Greg Stier is the founder and president of Dare 2 Share Ministries. Witnessing the power of God radically change lives within his own family, Greg committed his life to the Lord and to sharing his life-changing faith. He is passionate about the living God and compassionate toward the decaying youth. His goal is to train and equip a million Christian teens across America to go out into the world and share their faith with boldness and compassion.

EN: Can you share a little bit about your family background?
Greg: My family lived in north Denver during the highest crime rate in that area. My family was pretty intense—they had something to do with that crime rate. They were in trouble with the law. My Uncle Jack spent a lot of time in jail for armed robbery. My mom was a partier. My mom had five brothers and they were all scared of her. My mom was in a girls’ gang. She dropped out of high school in tenth grade. She went to a party and that’s how I was born. She got married at least four times. My family was physically violent but I was never abused. We were kind of like a gang. I saw a lot of blood. Little kids shouldn’t see blood growing up. Mom loved my brother and me. Just a working mom trying to make it happen. She went to be with the Lord in March 2004

EN: How did she come to Christ?
Greg: I got to share the Gospel with her when I was fifteen. She said, “You mean to tell me that all I have to do is accept Christ? You don’t know all the things I’ve done.” Actually, I did because my grandma told me. I go, “Ma it’s all on the cross.” She said, “All right, I’m trusting Christ, cigarettes and all.” I said, “Mom, Heaven’s non-smoking.” She said, “Whatever.”

EN: You dedicated your life to preaching the Gospel at the age of eleven. Can you tell us about your conversion experience?
Greg: On a dare, a preacher led my Uncle Jack to Christ. And my Uncle Jack trusted Christ. And the preacher said, “Does that make sense?” And he said, “Yeah.” He started witnessing to everybody. He’d go into Mormon churches on Sunday morning and start giving the Gospel. And he’d pull guys out of cars. He didn’t know any better. Then my Uncle Bob trusted Christ. It became a chain reaction. Around the same time I was going to church with my grandparents and I trusted Christ and then I saw my uncles through all these weird circumstances come to Christ and then their kids come to Christ. It spread like a virus.

EN: Is that why you wrote the book, Outbreak?
Greg: Yes, Outbreak is about viral evangelism. One member of your family catches a cold and everyone catches the cold. In my family, we all caught the cold and it was great! For a little kid, that has a great impact. Seeing my Uncle Jack, my Uncle Bob, all my tough uncles bend the knee to Christ and put their faith and trust in Him and start serving Him, I said, “I’m going to spend the rest of my life telling people the Gospel.” So I’ve been preaching since I was little.

EN: You’re fun to listen to because you use a lot of humor in your sermons.
Greg: Yeah, I like to use a lot of humor. When I was about 18 or 19 I thought I could either be a preaching comic or a funny preacher and I decided to be a funny preacher because nobody expects a preacher to be funny. Plus, when you’re a comic you’ve always got to be funny and sometimes when you get preachy you irritate people. So I thought I’ll just be a funny preacher.

EN: What made you evangelize as a teenager?
Greg: I saw my family all become radically transformed and they started witnessing to everybody and I wanted to witness too. I went to a Christian school so when you’re going to a Christian school, who are you going to witness to? Every Friday night I led a group of kids out to the mall and we talked to other teenagers at the mall. Sometimes we’d get thrown out. Security guards would put our arms behind our backs. That’s how I built relationships. I’d see the same kids week after week so it became relational.

EN: Tell us about one of your relationships.
Greg: I met a Satanist named Vince. I talked to him at the mall and he was totally not into it. But every time I’d see him at the mall, I’d say, “Hey, Vince.” And we’d talk. I’d talk about Christ and he’d say, “Oh, he’s trying to convert me again.” We kind of became friends. I was probably about 19 years old the last time I saw Vince. I walked into Denny’s and I saw Vince and a bunch of his Satanist buddies in a corner booth. Vince sees me and he says, “Hey, Greg, come here.” He goes, “All right, sit down; I want you to tell them.” I said, “Tell them what?” He said, “Tell them your message.” So I shared the Gospel with them all. Sitting next to Vince I leaned over and asked, “Are you getting close?” He said, “I am getting close.” So, that’s the last time I saw him. I don’t know if he decided to trust Christ or not.

