The Seven Mountains
Where Your One Life Was Made to Count
Sometime this week, with no vote taken and no headline written, the world your children and grandchildren will inherit moved a few inches—nudged not from a pulpit but from a school-board meeting, a newsroom, a screenplay, or a dinner table that happened or didn’t. That is where culture is built. For nearly two generations, the people of God quietly walked off the field and handed those places to whoever wanted them. Look around at what we got in exchange for our absence.
I don’t write that to scold. I write it because the door is still open and you are almost certainly standing on one of those hills already—closer to the summit than you think. There are seven of them. Learn where they are, and you will never wonder again whether your one ordinary life could matter.
The picture goes back to 1975, when Loren Cunningham of Youth With A Mission scribbled on a yellow pad the handful of arenas that shape the soul of a nation. When he compared notes with Bill Bright of Campus Crusade, the two lists were nearly identical. Francis Schaeffer had been pressing the same conviction from another direction. Seven spheres. Whoever climbs them sets the course of a generation. The image is older still. Isaiah saw the mountain of the Lord’s house lifted “in the top of the mountains,” with the nations streaming toward it. A mountain, in that language, is simply a high place of influence. The only question that matters is who is standing on the heights.
One caution before the climb. This teaching can be preached as conquest—seize the culture, take it over, build the kingdom by strategy and muscle. That version curdles fast into striving and politics wearing revival’s clothes. Jesus said something gentler and far more durable. Before leaving on a long journey, a nobleman handed his servants their resources and said only, “Occupy till I come.” Not conquer. Steward faithfully what He put in your hands, right where He placed you, until He returns to settle the account Himself. So we climb without frenzy—fully engaged and fully at rest, because the outcome never rested on us.
Seven Mountains, and What to Do About Each
1. Religion. This is the mountain we assume we already own—yet owning a pew is not the same as occupying the mountain. Sitting still through one more service was never the assignment. Start the small group nobody volunteered to lead. Open your living room on a Tuesday and disciple one younger believer by name. If the church near you has gone cold or there is no fellowship within reach, don’t climb alone. Find your people at myfamilyworldwide.org, a family of believers spanning more than a hundred nations, built for exactly that.
2. Family. This is the first mountain God ever raised and the one no one can climb in your place. It is also where most of us are quietly losing ground—not to some enemy at the gate but to our own calendars. So take it back the plainest way there is: be there. Actually there. Choose dinner over the deadline and the child’s game over the extra round. Let your family feel they outrank your work and play, because to God they do. Then look wider. If He has given you a spare room and a willing heart, foster or adopt a child who has no one climbing for them. There is no more direct way to seize this mountain than to bring one more son or daughter under a roof where Jesus is named.
God setteth the solitary in families… Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction. — Psalm 68:6; James 1:27
3. Education. Whoever teaches your children hands them a worldview long before you weigh in. So don’t surrender the classroom by default. Volunteer in it. Offer to teach a co-op class, a trade, an after-school club, or a Sunday lesson. You do not need a credential to shape a child; you need to show up when almost no one else will. Whatever you know how to do, there is a young person three streets away who needs someone to teach it to them.
4. Government. This mountain is not as far off as it looks. It begins on your own street, in the meeting where three people quietly decide what your town becomes. Go to that meeting. Then go further. Run for the school board, run for city council, or take the unglamorous seat nobody else wants. Esther was reminded that she had come to the kingdom “for such a time as this,” and so have you, in the small kingdom of your zip code.
5. Media. For most of history, this was the tallest and most tightly guarded mountain of all. In our lifetime the gates simply fell open. You no longer need anyone’s permission. Write the article and submit it. Volunteer at the local station. Or start where you sit. Launch a program, open a page on Substack, or begin the channel you’ve been putting off. You are a media voice by this afternoon. The gatekeepers are gone. The only question left is whether anyone carrying truth will walk through the open gate before the noise fills it.
6. Arts and Entertainment. You may never run a studio, but you already govern one screen—the one glowing in your own home. That is where you reclaim this mountain first. Stop the flood before you fight the culture. Put real blocks on sites that are dangerous or illicit. Cut the feed that coarsens your household a little more each night. Stop paying to pipe into your living room the very thing you pray against. Guard that gate, and you have already taken ground.
Whatsoever things are true… honest… just… pure… lovely… of good report… think on these things. — Philippians 4:8
7. Business. You spend most of your waking hours here, which makes the marketplace holy ground you may never have recognized as such. If God has put it in you, build something. Start the business, hire people, prove that enterprise and integrity can share a roof. But you don’t need to own the company to take this mountain. Be the missionary of your own break room. Bake the cookies. Offer to cover the shift no one wants. Do the small, generous, slightly baffling thing that makes a coworker ask why you’re different. When they ask, tell them.
Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. — Matthew 5:16
What It Gives Back to You
Here is the part we’re often too polite to say out loud: this costs you something. So what do you actually get for it? More than you’d guess.
You get a life with weight. A faith that only shows up on Sunday leaves six of the seven mountains untouched. That means it leaves most of your one life untouched too. Climb even one of these, and the low ache that whispers your years don’t really count for much begins to lift. You finally see that you were set on this hill on purpose, for such a time as this.
You also get something Scripture ties directly to your own welfare. When God’s people were exiled into a pagan culture, He did not tell them to hunker down and wait it out. He told them to build, to plant, to bless the city. He attached a promise to it.
Seek the peace of the city… and pray unto the LORD for it: for in the peace thereof shall ye have peace. — Jeremiah 29:7
Read that again slowly. Your peace is bound up in the peace of the place you’re tempted to abandon. You are not a bystander to this culture. You have skin in it. Heal the mountain, and you are healed along with it.
There is a reward that goes beyond this life which no one can claim or seize. One day you will stand before Christ and He will not open the book in order to tally up how many services you went to; instead He will ask you what you did with the mountains upon which you stood. To the faithful He utters one sentence, and it is the very sentence every human heart was made to hear.
Well done, thou good and faithful servant… enter thou into the joy of thy lord. — Matthew 25:21
Paul assures the laborer that none of his efforts is in vain—the work you do for the Lord will never be wasted. Each cookie, each meeting with the school board, each video uploaded, each website blocked, and each child adopted is a fingerprint pressed into eternity and will still be there long after the mountain itself has disappeared.
Pick the Nearest One and Take a Step
So which mountain is yours? You’re already on it—probably more than one. Don’t wait for the summit. Take the step nearest your feet this week. One small group. One classroom. One meeting. One uploaded message. One site blocked in your home. One child. One plate of cookies carried to a desk down the hall. That is how heaven has always reached the earth: not in a takeover but one faithful servant, on one ordinary mountain, occupying until He comes. If you have no one to climb beside you, don’t go it alone. Find your family at myfamilyworldwide.org.
Randy Kay is the founder of Randy Kay Ministries; host of Heaven Encounters with Randy Kay; and author of Heaven Encounters: 140 Near-Death Experiences Revealing the Afterlife (Charisma House). He is the founder of My Family Worldwide, a global fellowship spanning more than 100 nations. Randy has trained thousands and led human development for some of the world’s most successful companies. He offers three online courses at courses.randykay.org: Designed to Thrive, Encountering God, and The Healer.