, nor let them slip from your heart as long as you live, but teach them to your children and to your children's children. So that last little phrase, and your children's children says, you know what?

That's a command to grandparents. And so I want to see that fulfilled in my life. I want to do everything I can to be obedient to that verse. Because as you said earlier, Wayne, I want my grandkids in heaven with me. There's nothing in this world that I want more than that, to have my grandchildren in heaven with me someday.

And that's what drives Larry and the Legacy Coalition to do what they do so well. You've been listening to Larry Fowler, and there's more at FirstPersonInterview.com. The event that's coming up in early 2025 is the Legacy Grandparenting Summit in Birmingham, Alabama, and simulcast to 100 locations around the country. It will be held in February, and we'll place a link in our notes at FirstPersonInterview.com. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast with your preferred podcast app by searching for First Person with Wayne Shepard.

These interviews are helped in part by the Far East Broadcasting Company, who proclaims the gospel message in over 50 countries of the world, often reaching deeply into places where there is no or very little gospel presence. Take time to join us for the podcast until all have heard at febc.org. Now, with thanks to my friend and producer, Joe Carlson, I'm Wayne Shepherd. Join us next time for First Person. ♪