EN: Wow.
Greg: Kids are spiritual and they’re open. The Gospel is powerful. Paul said that we don’t fight with the weapons of this world, we fight with supernatural weapons: the Word of God, prayer, and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. We have the power of the Holy Spirit so we need to release it. It’s explosive power. That shrapnel will make a dent. We need to unleash that message.

EN: Were you challenged by non-Christians trying to debate you?
Greg: Oh, yeah. I believe in what I call “street apologetics.” In other words, you learn how to defend your faith by being asked questions you don’t have the answers to. As a kid I had a rule of thumb: fool me once—that’s it. You can ask me one question one time. So people would ask me a question and I’d say, “Well, that’s great. I have no idea what the answer to that is but can we set up another meeting next week?” I’d go home and study my Bible. I’d come in and eventually after about 100 times that that happens you pretty much learn the questions most of the people are asking. I used what I call kind of a “defensive play.” We call it the “4-1 defensive formation.” Four questions, one statement. So, when you’re in apologetics you ask four questions: What do you mean by that? How do you know that to be true? What difference has that made in your life? and What if you’re wrong? And the one statement is: I don’t know but I’ll find out. What this does is it creates an on-going honest dialogue. You have to realize that you don’t have all the answers. There are some questions people ask me and I respond with, “I don’t know.” We don’t have to be omniscient because we’re not God. But we need to keep studying and searching the Word.

EN: Why do you think Christians are scared to share the Gospel?
Greg: I don’t know but that’s my frustration. I know there’s fear of rejection. Sometimes people don’t know what to say or how to bring it up. They don’t want to be labeled as a freak. In this culture where tolerance rules, the message of the Gospel is very intolerant. When Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father but by me,” it’s pretty exclusive. As soon as you preach the Gospel, you preach an offensive message. Not only is Jesus the only way but you got nothing to do with it, your good deeds. You can never work your way there, you’re not good enough. It starts with bad news, that we’re losers when it comes to trying to make it on our own, and that if we do want to go there’s only one way to go and there’s good news through Christ. He did all the work. He died on the cross. He paid the price.

EN: What do you think about relational evangelism?
Greg: I believe in relational evangelism. But I think Satan sometimes, and this sounds radical, has used relational evangelism to his advantage. He is always whispering in our ear, “Wait a little longer, build the relationship a little more, earn the right to be heard.” I think he uses those kinds of thoughts sometimes to keep us from sharing at all. Romans 1: 16 says “I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ because it is the power of God unto salvation.” We’re not the power of God unto salvation, the Gospel of Christ is the power of God unto salvation, “for everyone who believes, first for the Jew and then for the Greek.” Satan often uses something good like relational evangelism and takes it to an extreme and makes it silent. Silent evangelism is an oxymoron. Evangelism means proclaiming a message. It means literally yelling that message out. If we’re not, we’re hiding it in.

EN: Describe Dare 2 Share.
Greg: Our mission is to energize a generation to evangelize the world. One of the primary ways we do that is through our full weekend training events. A Dare 2 Share conference is different from a regular conference in the sense that it is the most highly programmed event you will ever go to. Every 6-8 minutes something different is happening. So we go from music to training to a movie clip. Over the course of a typical weekend we’ll have 25 movie clips, 8 different skits, a full 40 minute production Friday night drama, a 4-hour outreach experience, lots of worship and then a full-on concert with a Christian band. So it’s a training event. Every year the conference theme and content changes so a kid can go through eighth grade to their senior year and get something new every year.

