Appendix 2: On Fostering Question-Asking and Answer-Seeking Environments
Appendix 2
ON FOSTERING QUESTION-ASKING AND ANSWER-SEEKING ENVIRONMENTS
Question-asking and answer-seeking has more to do with a way of life than a program, group, role, or title. We work it out by attending to the needs and opportunities through our friendships and acquaintances with others. Our associational life is often varied and rich with possibilities for dialogue with believers and nonbelievers alike. The purpose of this appendix is to help encourage a little further reflection about some of the possibilities and significance of fostering question-answering environments in our family, church, places of work, and “third places.”1
APOLOGETICS AND THE FAMILY
What might it mean to foster intentional places for asking/answering questions through our family life? How might care and formation through a home shape the environment for studying and doing apologetics? Initially, an answer to this question may involve an issue of time, which often reflects values and priorities, in light of one’s season of life and age-specific children needs. How might parents gain a perspective for fostering question-asking and answering possibilities through our family?
1. Recognize the significance of how the family acts as a “forming center.”2
As parents, you are part of a forming center, especially for your children and their development. All families are broken at some level. The goal is not to raise perfect children or to parent perfectly. But a goal should be to foster a climate of trust, safe-keeping, and belonging for the sake of intentionally helping children attend to the process of their own development and progress in growth. Parents have a unique calling to nurture children in what is good; children need regular “soul nourishers,” as Timothy Jones has written, which often come in the form of encouragement, being present, and guiding and teaching their hungry souls to feed on what is life-giving.3 Family as a forming center is a fertile context for fostering question-seeking and answering practices.
But family life can often be hectic and dictated by the tyranny of the moment and the needs and demands therein. If so, some of the most consequential lead-questions to consider when thinking about family as forming center may involve periodically asking, “How can our family routines be arranged in such a way so as to be more conducive to fostering intentional formation?” Answering that may inevitably involve thinking about how our own busyness or other people’s demands on us are prohibitive to family as forming center. Formation requires intentionality about stewardship of time and resources. It also involves communication and care. It does not just happen on its own. Perhaps consider what a typical week looks like, and consider if and how there are occasions in a day to connect and communicate as a whole family, whether to play together, eat together, work together, or simply share some experience of each other’s mutual presence in a tangible way.
2. Parent with attentiveness for “teachable moments.”
Parents are to look for teachable moments since “all of life packs lessons about the divine,” says philosopher James Spiegel in his instructive book Gum, Geckos, and God. “Every domain of human experience can serve as the laboratory of faith.”4 If so, there is nothing quite like in-the-moment or on-the-go instruction, and not merely when behavior or beliefs needs to be corrected. Attending to children in their moments of inquisitiveness, yearning for answers and questions, or just simply helping them to identify their various emotional states, are powerful occasions for letting them experience the personal presence of their parent. Some opportunities for teachable moments can include the following:
• When a child hears about and tries to process suffering, pain, or evil in our world.
• When a child does not get what he or she wants, it can be an occasion to help a child begin to understand the profound effect of desire on our lives, how it can be life-shaping, and how we can be OK even if we don’t always get what we want, etc.
• Experiences at a local church can prompt questions or at least curiosities. Maybe children observe our practices and wonder why we do what we do.
• When kids play together, there is much opportunity to help them appreciate and understand the value of cooperation, friendship, imagination, and a whole range of communication issues. Helping them identify their thoughts and emotions/feelings, for example, about others can be a rewarding opportunity for them to experience some of their own self-knowledge.
• Whenever there are encounters with a story, whether via a book, movie, or game, it is almost always the case that there is something meaningful to talk about regarding character development, decision-making, virtues/vices, cause and effect, etc.
3. Find ways to reason with or alongside a child.
Sometimes the experience of reasoning in the midst of others can often feel condescending or controlling. But it need not be that way. In age-appropriate ways, you can reason alongside a child so that you can actually enable your son or daughter to feel respected as a contributor to the process of thinking about some issue. There is something dignifying to a child for them to experience an adult reasoning with them. For example, with our five-year-old son and three-year-old daughter, my wife and I will sometimes do the following:
• If they want something nonessential, and especially demand something (e.g., to go buy a new toy now!), we will sometimes ask them for their best reasons for wanting it. We don’t expect much of an answer to their “because,” but we are trying to help them pause, and subject the desire/want to a consideration of why they may want it. In most cases, their reasons are inadequate, which often leads to a discussion about why that is the case.
• My son is at the stage where he loves recalling a story he heard or a movie he watched. By simply asking him basic who, what, where, why, and how questions along the way, we can prod him along to further reflect about something he already knows or doesn’t know or enables him to want to know.
• Learning to “reason alongside” a child earlier in their development can help foster trust, mutuality, openness, and intentional space to be involved in some of the thought processes of their own mind. The benefit to be gained can be reaped in their development.
