InterVarsity alumni – A Work in Progress
Larry Amon made many lasting friendships after he was led to Christ by a dorm mate at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in 1992, and joined the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship on campus.
A few years later, Larry was concerned about the lack of good entertainment options available to Christian adults and decided to start a radio program. He was a fan of the children’s program Adventures in Odyssey, because of the way it combined solid biblical values with appealing story lines. He thought that starting a radio program was something that a small team of people could accomplish.
He set the program in a fictional town called Progress, and the program’s name became A Work in Progress. As the program’s website explains, “Progress is the home of Progress College, a four year liberal arts university [and] the town’s main source of income and recognition. An odd thing about this town is that many people here, mostly college students, love ice cream. So there’s an ice cream shop on almost every corner.”
The stories revolve around James Everett, a former student just back from eight years as a missionary in Russia, his friends, his pastor, and other students at Progress College. It sounds suspiciously like an InterVarsity version of Adventures in Odyssey.
“Progress is very much modeled on my college life with InterVarsity,” Larry agrees. “It seems like half of the team producing Progress are InterVarsity alumni. One of the people on the team, Jill Earl, worked with Twentyonehundred Productions for awhile.”
While some InterVarsity alumni might be thinking that a radio program about a fictional town could certainly find more exciting subject matter for a dramatic series than a college fellowship, Larry disagrees.
“All of the top films, top books, and top songs are about relationships,” he maintains. “College is the time when a lot of people explore who they are, their place in the world and their relationships. A Christian college fellowship can really be a place of high drama, for better or worse, in reality or in a show.”
A Work in Progress is heard on a few radio stations scattered across the country, and over the internet. It operates under the auspices of a non-profit ministry, Christian Walk Alive. While the program hasn’t yet matched the distribution of Adventures in Odyssy, Larry believes it has found an audience. At the very least it’s a way to share his life-changing InterVarsity experience with others.
The memories of those InterVarsity meetings and retreats are still fresh to him. “I’ll never forget the giant banana split we made every fall,” he recalls. “It’s pretty safe to say that if I had never been involved with InterVarsity, my life would be very different.”