Zane Black didn’t grow up going to church, reading the Bible, or talking about Jesus with his peers. In fact, he said he had patterns of destructive behavior and would sell drugs to pay for his bad habits.
“A dude I literally partied with told me my life was out of control,” he told ChurchLeaders. “When you get one stoner telling another stoner that their life is out of control, you know you’re in a dangerous place.”
“I couldn’t break the chain and the bondage of addiction,” he said. “I got kicked out of my house and was living with a friend’s family.”
Black shared that this family took him in even though he had been selling drugs to their kids. Black even said that the “youngest son [was] selling drugs for me. He got kicked out of school for having a gun.” But this family, Black said, “invited me into their home, and they invited me to their church, and it was there that I heard about Jesus for the first time and having a personal relationship with Jesus.”
God rescued Black at that church. Black said that he began reading his Bible and attended Torchbearers Bible School in Colorado. Black’s radical life change prompted him to sell his car, which he had bought with drug money, to pay for tuition at the school.
“Now, fast forward, 20-something years later, we are now starting a Torchbearers program in Santa Cruz, California,” said Black.
For two decades, Black has worked at a Torchbearers center, has served as a student pastor, and he has been given the opportunity to tell his story across the globe.
Two years ago, Black and his wife of 16 years had the opportunity to start another Torchbearers ministry. “Our whole marriage, we prayed about wanting to start a Torchbearers experience. She had gone to the one in Austria, and God had used that to change her life,” Black said.
The idea of a Torchbearers program is for a student to take a gap year between high school and college. “Something that birthed to me,” Black said, “was like, not every person has opportunity to take a gap year—plus nine months is costly sometimes.”
“And so we began to dream about what would it look like to take what I like to call a ‘gap summer,’” he added, which would be the “summer between your senior year in high school and your freshman year in college or before you start your career.”