4. Foster an environment that empowers study in the home.
In one sense, it may be easy to immediately imagine home schooling as the ideal for fostering an environment that empowers the discipline of study at home. But one does not have to be involved in home schooling in order to do this. The goal is to help foster habits within our children that enable them to regularly practice being attentive to how God is at work in their life and in the lives of others—in their knowing, loving, doing, serving, etc. (You may want to review what I say about study in my introduction.) This is not merely a cultivation of religious knowledge per se, but it is at the very least a cultivation of a kind of spiritual and moral knowing, which can permeate other areas of knowledge, including literature, science, psychology, economics, politics, history, etc.
• Reading worthwhile books can be an important way to connect us with the thoughts and experiences of others, whether they are fiction or nonfiction works. But so-called “book learning” is only one among many means for facilitating study.
• Other means for studying include having good conversations with others, self-knowledge through circumspection about one’s life, and apprenticing ourselves to trustworthy examples of the kind of person we want to become.
• Teaching our children to pray, to openly, dependently, and responsively learn to attune their heart and mind to our Father through His Son and by the Spirit, can be one of the most consequential ways we can help them study. Even more, we can help them integrate the practice of prayer in both contexts of solitude and silence and in the midst of their work in the world. Study and prayer are integral; our soul is meant to run on prayer, just as our body needs to breathe in and breathe out.
5. Look for ways to include other moral-spiritual exemplars for your children’s lives.
Even as early as their middle school years, explore ways for there to be other moral-spiritual exemplars regularly inputting in your children’s lives. They can benefit by knowing how life is done by seeing it at work in others beyond what they see from their parents. Maybe for middle school years, it is a trustworthy teenager through your local church who would enjoy hanging out with your kids. For junior high or high school children, maybe a college or graduate student can help bless them. There are real needs and opportunities here for how junior high, high school, and college-aged kids are pastored to serve others younger than them.
6. Aim to find ways to integrate intellectual formation with character formation.
J. P. Moreland talks about helping people form an “apologetic character,” or we might describe this as a winsome character that is confident and hospitable in sharing understanding about why, how, and what is believed. J. P. says an apologetic character involves “those habits of excellence that constitute what it means for a believer to flourish as a convinced disciple, an attractive, skilled defender of the faith, and a persuasive ambassador for Christ.”5 For example, development in this area would involve helping children notice, identify, and grow in how truth-seeking is related to honesty, how humility is related to open-mindedness and non-defensiveness, and how ardor is associated with vigilance and fortitude. Such training and planning for intellectual and character development requires far more than reading a book, taking a class, or attending a conference. It is a commitment to fostering a way of life that is aimed at becoming a particular kind of person.
7. Expose older students to solid training about some of life’s deepest questions.
If you have junior high or high school students, consider the following opportunities and material:
• Sean McDowell’s GodQuest DVD curriculum (www.seanmcdowell.org)
• Apologetics Study Bible for Students, edited by Sean McDowell
• Focus on the Family’s TrueU Curriculum (www.trueU.org)
• RZIM’s Interactive Youth Apologetics (www.rzimask.org)
• On Guard DVD Series Companion (www.bit.ly/OnGuardDVD)
• Summit Ministries (www.summit.org)
• Impact 360 (www.impact360.net)
• Stand to Reason’s Brett Kunkle (www.str.org)
• Mark Matlock’s Wisdom Works Ministries (www.wisdomworks.com)
• Jonathan Morrow’s Think Christianly (www.thinkchristianly.org)
• Salvo Magazine (www.salvomag.com)
• Ratio Christi (for Christian college apologetics training and networking) (www.ratiochristi.org)
8. Acquaint students with the rich work of Christian scholars and their popularizers.
Introduce your high school students, especially eleventh and twelfth graders, to the varied work of Christian scholars and their “translators” and popularizers who work on behalf of Christian thought and witness in the world. Credible networks of Christian scholars exist in all the main academic disciplines that one would find in a typical college or university setting.6 One of the most popular content resources to have developed in this area has been “Christian worldview studies.” Enjoy the following resources:
• Sean McDowell, ETHIX: Being Bold in a Whatever World (2006)
• Jonathan Morrow, Think Christianly (2011) and Welcome to College: A Christ-Follower’s Guide for the Journey (2008)
• David Horner, Mind Your Faith (2011)
• James Sire, The Universe Next Door, 5th edition (2009)
• Crossway Books’ series of short books on “Reclaiming the Christian Intellectual Tradition”
• The Veritas Forum (www.veritas.org)
• For a survey of other resources, see the list from Brian Auten’s Apologetics315.com blog.
