Part One: Introduction to My New Blog Series

In the late 1970s, while living in San Diego, my wife and I became good friends with neighbors across the street. We had a lot in common: we were about the same age, our kids got along well, and we enjoyed playing games and going backpacking together.

The wife, I’ll call here “Cindy,” was a third generation Christian Scientist. Her husband, “Jeff,” I can best describe as an I-couldn’t-care-less-about-religion secular humanists. At the time, I was pretty much an “Easter Sunday Christian” (that’s normally when I attended church), and, as far as I knew, Christian Science was just another Christian denomination that liked science!

Eventually, both our families moved out of town. We moved to a rural community twenty-five miles away, and Jeff and Cindy moved to central California. A few years later, however, they returned to the San Diego area.

During the interim between our friends’ move to central California and their return to San Diego, I became a Christian and returned to college, eventually earning a Master of Arts degree Christian Apologetics. So by the time Jeff and Cindy returned to Southern California, I knew that Christian Science was a cult—and I was eager for a confrontation.

The opportunity came one evening when we invited them over for supper. After eating we went outside to sit on our deck. I immediately unsheathed my apologetic sword and plunged into battle. The result was disastrous.

It wasn’t that I failed to give a good account of myself. With little effort, I cut to shreds Cindy’s erroneous beliefs. I deftly pared her objections to Christianity while skillfully slicing away her defenses of Christian Science. She had no answers to my challenges, no rebuttal to my facts. I did my job, all right. In my mind’s eye, she had to admit that, at best, she was simply deceived by an inane cult, and, at worse, she was a naive buffoon.

She did neither. And we never heard from Cindy and Jeff again.

What went wrong? Obviously, the problem was me. It was a classic case of “winning the battle but losing the war.” I had all the answers, but that only meant that I was half-trained. What I lacked was gentleness (I Peter 3:15b) and communication skills (2 Tim. 2:24-25). Had I used my apologetic sword properly, I would have pricked Cindy’s conscience so that she would begin to question her religious worldview. But I would have done so gently, being careful not to inflect a mortal wound. Instead, I chased her away, bleeding and unconvinced.

My tactic was designed to win the argument, not the soul. I failed to create an environment in which the Holy Spirit was free to convict Cindy of the falsity of Christian Science, while at the same time convince her (and Jeff) of the truth of Christianity.

I share this story to illustrate an important principle of apologetics: Having the knowledge to intellectually combat and defeat non-Christian religions and philosophies is not enough. It’s also necessary to debate these issues and to present the Christian perspective in such a way that unbelievers will listen and understand.

Of course whenever possible our evangelism should always begin with the Gospel—as I should have with Cindy and Jeff. But if it fails to generate interest, as we’ll see in future blog articles, we have other options. And we’ll see when not to use apologetics at all!

Teaching this is the purpose of this new blog series, adapted from my book Engaging the Closed Minded; Presenting Your Faith to the Confirmed Unbeliever (Foreword by John Warwick Montgomery). The goal of this series is to help readers decide when our evangelism should be expanded beyond sharing the Gospel to include “law” (I’ll define how to use law in evangelism later) or apologetics—and sometimes both. In a word, this series of blog articles is designed to help Christians communicate their faith in a way that unbelievers will listen to us and give us a fair hearing. ©

Engaging the Closed Minded (Kregel Publications, 1999) is now out of print, but it can still be purchased through Amazon and possibly other outlets. If you would like to be added to my blog email list, in order to receive notices when I post a blog article or other writing and teaching activities, go to my website at www.danstory.net, click on “contact,” and send me a request.