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Selling Apologetics to Your Pastor

Selling Apologetics to Your Pastor

Time : 00:04:21

The Bethinking National Apologetics Day Conference: "Countering the New Atheism" took place during the UK Reasonable Faith Tour in October 2011. Christian academics William Lane Craig, John Lennox, Peter J Williams and Gary Habermas lead 600 people in training on how to defend and proclaim the credibility of Christianity against the growing tide of secularism and New Atheist popular thought in western society. In this clip, Dr Craig answers a question about how apologetics can be introduced to a church.


QUESTION: Hi there. I just wanted to find out, what is the best way of letting churches and church leadership know that apologetics, rather than introducing doubt to new believers, is something that can produce a confidence?

DR. CRAIG: This is a very good question. Let me say what I think is the wrong approach. The wrong approach is to go to your pastor and demand that he begin to offer apologetics and get involved, and so forth. Your pastor is so busy and so harried that the last thing in the world he needs is another responsibility to take on. He won’t do it. Instead what you do is you volunteer as a layman to say, “Pastor, I’d like to teach a Sunday school class or an evening Bible study,” or something of that sort, in dealing with answering tough objections to Christianity. Or, “I would like to do a book study and take people through On Guard, would you give me your sanction to do that?” And I will tell you, your pastor will fall down and call you blessed because he wants volunteers, he wants laypeople to take the leadership, and take some of the burden off his shoulders. And that’s what I’ve done in our home church where Jan and I attend. I just began teaching this class called Defenders on apologetics and over the years it has just grown and grown and we have now a very large class meeting in our church where people come to hear the Christian doctrine and apologetics taught. And what is fun is that people will even come from other churches, from the Catholic church, the Methodist church. They will go to services there to worship then they will come over to our church to go to this Sunday Bible class in Defenders and hear doctrine and apologetics because there is nobody at their churches that are teaching these kinds of things. So I would encourage you as a layperson to take the lead on these issues and network with other interested persons and begin to do this kind of thing yourself. And I think that’s the best way to introduce this into the local church context.

QUESTION: I suppose that the concern is making sure that some churches see the importance of it rather than as something that could lead people down the wrong path or cause people to start worrying or doubting based on the difficult objections they come into or the difficult concepts they encounter.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah, I think what you might do is talk to the pastor when you go in and share with him some of the stats that, I think, Gary Habermas mentioned, about the number of Christian students who lose their faith when they go off to university and become unbelievers. And the statistics about how the church is being devastated by the loss of its youth, and that apologetics can be one of the means of sustaining faith in our teenage and twenty-something age group. And maybe, if you think he won’t be convinced, bring one such person with you. Bring somebody along who, say, had lost his faith and has now come back to Christ through the study of apologetics.

Oh, I just thought of another way you could do this. Say you don’t feel qualified to teach such a class. On our website at ReasonableFaith.org these Defenders classes that I described – they are all podcasts. So you can just download these and listen to them together, and then have a class discussion afterward. You don’t even need to teach the class. I’ll teach it for you, and then you have a discussion. People are already doing this. We get emails from people in Germany and other places around the world; they say, “We love listening to the Defenders class, and we even have our own class where we just listen to this material.” They say, “We feel like we are part of the class. We feel like we know Cindy, and Steve, and Hobert, and these other people who ask questions” because the class discussion is all included. So avail yourself of these resources; that’s what they are there for.