APOLOGETICS AND THE CHURCH
What if a local church had the reputation of being the go-to place in a local community where it was known to be a confident yet non-defensive context to openly ask the tough-minded big questions about reality and learn how the Christian tradition has thought about both the answers and the very questions themselves? What if local pastors were known in a community for taking seriously the fact that they are in possession of a body of moral and spiritual knowledge that is not only good for the “house of faith” but for all people? Can you imagine?7
THE CHURCH’S PRIMARY PURPOSE: PREPARING FOR MINISTRY
Based on passages like Ephesians 4, the primary purpose of local church pastors/teachers is to equip others for service or ministry in Jesus’ name through their vocations in the world. A central feature of that equipping is helping to transmit and translate Christian understanding and wisdom of reality to members in order for them to minister to others and not merely passively support the professional pastor who allegedly does all the real work of ministry. But how can this equipping/training come about? One way to think about that has been to see apologetics as an essential contribution to the task of local church leadership equipping.8
“Apologetics in the local church” has continued to receive renewed attention in recent years whether through conferences, online discussions, or the simple yet consequential result of people trying to practice this endeavor and report on their successes and failures.9 In one sense, a good case could be made that training in apologetics properly belongs to the teaching ministry of the church. But a dominant image usually colors what teaching ministry in a local church looks like; the idea conveyed is usually one of “pulpit ministry” or teaching in some sort of Sunday school class. Of course, these areas of implementation are not bad, but they are only some among many ways to think about apologetics in a local church.
What are we attempting to produce by training people how to think about and engage the “big questions” about reality? Mere intellectual development and accomplishment? Students of contemporary, professional apologists? To me these seem inadequate as outcomes, if not short-lived. I suggest that a significant goal of training people in this area, and in general for works of ministry, is to help them develop into a particular kind of person and leader of others. With respect to the role of apologetics in such training, J. P. Moreland has written about the value of disciples of Jesus developing an “apologetic character”:
So understood, an apologetic character is not a set of answers a person memorizes and adds to a life otherwise defined without regard to the apologetic mandate. No, an apologetic character is a way of being present in the world, an approach to life, a part of the very structure of one’s embodied soul. Just as there is a difference between someone who can spit out answers from one’s home medical book and a skilled physician who sees the world as a doctor, so there is a difference between one who memorizes a set of answers to certain apologetic questions and one who has an apologetic character. An apologetic character is part of the very warp and woof of one’s journey, of one’s very life as a disciple. So understood, it will increasingly exemplify a set of virtues and exhibit mastery of a range of skills…. The development of an apologetic character cannot be reduced to mastery of a set of questions and answers, to a set of skills, or even to a list of virtues. While such a set or list is very helpful for focusing one’s training efforts, we must never forget that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Training believers to exemplify an apologetic character includes, but goes far beyond, any list of answers, skills, or virtues. It is an entire way of living. Thus, such training will always require role models who are themselves examples of an apologetic character. As a result, it is far more important for a Christian school to help its faculty to grow as apologists than it is to learn skills for teaching “apologetic techniques” to students.10
What would it mean to cultivate this character in a congregation, through our families and Christian schools? Surely, it would involve more than just the efforts of self-identified “apologists” alone, right? Pastors are poised to be, and must be, “stakeholders” of this cultivation. In view of J. P.’s concept, apologetics looks weird without pastoral care through the local church, and the local church without apologetics looks defenseless.
But how do we do apologetics training and work through a local church? That’s an important question to be considered for this appendix. A common way to answer that question has been to reply with just content suggestions or training resources to be studied in a local church context. The idea seems to be that if we can just convey the right material for the right people and drop that into the right local church context, then the material alone will work its magic. To be sure, utilizing quality content can be helpful, but it can also miss a bigger opportunity of thinking strategically and organizationally/institutionally about the “how” question:
First, while there are some exemplary training and learning resources that address quintessential apologetics issues, they are mostly designed for conveying information and are only rarely, if ever, capable of forming character in the sense above. Why? Well, it’s hard to do that kind of forming via a DVD, book, online course, etc. It takes more than consuming a product, even a good product!
Second, training in apologetics involves far more than mastering a body of knowledge, literature, and conversation. It involves cultivating a way of life and becoming a particular kind of person who is a credible, competent, and character-rich spokesperson for Jesus, attuned to understanding and answering people’s relevant and life-shaping questions.
Third, just dropping stellar apologetics-oriented content in the context of a local church is often a failure to think organizationally about how such content can be appropriated through extant and relevant structures, habits, practices, and leadership roles. In that respect, it can be a real failure of imagination.
THREE IMPORTANT DISTINCTIONS
I think there are three important distinctions to keep in mind when thinking about how to do apologetics in a local church. In some sense, these distinctions act like rudimentary building blocks toward thinking organizationally about apologetics in a local church.
First, there is the difference between a church congregationally “gathered” versus the church “scattered” throughout a neighborhood with members associated with different communities.
I am inclined to emphasize the latter, which includes the former. For the church is more than that which is gathered or congregated, just as pastoring involves more than merely performing church duties at the church. This is not to diminish the significance of what happens when a church is congregated. But how we imagine church surely shapes how we think about what it is like to do something at, in, or through a local church. The prepositions are theologically potent, whether we acknowledge it or not. Why does that matter? It can shape how we understand apologetics in a local church.
Second, there is the difference between “program” and “environment” for enacting the ministry of answering people’s questions in a local church.
