Have you ever heard of a game called chicken? You know, the dangerous—and really dumb—activity where two or more contestants face down an oncoming vehicle, with the winner being the one who bails out last?
Two guys in Gresham, Ore., are playing chicken with the flow of today’s society. Only their game is a little different. The traffic of conformity, whizzing toward them at breakneck speed, doesn’t even make them flinch. In fact, they are plowing into the incoming surge with dogged resolve and leading others into the fray.
Meet 18-year-old twins Alex and Brett Harris. They have a Web site, a blog, a speaking tour, an upcoming book and some crazy idea called “The Modesty Survey.” They are perfect examples of Breakaway’s “Year of the World-Changer,” a 12-month celebration of what we like to refer to as “real-world revolutionaries.”
Check that. In Alex and Brett’s case, it’s real-world Rebelutionaries.
A Family Movement
Revo … er, Rebelution (more on this term later) is nothing new for the Harrises. It seems to run in the family.
The twins’ father, Gregg, grew up in Dayton, Ohio, in the 1960s as “the only long-haired poet in a redneck town.” He ran away from home at age 15 and hitchhiked his way to Laguna Beach in Southern California. For four years he lived on the street as a troubadour, a bellbottom-wearing, ballad-strumming hippie with a guitar in his hands and sand between his toes.
After getting saved at 19, he returned home, got married and soon became one of the country’s premier advocates of home schooling, a radical educational idea in the 1980s. He toured the country for a decade and presented workshops to more than 100,000 people. Currently, he pastors the Household of Faith Community Church in Gresham.
Joshua Harris, now 32 and the oldest of Gregg and Sono’s seven children, penned four best-selling books (including I Kissed Dating Goodbye) before age 30 and, at 29, assumed his current role as senior pastor of thriving Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Md. Gregg’s second son, Joel, 24, is the director of an 85-student worship academy in Oregon that specializes in training worship teams for local churches.
Needless to say, Alex and Brett have plenty of spiritual paradigms.
“I don’t know if it’s even possible to quantify the kind of impact our parents have had on us,” says Brett, who, like Alex, accepted Christ at a young age. “They’ve taught us to pursue the Lord with our whole hearts, to work hard, to aspire to leadership and to serve humbly.”
To describe the twins, it’s best to break out a thesaurus. Bland niceties won’t do. They are godly young men who are intentional, creative, articulate and passionate about living out their faith. And they succeed at virtually everything they try. Good musicians? Check. Proficient with computers and Web design? Check. Politics, gardening, sports? Check, check, check. A few years ago, they won multiple national championships in speech and debate through the National Christian Forensics and Communications Association.
They seem to feed off each other.
“We still do everything together, and we plan to keep working together for the rest of our lives,” Brett said. “The way we see it, God made us twins for a reason.”
Go Against the Flow
In the spiritual warfare of today’s often-aimless teenage culture, the twins are a double-barreled shotgun. They are blasting away at (to borrow one of their phrases) “the myth of adolescence,” which says the teenage years are nothing but a long pleasure cruise. The twins’ alternative is a three-word mantra.
“Do hard things,” Alex says. “We live in a world that says, ‘You’re young—have fun!’ It tells teens to ‘Obey your thirst,’ ‘Have it your way’ and ‘Just do it.’ Or it tells us, ‘Hey, you’re great! You don’t need to exert yourself.’ But those kinds of mindsets sabotage Christlike character and competence.”
To fight against this attitude, the twins formed “The Rebelution” in August 2005 by merging their two separate blogs into one focused vehicle for change, www.therebelution.com. It has been wildly successful, winning consecutive “Best Teen Blog” honors in the 2005 and ’06 Homeschool Blog Awards and attracting more than 10 million hits. They are at the forefront of a large community of teenage guys and girls who want to, as their Web site puts it, “rebel against the low expectations of an ungodly culture.”
But The Rebelution is much more than a catchy Internet URL.
“It’s a name for what God is doing in our generation,” Brett says. “We’re just blessed to play the part that we’ve been given to play.”
Aside from about 800 posts by the twins, their Web site also features “The Modesty Survey,” a rebelutionary (there’s that word again) discussion on modesty in dress and fashion. Last January, hundreds of Christian girls developed a 148-question survey “that covered everything from glitter lotion … to swimsuits,” according to Brett, and more than 1,600 Christian guys responded with 150,000-plus answers over a 20-day period. The twins painstakingly compiled the results and presented them on their site as a gift to their sisters in Christ on Valentine’s Day.
Pretty heady stuff.
“I think what impresses me most is that they’re really thinking deeply and clearly about the teenage years and being able to strike this balance of relating to their peers but also challenging their peers in a way that isn’t condescending but inspirational,” their brother Joshua says. “And they’re coming up with a message that I think is so needed and so biblical, in terms of using your youth to put your shoulder to the plow.”
Alex and Brett’s blog also led to an internship with Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker in the fall of 2005 (at age 16!) and temporary jobs as grassroots campaign directors for four Alabama Supreme Court candidates from March to June 2006 (at 17!). What’s more, the twins are in the middle of their second Rebelution Tour, a five-city swing through the U.S. and Japan from June to November. On tour, Alex, Brett and their father exhort teens with the godly uprising themes of The Rebelution.
Is that all? Not hardly. They are also working on their first book, Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations, which already has a publisher.
Their father couldn’t be prouder.
“I want them to be instruments in God’s hands that can roll back the darkness, reform the church and bring glory to God,” Gregg says. “The Rebelution is all the things I’ve hoped for. I’m very pleased.”
A Future Worth Fighting For
College is right around the corner for Alex and Brett. And in about 13 months, so is the end of their teenage years. But don’t expect The Rebelution to fade away.
They are planning to expand their movement, the Web site and future conference tours—all while taking a year off from school to write their book.
“The Rebelution doesn’t just stop when you reach 20,” Alex says. “We know we’ll continue to ‘do hard things’ for the glory of God for the rest of our lives and call our own generation and new generations to join us in that. And we know we’ll be doing it together.” 
