The Fellowship–also called The International Foundation or the Fellowship Foundation–is a Christian organization centered in Washington, D.C. It has more influence on government leaders in our nation’s capital than any other religious group. It was founded there by Abraham Vereide in 1944 and first called International Christian Leadership.
Abrahm Vereide was a Norwegian immigrant who founded Goodwill Industries in Seattle, Washington, in 1916. (I was born in Seattle and grew up there.) He also became a Methodist clergyman. In 1935, Vereide started a men’s prayer breakfast in Seattle and then one in San Francisco. In Seattle, it led to much ending of city and state government corruption. Then one of this group’s members, Arthur Langlie, became state governor.
Vereide’s vision was to bring together civic and business leaders in a loving fellowship for Bible study and prayer, with an added purpose of having a positive effect on communities. By 1940, the Seattle group had grown to 300 members. By 1942, Vereide had established sixty such prayer groups, mostly in larger U.S. cities and especially on the West Coast.
Abraham Vereide then relocated to our nation’s capital to try to duplicate what he had done elsewhere. He founded the first prayer breakfast among members of Congress in 1944. He eventually became a spiritual advisor to President Dwight Eisenhower. That led to the birthing of the National Prayer Breakfast in 1953. Abraham Vereide is therefore known as “the father of the prayer breakfast movement.”
The reason I am saying all of this is that The Fellowship had a profound, yet somewhat indirect influence, on the founding and development of the PGA Tour Bible Study. My close friend, college golf teammate, and fellow PGA Tour player Babe Hiskey and I co-founded this fellowship group in 1965. Babe’s elder brother, and also my close friend, Jim Hiskey, suggested this idea to Babe and me. Jim then served as sort of a periodic overseer of the work during the following decades.
Jim Hiskey was a three-time All American golfer at the University of Houston, where Babe and I subsequently attended. Upon graduation, Jim turned pro and went on the PGA Tour for about a year. He then went on the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ, a fledgling para-church, evangelistic organization that ministered to college students. Jim was the director of CCC in Houston, primarily at the campuses of Rice University and the University of Houston.
Campus Crusade for Christ was established by Southern California businessman Bill Bright in 1954. Bill Bright and Dick Halverson were members of a Sunday school class at Belair Presbyterian Church in the Los Angeles area that was taught by Henrietta Mears. About 500 Christians ministries grew out of that class.
Dick Halverson went to Washington, D.C. to join Abraham Vereide in his Fellowship work. Doug Coe, who had worked in Young Life, InterVarsity, and Navigators in Oregon then joined Vereide and Halverson in Washington, D.C. After Hiskey served seven years with CCC in Houston, he joined these Fellowship guys in, I think, 1966. So, Jim was mostly a leader with The Fellowship as he sometimes came out on Tour to assist us pros with conducting the PGA Tour Bible Study ministry to the pros.
I finished my full-time career on the regular PGA Tour at the end of 1982. The next year, Doug Coe ordained me so that I was an associate staff member of The Fellowship. Throughout the 1980s, I worked with Jim Hiskey and our mutual friend Tom Flory in establishing a ministry across the country called Golf Fellowship. (These amateur golfer groups are now called Links Players.)
The Fellowship used to have about 200 ministries. The name Golf Fellowship obviously indicates an association with The Fellowship just as is Chuck Colson’s ministry Prison Fellowship.
For decades, Dick Halverson served as senior pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. Dick also was Chaplain to the U.S. Senate in 1981-1994. Dick and Billy Graham endorsed my first book, The Gospels Interwoven (1987).
With all of this background established, I have now arrived at the purpose of the title of this post. The reason I am writing this post is mostly due to the strong disrespect Democratic presidential nominee Hilary Clinton gets from so many Republican voters, especially Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump against whom she is campaigning for the U.S. presidency. That election is now less than three weeks away, and the third and last televised debate between Clinton and Trump is tomorrow night.
The Fellowship ministers to both men and women. Mrs. Hilary Clinton has had significant involvement in The Fellowship. In her autobiography she says Doug Coe “became a source of strength and friendship” to her while she was First Lady.
The wikipedia article about Doug says, “Coe was a member of the large United States Congressional and ministerial delegation which accompanied then First Lady Hilary Clinton to the 1997 funeral of the founder of the Sisters of Charity, Mother Teresa.”
That wikipedia article also states: “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met with Coe on many occasions as First Lady of the United States. According to NBC News, she participated in a prayer luncheon at The Cedars, the Fellowship Foundation’s historic conference house and grounds on the banks of the Potomac River in February 1993 and met privately with Coe in her White House office on December 19, 1997, and a ‘Meet & Greet with Business Leaders’ on Feb. 4, 1998. Clinton has written that Doug Coe is ‘a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship with God.’ Doug Coe has been referred to as a friend and hero by former Vice President Al Gore.”
Hilary Clinton grew up in a family that regularly attended the Methodist Church. Thus, ever since then she has been a professing Christian as a member of the Methodist Church. Of course, God judges the heart, and he knows all those who belong to him. I contend that people who profess to be Christian should be accepted as such if they believe in Jesus as their Savior from sin and to some degree allow Jesus to be Lord of their lives. From what I know of Hilary Clinton, which is only what I learn from the news media, she deserves more respect as a professing Christian, which she does not trumpet, than what she is getting in this election campaign. Nevertheless, I disagree with her social stance regarding abortion and homosexuality.
The courts have ruled on abortion and homosexuality and a significant majority of Americans favor those rulings, with this majority growing all the time. Thus, I doubt that having other judges on the Supreme Court will make it possible in the future to overturn these rulings save for a great spiritual awakening in this country. That is the hope that many Evangelicals have and the main reason they are voting for Trump, who certainly has in the past shown less proclivity to Christian living than has Mrs. Clinton.
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