If apologetics work is done in a church, it does not follow that it has to be made part of a program or given its own program stature in a congregation in order to be present and accessible to members. There’s nothing wrong with being programmatic per se.11 But sometimes congregants imagine that if something is not arranged programmatically in a church, it must mean that it is unimportant or somehow unreal. To be sure, items which have program status can feel like they are more important than not. But part of this has to do with how a congregation communicates about such things and how communication operates within a church’s overall ecology. For something can also be important and present in a congregation at the level of ethos or environment yet not part of an official program. For example, is a congregation typified by an ethos of commitment to know what is true and worth believing and an openness to genuine inquiry and understanding? That can shape both the tone and texture of how programs are experienced in a congregation. Perhaps we need some strategic thinking about forming environments conducive to understanding questions and seeking answers through our local churches.
Third, there is a difference between community and programs.
Sometimes congregants fail to appreciate how community must be formed often prior to establishing a program. At other times, programs can help give impetus toward forming community. Bottom line: there is a difference between community and a program (including even groups formally associated with a program). I am reminded by an insight that Eugene Peterson has often said by suggesting that community is not made or constructed but it is discovered (this is at least my paraphrase of Peterson). Why? Well, we discover community through working together, cooperating and collaborating, for example. It’s more than the sum of our shared interests or having affinity around a common cause. Community is the result of mutual service for or with each other. There may be ways to develop and establish conditions that could be conducive toward forming community. But community is not directly willed into existence.
In other words, establishing apologetics-oriented programs does not equal a community of apologists per se. Why does that matter? For one thing, it is significant because the work of apologetics can be accomplished in communities through a local church even if such endeavors are not the result of church programs.
Most models that attempt to “get apologetics” in a local church (almost as if it were a conspiracy or a subversive act) operate with a common emphasis on privileging apologetics as a program or product placement through a group(s) in contrast to attempting to form and flourish an environment hospitable to genuine inquiry and openness to understanding.
The pages that follow for this discussion on apologetics in the local church are in some sense the result of (unofficially) observing dozens of churches (various denominations) and interviewing dozens of pastors and church staff, educators, graduate apologetics students, and professionals over the last ten years in such places as Oregon, California, Texas, Georgia, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Wisconsin. I do not claim any unique authority on what I say beyond what I have only been able to hear, see, discuss, and understand with locals. I have tried to seriously reflect on these experiences and then (hopefully) account for some of their features.
NINE MODELS FOR APOLOGETICS AND THE LOCAL CHURCH
How might we consider the work of apologetics in a local church? One way is to consider what different models one can offer in this area. I can identify at least six common organizational models for local church apologetics work, and three other models that are rarely tried. In each of these models, “apologetics work” can refer to a range of possible endeavors, including training/equipping, leadership, resourcing with content (for example), study, outreach, engagement with evangelism, etc.
1. A distinct training program with its own educational priorities and objectives
In some significant way, this model is what tends to commonly come to mind for most enthusiastic apologists who want to see their work occur in a local church. Undergraduate or graduate students in apologetics tend to implement this training as classroom experience in a local church context. The idea might be, why not foster a classroom-like experience, including lectures and readings, for people to attend as a distinct program? That frame of reference is not surprising since that is probably how such students learned apologetics. But the challenge with this model is that it can become (even unintentionally) a niche group of people, perhaps even isolated from other educational and serving endeavors of the church. Moreover, the form may only be accessible to academically inclined learners and limited in its scope and application. It might lend credence to the impression that apologetics really is only for “eggheads” or the “smarties” in a church. With this model, it is often hard to appreciate that education does not have to occur in a classroom or a quasi-classroom in order for it to be educational.
2. An outreach ministry linked to evangelism
Linked to evangelism efforts, this apologetics model is less about something that happens inside the church but is more of a veritable practice in the real-world, public marketplace of ideas and interactions. Maybe it is viewed as a means for gathering and inviting people back into the church. Perhaps it is a practical and tangible extension of how a church participates in evangelism. Training in apologetics looks more like learning to have prepared answers in hand or utilization of skills to know how to deflect objections. A challenge for this model is frequent temptation toward reducing apologetics to a mere communication technique. Moreover, apologists can become so outward outcome-based that inner transformation (e.g., character development) can be considered less important to attend to, versus winning souls by winning arguments.
3. A demographic-specific small group ministry
This model is so supportive of the value of apologetics as a program in a local church that it sees demographic-specific training groups as a fundamental way to convey education in this area. So, for example, one might see groups centered around “apologetics for women” or “apologetics for young adults.” The benefit of such groups is that they may be more conducive to hearing demographic-specific questions and needs regarding apologetics issues. The challenge, like most anything else that is defined by demography, is that it can become niche, individualistic, and isolated. It can also limit learners from growing in collaboration with learners from a different background.
4. Training via guest speakers or apologetics curriculum
This model recognizes a need for program-oriented apologetics training, but a local church may not have adequate in-house resources and laborers to fulfill the need. Thus, resources are sought outside of a local church context for utilization inside the church. Pastors who see the need for apologetics study in their church can often feel overwhelmed with how to fulfill it without having to reinvent the proverbial wheel. Today, more than ever, there are excellent resources to utilize, and by and large, professional apologists have a heart for the church and are eager to come speak to a local congregation.
