By Dr. Joseph Umidi
What an honor for Dr. Howard Foltz’s office and mine to have been connected over the years. It was more than a physical connection. It was my opportunity to see how uniquely Howard connected people, churches, agencies, academies, networks, nations, and Kingdom movements around the core biblical mandate of evangelism and unreached people church planting.
Howard was a one of kind strategist who connected the mandate of Regent University to train “Christian Leaders to Change the World”, with the mandate of the Christian Broadcasting Network to “prepare the nations of the world for the coming of Jesus Christ and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth”. He did that in so many ways that I got to see as his office neighbor on a daily basis.
1. Howard brought God’s heart, passion, and Holy Spirit fire for the lost into the academy and kept his colleagues and his students from the ever-present dangers of ivory tower intellectualism. He only had a small opportunity in his limited required mission courses to influence students and staff, but he seized every moment to produce workers and leaders for the Great Commission. In my 37 years at Regent, I have never seen students achieve a sustainable shift in transformed thinking and focus in such a short amount of time simply by taking one of his courses.
2. Howard was a master innovator who connected the best of mission mobilizer conference speakers and training with the standard ways students would be trained primarily through reading books and writing papers. The results were electric. The School of Divinity became an “activation culture” that launched students into research projects that awakened the church to recover its New Testament mandate to reach the nations. I personally know hundreds of students whose callings were laser clarified by experiencing God on Howard’s mission trips, and then never looking back from the epiphanies they experienced by mobilizing workers and churches to the end time harvest. His legacy will endure for generations.
3. Howard was a well-spring of creative ways to understand the times and know what the people of God were to do. He produced scores of proposals, written I assume on his weekly weekend flights to speak and train. Some of these ideas were ahead of time for slumbering accreditation agencies that lived in the past. All of them contained unique ways to work synergistically across our campus, across the street with CBN, and across the church landscape in the U.S and beyond. Every time he shared one with me ahead of time, I witnessed the gift of Howard Foltz to consistently keep the main thing the main thing. He never ceased to connect the redemptive dots in God’s heart and Word with all of us.
Thank you, Dr. Pat Robertson, for allowing Howard to give so much to so many in such a short time. We could hardly share our appreciation for the price you both paid for Howard to finish his course so well. Howard is truly one of my personal heroes and, in my career at Regent University, one of the clearest Hall of Faith examples of a faculty on fire for the glory of God.
Dr. Joseph Umidi serves as Executive Vice President for Student Life and former Interim Dean of the School of Divinity at Regent University. He presently serves as president of Mission South America giving direction to a network of 120 churches in Colombia and other South American nations. He is founder and president of Lifeforming Leadership Coaching, Inc., a Christian coach training ministry in 29 countries and 14 languages advanced by several Regent alumni.