Son Worshipper

by Nancy Huffine

 

Dann Spader, Class of ’74 and Moody’s 2024 Alumnus of the Year, has one of the most unique “How-I-got-to-Moody” stories you’ll ever hear.

“In December of 1970, I came to Christ at engineering school in Rapid City, South Dakota, through my roommate who had trusted Christ just two weeks earlier,” Dann relates. “I had a radical conversion, and I soon knew I wanted to go into ministry and study the Bible in greater depth.”

The following summer, Dann attended a Cru summer project in Ocean City, New Jersey, where teams would share Christ on the beaches every day and then study in the evenings. “I barely understood the Bible, and I had a deep desire to learn God’s Word,” he says. “I asked the Cru team for prayer about which Bible school I should attend.”

While tearing down an old building (one Cru team’s assignment), a team member found something unusual inside the building’s walls. “It was an old Moody Monthly magazine,” Dann says, “and it happened to be the edition which listed all the Bible schools in the country!”

The Cru member gave the magazine to Dann, who flipped through and circled “three of the cheapest Bible schools,” Dann recalls. “I had no money, and Moody came up as tuition-free. In talking with Cru staff, they all said Moody was the ‘West Point’ of Christian schools and was a great place to study.”

Hitchhiking to Moody

With just enough money in his pocket to pay for the first semester, Dann hitchhiked to Moody from his home in South Dakota in the bitter cold of January 1972. “A truck driver picked me up and dropped me off in the stockyards of south Chicago,” he says. “My possessions consisted of one suitcase and a box. At that point, I had been a Christian for 12 months and two weeks.”  

Dann majored in evangelism, graduating from Moody in 1974. Five years later he met his wife, Char (Blair ’75), and the two were married in 1979. Dann later received his Master of Religious Education and Doctor of Divinity degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He served in church pastoral roles for a dozen years—10 years as a youth pastor and two years as an interim pastor for a church plant.

It was during his Moody years that Dann felt God drawing him to work with teens. “Stan Gundry (then a Moody theology professor) had a major impact on my life when he said in a Gospel of John class that some of Christ’s initial disciples could have been teenagers when Jesus called them. That’s probably true of John, as he could have been 16 or 17 years old.”

Teaching the real Jesus

That memory was still fixed in Dann’s mind when he began his first full-time job at Chicago’s Judson Baptist Church. “As a new youth pastor my first thought was, What did Jesus do with His youth group?” Wanting to focus on the Son’s life, Dann named the group “Sonlife.”

“My life has primarily been about teaching what I like to call the ‘real Jesus’ who walked on this earth,” Dann says. “When you study that real Jesus—who was fully God and also fully man—you soon realize that His life was primarily about the making of disciples who could make disciples . . . developing disciples who could multiply their lives into others.” 

In 1978, after watching three of his best friends—also youth pastors—leave the ministry, Dann developed a deep burden to teach other leaders what he was learning from immersing himself in the Son’s life. But he had no idea how to begin. It was during that struggle that Dann experienced the first of numerous miracles in his life.

A ‘burning bush’ revelation

“After a couple of months of some very difficult times, God gave me a ‘burning bush’ type of experience late one night in a time of prayer,” Dann says. “I wrote down what I felt the Lord had clearly revealed—to start a ministry to train other youth leaders in the life of Christ and create a movement of disciple-making ministries.  

“The way I visualized what God had shown me that night was this: 10,000 youth groups with disciple-making ministries over 10 years. I told no one about that experience, but I prayed it back to the Lord for the next few months.”  

Then Dann got his first opportunity to teach “the Son’s life” at Moody’s Pastors Conference. Soon another door opened at Moody for Dann. “When Dr. George Sweeting heard of the vision God had laid on my heart, he asked me if I wanted to become a part of the Church Ministries department, and I came on staff from 1980 to 1990 as the full-time director of Sonlife Ministries at Moody.”  

See you at the party—and beyond!