A challenge, though, is to discern what to do once the conference leaves town, or the professional is no longer in one’s midst. How do you learn to attend to the need to form an environment, indeed a culture, of study, of learning, and of growing in ways to help people find answers to their questions? Because the apologetic need is often so great, and due to this model’s temporary adequacy, this model often provokes interest and need to implement other models aimed at cultivating a question-answering environment.
5. Ministry associated with members of a church
Such a ministry is not formally dependent on the organizational intention and program of a local church. This model recognizes that apologetics in a local church can operate in a non-program-dependent way. It tends to understand apologetics work with a more community-focused framework by emphasizing the work through members of multiple ecclesial and educational institutions. Workers and leaders in apologetics may all represent and contribute to different churches, but they share in a particular work beyond their affiliations to any particular church or educational outlet. In the context of a local church, with this model, apologists participate in a more on-call kind of way.
In my estimation, of the six main models for apologetics training in the local church, this is the most uncommon one that merits further attention. The challenge, though, is that self-identified apologists can feel isolated and remain unconnected to the serious work of sharing in the responsibilities of the teaching ministry of a local church. Why? Well, perhaps the (mis)perception is that such apologists are off doing their own thing.
6. Apologetics enacted primarily through the pulpit ministry
This model also offers a further alternative to program-oriented apologetics endeavors in a local church. It attempts to integrate the good of apologetics leadership, benefits, and understanding through the megaphone of the weekly teaching ministry of the pulpit. In this context, perhaps a pastor/teacher is engaged in apologetic preaching, where the aim is to perhaps expound on a passage of Scripture or a contemporary topic with the intent of offering a defense of Christian truth claims.
The challenge with this model is to discern whether there is a need long-term for a “formation net.” That is, it’s one thing for congregants to gain an acquaintance of apologetics via the pulpit, but are there further apologetic needs to address that are beyond the capacity of the pulpit? Moreover, while there can be some growth as the result of great apologetic preaching, that’s a different kind of experience compared to being a stakeholder of that same content via discussion and directed practices through a small group, for example. These differences of training and opportunity for growth have to be weighed against their alternatives.
A few other models are worth mentioning, even though (in my opinion) they have yet to be thoroughly tried in a local church context.
7. Through local church staff leaders
This model emphasizes the need for a church to invest in leadership development that is attuned to helping people do apologetics through their various vocations. Thus, it is more leadership-oriented and not merely program-oriented. The model banks on the fact that the church has been given teachers so that people may be formed by a Christian understanding of reality. But instead of creating a separate kind of teacher-leader for apologetics training, this model encourages local church teachers to gain perspective on how apologetics work might look from within already established areas and roles, whether they are adult theological training, children’s leaders, young adult pastors, etc. This model emphasizes investing in the theological and worldview development of local leaders.
8. As education in Christian public communication skills, character, and practices
This model is more praxis-oriented, not at the exclusion of cultivating leaders to operate with a Christian understanding of the world, but especially attentive to the manifold “how-to” elements of apologetics as embodied, Christian communication. Whether as a way of shaping mental environments, programs, training through various communities, or a way of investing in leaders, this model is designed to help learners practice what apologetics work can look like in local contexts of interrelationship with others.
9. As a background, educational ministry for the sake of informing and forming others
Enthusiasts of apologetics training in a local church often think it has to be represented in the foreground in order for it to be consequential (e.g., having programs, leaders, or groups with reputation for doing apologetics). This model, though, emphasizes that apologetics training is more effectual if it empowers extant educational/training leaders in a local church to think, apply, and communicate apologetics integratively. For example, through discipleship-training and spiritual formation endeavors, apologetics training would operate from within this area of understanding and not separate from it, according to this model. For ministries to families, youth and college students, and adults, this model would attempt to find ways to integrate apologetics training from within these areas. Moreover, on this model and similar to number 7 above, perhaps the church would be willing to invest time and resources in fostering an educational and research support staff chiefly devoted to empowering other leaders in the church to enable them to equip members. This would be an example of supporting this endeavor in the background for the sake of empowering both the environment and programs in a local church.
Depending on the needs, goals, and willingness of church leadership and structure, there may be good reason to develop “eclectic” models for organizing apologetics training in view of the particular season of a church. For many of these models are conducive toward some kind of fusionist approach and model for training.
FIVE RECOMMENDATIONS FOR GENERAL IMPLEMENTATION
Regardless of the model(s) for “doing apologetics in the local church,” at the very least a local church may wish to at least engage in the following routine endeavors:
1. Each month or every two months, devote at least one Sunday morning/evening or midweek church gathering to addressing a major worldview or apologetic question that would seem to be relevant to the spiritual and intellectual needs of a congregation. This would be beneficial for both self-identified Christians and unchurched attendees.
