This Civilizational Moment

Author: John Stonestreet and Hayley Wilson

In 1988, Chuck Colson honored Beningo Aquino Jr., a Filipino opposition leader who stood against dictator Ferdinand Marcos, with the very first Wilberforce Award. Aquino was assassinated for calling for a free Philippines. At that inaugural ceremony, Colson described Aquino as embodying faith in action, like the award’s namesake, abolitionist William Wilberforce. Since that first year, the Colson Center has stewarded the Wilberforce Award to dozens of other recipients who have made a lasting difference in many other spheres of influence.

This year, Os Guiness will be recognized with the 2026 Wilberforce Award at a ceremony to be held at the Colson Center National Conference in Knoxville, TN.  The great-great-great grandson of Dublin brewer Arthur Guinness, Os was born in China during World War II where his parents were medical missionaries. The first decade of his life was a time of national and global upheaval, war, the rise of Communism, and a famine that took the lives of his two brothers. Expelled with other foreigners in 1951, Os returned to Europe. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy at Oxford University, before sharpening his faith and worldview at Francis Schaeffer’s L’Abri in the Swiss Alps.

Os has spent decades addressing essential issues that face humanity and society from a Christian worldview. In 1991, he founded the Trinity Forum, dedicated to the cultivation of the Christian mind. An ardent defender of religious freedom and the rights of conscience, he was the key drafter of the 1988 Williamsburg Charter, a celebration and reaffirmation of the First Amendment, and the Global Charter of Conscience, which was presented to the European Union Parliament in 2012.  

In Truth Rising, a documentary produced by the Colson Center and Focus on the Family, Os argues that the current moment God has placed us in is a “civilizational moment.” Here’s what he had to say:

A civilizational moment is a period of crisis when a civilization, our civilization, completely loses touch with the inspiration that made it what it is. In other words, our foundational inspiration, our original dynamism, is gone. We've lost it. It is at this point, like all the other civilizations that have come and gone before us, that we face three clear options. Renew the original inspiration, replace it, or decline.

What the world needs is Gospel people, those with a “backbone of steel,” Os said in his book Impossible People. In other words, we must be immovable no matter how far or wide those around us are swept into the cultural drift.

As Os argued in his best-selling book, The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life, we must fully reckon with the seriousness of the hour in which we live, and then work for the glory and approval of “an audience of One.” Like Wilberforce, Chuck Colson, and many others whom God called to different times and places throughout history, Os Guinness is a much-needed prophetic voice for our cultural moment.

Learn more about Os and his story in the Truth Rising documentary. Or pick up any one of his many books, all essential reading to understand the moment we are in and how we are called to live. Or join us for the 2026 Colson Center National Conference in May where Os will be speaking and will be presented the 2026 Wilberforce Award. Learn more about the Wilberforce Award at colsoncenter.org/award.

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Hayley Wilson.