Tackett the teacher

“The Truth Project” goes well beyond mere rhetoric | Joel Belz

Del Tackett likes to tease his audience with the question: Is he mostly a public speaker—or is he at heart a teacher? Tackett pretends to leave his listeners with the issue, challenging them sometimes to vote one way or the other. An orator, he says, asks rhetorical questions. A teacher wants real interaction.

Del Tackett certainly understands rhetoric. But if anything in life frustrates him, it's watching something that's important and true get diluted by mere rhetoric. That's why he insisted, over the last four years as he developed "The Truth Project" for Focus on the Family, that the venture not be allowed to become a package that would be marketed, consumed, and then stashed away on a shelf. He insisted instead on burrowing into the consciousness of participants in a life-changing manner.