2. On a quarterly basis, devote at least one Sunday morning/evening or midweek church gathering to answering biblical/theological or worldview/apologetics relevant questions from the congregation. Maybe these are answered by both pastor(s) and any theology/apologetics professors that attend a congregation. Bottom line: it is enormously beneficial for a pastor to be attuned and responsive to the ongoing and actual questions from a congregation; it’s an effectual way to test an important part of the soul of a congregation.
3. Twice a year, invite a guest speaker(s) to come and address a major apologetics/worldview issue for some sustained training that would be beyond the scope of a regular church gathering in order to equip local church leaders from the immediate area. Maybe this is a Saturday morning seminar for two to three hours that is discussion-oriented.
4. If a local church has a bookstore/library, stock it full with quality resources that are attentive to real and felt intellectual needs in the congregation and regularly promote such resources through as-needed book study groups and discussions, one-paragraph reviews through churchwide communication endeavors, and opportunities to connect current theological training needs with bookstore/library resources for further study.
5. Teach lay leaders how to address relevant worldview/apologetics questions through small group ministries in a local church, including how to integrate such training and character development with discipleship-forming endeavors in a group.
SEVEN QUESTIONS FOR CHURCH LEADERS:
DISCERNING THE VALUE OF THE “APOLOGETICS ENDEAVOR”
Here are seven questions to help you determine if an apologetics program might be effective in your church:
1. How will it enhance the environment of a teaching/equipping and preaching ministry of a local church?
2. If it is formally part of the organizational intent of a local church, how can it integrate with other teaching/equipping endeavors?
3. How will it complement and empower and not distract or compete with the work of other pastors/leaders through a local church?
4. If it is a group, how can the endeavor be arranged to be more discussion oriented rather than lecture oriented?
5. How will it enhance people’s leadership and resourcefulness through their vocations?
6. How will it strengthen people’s actual confidence in God and enable them to be effectual in their witness to others?
7. How will it enable people to pick up tools or practices or habits in their everyday life that will enable them to do apologetics?
MISTAKES TO AVOID WHEN ADVOCATING APOLOGETICS TRAINING IN A LOCAL CHURCH
Well-meaning advocates of apologetics sometimes practice several of these seven mistakes when trying to convince pastors to include apologetics training in a local church:
1. Demanding that apologetics work has to develop your way in order for it to be effectual in a local church. Organizationally speaking, there is not one way to do apologetics work in and through the local church. The above models are evidence of that. Therefore, it is unfair and unproductive to demand that it has to look a particular way in order for it to work in a particular context. Thinking creatively, strategically, and collaboratively with other church leaders about models can be a positive way forward.
2. Shaming pastors for not doing their job if they are hesitant about apologetics or see its value differently than you do. Such shaming is dumb, ineffectual, and manipulative. Instead of shaming, a better approach would be to help pastors understand the value and benefits of apologetics to the role of a pastor and a congregation. Educating, not judging, is a fruitful way forward. Moreover, teachable parishioners do well to consider how other credible Christian leaders view apologetics, including their criticisms, in order to understand how to better communicate in this area. Shaming is a total conversation-killer.
3. Overselling the value of apologetics in a local church by insisting that it is the most important endeavor that a church could be involved in. Apologetics training and ministry was never designed to be the end-all be-all; it is a serving discipline and ministry. It comes alongside other areas of thought and life and empowers them for their own good. Rarely is it the case that pastors are convinced of something as a result of overselling some cause, product, program, personality, etc. It can be effectual to convey a confident and measured view of the good of apologetics in a local church.
4. Attempting to distract from the normal teaching ministry of a local church by hosting apologetics-oriented events at the same time as what a local church is trying to do. This is the kind of activity that gives apologists and apologetics in the local church a royal black eye. It is self-centered and immature.
5. Thinking that apologetics in a local church needs to be an “official” part of the programming of a church in order to be valuable and effectual. Depending on a pastor’s leadership style and perspective, and how a church’s structure operates, one may be waiting a long time to be engaged in apologetics in a local church if one is waiting for the green light to make apologetics part of the programming of a local church’s training effort, for example. My encouragement is to find ways, which may often have a non-glamorous low profile, to strengthen fellow believers with needs in these areas but keep communication channels open with pastors and see how that develops further.
6. Insisting that graduate-degreed apologists and philosophers be the only or main teachers in any apologetics training opportunities. One of the most remarkable achievements in evangelical graduate training of the last twenty years is the opportunity for anyone (pastors and parishioners alike) to get formal training in apologetics. The result has been enthusiastic apologetics students wanting to do something with their education through a local church. But self-identified, professionally trained apologists or philosophers are not the only stakeholders of apologetics training. The same could also be said for theologians; they are not the only stakeholders of theology training through a local church. Emerging leaders in apologetics do well to recognize the multi-faceted role of diverse sources of knowledge and expertise on apologetics and find ways to train as collaborative teams.