EN: What role do you believe you play in the lives of teenagers?
Greg: I want to be the voice of the teenagers—even though I’m old—to the adults. I want to really challenge the adults to sit up and take notice of kids. That’s my heart. Kids all have a calling on their lives. I believe in teenagers. I love them so much. They are just being bored to death. The curriculum out there today is so basic and inefficient. Rack their brain up a little bit and challenge them! Kick them in the rear. I mean, coaches do. They need to be more of a priority. We need to train, equip and unleash them. The Mormons are doing it. They are inconsistent with their theology but they are more rigorous and effective. They have a 6 A.M. seminary every day, Monday through Friday.

EN: What keeps you connected to the youth culture?
Greg: We always complain about the media and entertainment but it keeps you connected to what kids are watching and what they are listening to. I also talk to a lot of kids. I do a lot of youth events and I always hang out with the kids after. If there’s a crowd of adults and kids, I’ll be with the kids.

EN: Have you always been drawn to kids?
Greg: Yeah, since I was a kid. When I was a pastor at church, if there were kids in the room, I would always turn toward them.

EN: Statistics show that most kids who accept Christ before college abandon their faith during and after college.What’s your take on this?
Greg: We’re working closely with focus on the family with what we call The Capture Their Hearts (TCTH) campaign. TCTH campaign is because up to 50% of even college freshman abandon their Christian faith by their senior year in college. They abandon their Christian faith because they’ve been living on borrowed faith. They’re not owning their faith. I think it’s because the church failed to give them a mission and the church failed to indoctrinate them. But it’s not just head knowledge. It’s head, heart and hands. The goal is to train the teens with the A-slot as the parents. It’s giving them basic truth about theology. Ultimately, they’ve got to see mom and dad live it. Know what you believe and live what you believe. And later on when your child comes up and asks you what this or that means, you can answer, “Well, it’s such and such.” Parents and teens need to talk. There needs to be a revolution.

EN: What would you say to parents who drop their kids off at church and expect some sort of results from the church?
Greg: The lead has got to be the mom and dad. For those kids who don’t have parents, like me, we have adults in our churches to mentor those kids. I had men as a kid who poured their lives into me. It wasn’t a program. It wasn’t an 8-week curriculum. You know, they just kind of adopted me.

EN: What problems do you think youth face today that are specific to this generation?
Greg: There are the typical answers: drugs, sex and the media barrage. There’s a book out called Soul Searching that talks about the type of spirituality that kids have. Most kids call themselves religious, not just spiritual, but religious. The kind of religion is generally Christian but they call it a moralistic therapeutic deism so that kids say, “Oh, yeah, you should do what’s right and you need to call on God when you need something.” So it’s therapeutic. It’s going to help you, it’s going to help me—it’s deism. Kids believe that God’s not really involved in their lives. They think He’s off doing His own thing and they call Him when they need something, like when they’re breaking up with a girlfriend or they need to do well on a test. It’s really a self-centered existence.

EN: What do you do when you feel empty spiritually?
Greg: I go back to the well. I’ve gone through some real dry parts of my life and sometimes you just need your time with the Lord. Sometimes I just find a park in our area and I just walk and pray and walk and pray until I work it out. Sometimes I go see a movie. Sometimes I’m so stressed out that I’ll check out and I just say, “I’ll be back.” Humanly, you just need a nap or need to eat. Sometimes I write. I write a lot of stuff. I write a weekly article called “Stier Straight” and it gets stuff off my chest.

EN: Who are your greatest inspirations?
Greg: I like Spurgeon, Moody, Billy Graham, Hudson Taylor, and Chuck Swindoll. I like Elijah because he was totally outnumbered but he stood up and stood strong.

EN: Any wishes for the future?
Greg: I want to reach the world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I don’t care if anybody remembers my name. I don’t call it Greg Stier’s Conferences, I call it Dare 2 Share. My happiest day will be when Dare 2 Share is no longer needed because the church is an unstoppable force and the gates of hell can not prevail against it.

Posted: May 8, 2007
*This interview first appeared in Encounter Monthly Journal, December 2005