Sonlife continued to grow. With Moody’s blessing, in 1990 Sonlife launched out on its own. “In 1992 we had over 10,000 youth groups participating in a one-night evangelistic event called ‘See You at the Party,’ hosted with Josh McDowell,” Dann recalls. “We had over 1.5 million young people involved in over 54,000 simultaneous pizza parties with over 500,000 non-Christian friends!”

Barna Research (now known as the Barna Group) estimated more than 83,000 young people led one of their friends to Christ during the event. “God did it all, as it was His heart from the very beginning,” Dann says. “And for some reason, I got to be a part of His miraculous plan.”

Robert Rivera, a supervisor in Moody’s Practical Christian Ministries department, says Sonlife had a profound impact on his direction in life. During high school he attended a conference at Moody called SEMP (Sonlife Missions and Evangelism Project), which stirred a desire “to understand God’s Word in a way that impacted my relationships and informed my decisions in life,” he says. “Like scales peeling off my eyes, I saw God’s calling for my life and it included Moody Bible Institute,” he says.

After graduating from Moody, Robert served for 11 years in youth ministry and still has a passion for youth. he says, “I often look back at those SEMP conferences as turning points in my faith and in my life.”

Sonlife soon began to expand to different parts of the globe. “In 1998, God clearly gave me the vision of being in 100 countries by 2020. We were in about four at that time, and this also was truly of the Lord,” Dann says.

Seeing the need for a global alliance of ministries, Concentric Global (previously called Global Youth Initiative) began, and Dann became its new leader in 2005. “To now see movements of multiplication in 130-plus countries is truly a miracle from God!” Dann says.

Over the years, Dann has led more than 50 trips to Israel designed to instruct young leaders in both the life of Christ and in the ways Jesus developed His disciples. He has written over 20 leadership training manuals and studies, including the “Like Jesus” series, which is comprised of Walk Like Jesus, Live Like Jesus, and 4 Chair Discipling (all Moody Publishers).

Still mentoring to multiply

Now semi-retired—as Dann says, “whatever that means!”—he has the same three priorities as before: training in the life of Christ, coaching leaders, and mentoring them to multiply into others.

“These three priorities seem to constantly fill my days,” he says. “I’m no longer leading an organization, but I use my time more in investing in key young leaders. I call them ‘emerging country leaders.’

“I probably do two or three Zoom calls every week plus travel globally to speak at leadership events. Both Concentric Global and Sonlife use the materials on the life of Christ that I have written, so I do quite a bit of teaching about Jesus at various events.” 

When Dann looks back on his years at Moody, he’s grateful for the institute’s influence on him and for what he considers to be the most precious gift he ever received. “The greatest impact Moody has had on my life was the grounding in the Word of God, especially as a new believer,” he says. “Moody developed in me a deep love for God’s Word and an ability to study it carefully.

“Through Moody, God brought to me my precious wife, Char—a missionary ‘off the boat’ from Africa, as she likes to say. Char has truly been God’s greatest gift to me and a huge asset in so many ways.  All three of our girls are in ministry and deeply love the Lord, mainly due to my wife’s godly investment in them.”

Dann and Char’s youngest daughter, Christy Spader ’12, graduated from Moody and now teaches part time as an adjunct professor. Their oldest daughter, Julie (Spader) Goodman MA ’08, earned her Master of Arts in Spiritual Formation and Discipleship at Moody.

Moody Alumnus of the Year

Dann is both humbled and thrilled to be named Moody’s 2024 Alumnus of the Year. “It’s probably the greatest honor I think I could ever receive,” he says, “because of my deep respect and love of Moody. 

“When I first heard the news, my initial thought was John 3:21. Early in His ministry, Jesus set this priority for His disciples: ‘Whoever lives by the truth comes into the light; so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.’

“I believe Jesus was requoting Isaiah 26:12 that says, ‘All that we have accomplished, God has done for us.’ This honor truly comes because, for reasons I don’t fully understand, God has chosen to do the miraculous in my life. He gets all the glory!

“We always had the saying in Sonlife and then Sonlife Ministries that we wanted our lives and ministries to be so supernatural that when people look at us they will say without a doubt, ‘God has done that!’ He then gets all the glory! That is my prayer in this honor as Alumnus of the Year.”