7. Concluding that if a pastor doesn’t do apologetics the way you think it should be done he doesn’t care seriously for the life of the mind. This is similar to (2) above, but it also has a different bite and a strange nuance to it. For example, if apologetics is crucial to the health and preservation of the “Christian mind,” it might be argued, it should be presented by pastors because pastors have a responsibility to cultivate the mind of their parishioners. Therefore, if pastors do not engage in apologetics in some particular way (training, ministry) through their role as pastors, it is concluded that they must not care for cultivating the life of the mind in their parishioners. But, of course, this is nonsense. Truth be told, more often than not, pastors probably do apologetics in some fashion without even being told they do. For example, whenever they attempt to deal with that which hinders confidence in God, or how God’s action in the world is meaningful (e.g., answer to prayer) or when they seek to cultivate the apologetic character of their parishioners (even if they don’t call it that), they are likely engaged at some level with work within the scope of doing apologetics.
Here are six assumptions to avoid when bringing apologetics training to the local church:
1. Training is fundamentally the result of substantive lecturing and “book-learning.” What are the contemporary, dominant ways for conveying apologetics content? In text form (especially as books) and doing events/conferences and lectures? If so, it is not surprising that such dominant communication means shape what is understood and expected to be main models for training in apologetics. Lectures, books, events, and other products to experience are not inherently inadequate means, but they are only one among many means. And if apologetics goes beyond merely conveying information and knowledge (content) to include a particular kind of character development, then it behooves leaders and educators in apologetics to convey a strategic imagination about the relevant means to fulfill real and felt training needs in this area.
2. Training is really learning how to utilize debate tactics against opponents of Christian truth. If lecturing is not perceived to be the dominant mode of doing communication in apologetics, debating probably is. When people think of apologetics they often think of how to compete and defend someone in a debate. That tends to be the dominant image that pervades their outlook in this area. Sadly, many people often eliminate themselves from engaging in apologetics because they are not good at arguing or engaging in a debate, and because they think that apologetics is all about communicating in debate form, they conclude that apologetics must not be for them but only for those with such command of skills and technique. One can debate the benefits of what debating actually accomplishes. But there should be a widespread recognition among apologetics enthusiasts in a local church that learning apologetics is not equal to learning debate tactics.
3. Training is all about memorizing apologetics arguments and talking points, to be repeated as needed. There is something to be said for taking stock and memorizing basic arguments for some claim relevant to the Christian worldview (e.g., arguments for God’s existence). But this alone is inadequate as an intention, means, and approach to learning apologetics. For doing apologetics is also about learning to improvise in conversation, listen astutely, cultivate a character that is winsome and virtuous, non-defensive with one’s convictions, and trust and cooperate with the Holy Spirit.
4. Successful training has occurred when students of apologetics sound like great apologists. Though this aspiration is often unspoken, many think a ready defender of the faith will sound like Lee Strobel, Hank Hanegraaff, William Lane Craig, Ravi Zacharias, J. P. Moreland, Craig Hazen, Norm Geisler, Paul Copan, or any other favorite apologist. In one sense, this aspiration is understandably commendable. There are now more models than ever to have before one’s mind and to consider how these models get the job done in apologetics, philosophy, theology, and evangelism. But the ultimate goal of apologetics training and aspiration should not be centered on these personalities as models. We are not called to have their calling. We have our own calling, even if it overlaps or resembles theirs. Not only do these models have their own calling but they have their own voice and platform. It is folly to separate calling from voice and platform. The standard should not be to mimic them in that regard. Rather, our training and ministry in apologetics should seek to be attentive to how these models work but also discern what our unique contributions are in this area and how that can get worked out through our various vocations.
5. Training is ultimately about stockpiling superior intellectual ammunition against non-Christian thinking. This attitude is incommodious and full of so much myopic thinking about people and ideas.
6. Training is for self-identified intellectuals (or for those aspiring to be) who otherwise wouldn’t have a “home” in a local church. Self-identified apologists, and Christian scholars in general, often have an accompanying anxiety about the local church that runs something like this: the local church does not appear to prize the life of the mind given the sort of anti-intellectual, simplistic, and cliché-driven pronouncements that fill this environment, especially teaching contexts like the Sunday pulpit or Sunday school. The solution? Perhaps unintentionally or intentionally, scholars and other academic types congregating among themselves as a sub-community or niche group in a church. In one sense, this outcome as a default posture is understandable, if pastors or a church’s ethos fail to help academic types belong. However, there is much to be said for academic types being socialized by a local church’s environment, where they can regularly enter into interaction and service with and for non-academic types. The problem is making “training” into an insular, self-contained hangout for academic groupies.
The straightforward and consequential goal of local church apologetics work should be to equip people to be resourceful with answers to tough questions through their vocations in the world. So, we want to aim to equip people from within their everyday life.
APOLOGETICS AND PLACES OF EMPLOYMENT
Apologetics in the workplace may often look more covert than not. After all, the main purpose of going to work, whether as an employer or employee, is probably not necessarily to win hearts and souls for Jesus, unless, of course, that is the organizational mission of a workplace. Naturally, we should arrange our lives to be open to the Spirit’s work. For we can still bear witness to Jesus and His kingdom while being “on the job,” especially in a pluralistic and non-religious context. But how might our witness look with the aim of serving people with the questions they might have about life and reality? Here are some suggestions:
1. Be an excellent and trustworthy worker, as one who in everything is “working unto the Lord.” The social capital accrued here can go a long way in establishing a hearing for your “voice” among fellow employees and your employer. The very witness of your life in this context can strengthen or weaken how colleagues and associates experience the plausibility of your beliefs.
2. Be an available resource. Maybe you are the person who is good at recommending resources to interested people. Maybe you can help people gain clarity about their own questions. The winsomeness of being known as an available resource to dialogue about the big questions of life and reality is a major way to serve people in the workplace.
3. Intentionally encourage fellow Christians in the workplace by helping them become an available resource to others. As colleagues and fellow brothers and sisters, find ways to encourage each other and promote ways in which the plausibility of Christian witness and the message and mission of Jesus can gain a receptive hearing in your workplace. Practice intentional prayer both for coworkers and for the overall environment.
4. Study how your workplace, along with your organization’s goods and services, might shape how people ask and understand their big questions. This may or may not be a relevant factor all the time or for all people in all work environments. But it is worth attending to. For example, maybe someone is a factory worker and experiences a boss who is not much more than a taskmaster. How does that shape a worker’s experience of God? Or, someone is working in sales, and forms the habit of just feeling like everything in life has to be “sold” in order to be convincing. How does that shape someone’s experience of God’s communication to them through His Word and other people?
5. Find intentional ways to relate to non-Christian workers so that in due time you can find ways to be with them beyond your shared workspace and hours. Invite them to your routine third places and let them reciprocate. Attempt to build associations that move to friendships.
6. With prudence, avoid “foreign entanglements.” Such entanglements consist of discussions or disputes that will gain Christian witness very little in the likelihood of someone wanting to understand and believe what is true. For example, let’s say that you work in a politically left-of-center environment. But you self-identify, politically speaking, as a “Christian conservative.” Which is more valuable, short-term and long-term: “correcting” your liberal friends on most everything they say that stands in disagreement with your worldview, or being prudent in what you say and how you say it in order to still earn the right to be heard and to form a sustainable relationship with someone? This is not at all easy, and can easily feel like giving in. But it need not be.
7. Keep the health of the environment in mind. The following questions can be kept before your mind: Do non-Christians in my workplace encounter a living Jesus who is known as the wisest person in the world? How is Christian presence experienced in my workplace? How might the mental environment of my workplace shape people’s experience of moral-spiritual knowledge of reality?
1. To this list we could add the valuable contribution of Christian education as an integral context and means for fostering a question-answering environment. By Christian education, I have in mind everything from home-schooling, to private grade school, college, and graduate work. It is valuable in this main way: it is a normative historical practice that both transmits and translates Christian thought and practices as a knowledge and wisdom tradition.
2. For more on this idea, see Marjorie Thompson, Family: The Forming Center (Nashville: Upper Room Books, 1996), 22, 41.
3. See the helpful perspective of Timothy Jones, Nurturing a Child’s Soul (Nashville: Word, 2000).
4. James S. Spiegel, Gum, Geckos, and God: A Family’s Adventure in Space, Time, and Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008), 9.
5. J. P. Moreland, “Developing an Apologetic Character,” ACSI Leadership Academy Report (2001): http://www.jpmoreland.com/articles/developing-an-apologetics-character.
6. For a substantial microcosm of such resources, readers might be interested in my Appendix 1 and 2 of “Recommended Resources and Organizations,” in J. P. Moreland’s Love Your God with All Your Mind, revised and updated edition (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2012).
7. You can “imagine” more, and with inspiration and specificity, from Dallas Willard’s last chapter in Knowing Christ Today titled, “Pastors as Teachers of the Nations” (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2009).
8. For various discussions on this, see J. P. Moreland’s chapter 10, “Recapturing the Intellectual Life in the Church,” from the 2012 revised and updated Love Your God with All Your Mind, and then also the final chapter, “Pastors as Teachers of the Nations,” from Dallas Willard’s Knowing Christ Today.
9. Some interesting and helpful discussion can be accessed through Brian Auten’s popular Apologetics315 blog: www.apologetics315.com.
10. Moreland, “Developing an Apologetic Character.”
11. In general, we do well to be mindful of how we define “success” or “progress” in view of programs. In the American church context, where there seems to be a greater propensity to be attracted to the allure of pragmatism, it is often the case that success is defined by “demonstrable outcomes”—outcomes that one can measure, if not control. Programs, or programmatic thinking, can be poised to deliver demonstrable outcomes. If people want something done in a church or if they want change to take place, very often they seek to “move” their groups or community by a new program. But the question is, with Eugene Peterson, are programs adequate “Kingdom means” for getting the job done? More often than not, is it the case that we need to decouple “fruitfulness” from “demonstrable outcomes” relative to programs? How we understand these issues will shape how we understand, assess, and decide about apologetics as a program in a local church.