One of my passions is training the church in apologetics and theology, and while learning from books and courses is great, few things can beat being challenged by someone outside of your faith. While I would love to help you out with resources for education, I can also play a few different roles and provide some much needed practice:

• New Atheist
• Progressive Christian
• TBD (always looking to grow)

As testament to how important this, I'd like to share two examples of this in action:

Eric's roleplay:

I was in a room full of Christians this week—most of them pastors—while Eric did a role play exercise. He pretended to be an atheist and gave people the opportunity to engage him. Y’all it was both frustrating and embarrassing.

For one thing, the arguments offered were terrible. I felt like I was in the true life version of “God’s Not Dead.” For another, people were getting angry at Eric, interrupting him and shouting at him. They were just rude. It was awful.

And the worst part? No one even attempted to share the Gospel with him. It was all about trying to argue with him and lay traps for him. One guy asked if he and Eric could be friends (which was actually weird and awkward), but nobody even came close to the Gospel. It was shocking and sad.

I walked away more convinced than ever of the need for Christians not just to study apologetics, but to practice apologetics. I was wondering in any of those folks had ever actually engaged a skeptic. And these were pastors! We must do better. We must! We need to obey the command to love God with our minds, and we need to obey the command to love others as ourselves.

Sound Faith Role Play:

I had the wonderful opportunity to do an atheist role-play for a young adults group in Washington last night. They weren't informed beforehand that I'm a Christian. For the first 30 minutes, I shared my "story" of being an ex-evangelical and the many arguments that led me to eventually become an atheist. They asked questions non-stop for 50 minutes. I didn't hold back in tearing down their attempts to refute me, and several were visibly frustrated with their inability to address my points effectively.

When I revealed who I really was, there was jaw-dropping, laughing, brow-wiping, and huge sighs of relief. There was also a lot of honest confession that they weren't prepared for such discussions. Everyone wanted resources and some expressed a desire to study apologetics academically. By a show of hands, only one person out of about 50 total said they suspected that I wasn't an atheist.

Some may criticize an event like this, since it's deceptive to pretend to be an atheist rather than just bringing in an actual atheist. This criticism fails to recognize the situation. Bluntly, we are engaged in spiritual warfare. As a military veteran, I know that we do not send our young trainees to face the enemy without proper training, and this type of event is as close to the real thing as it gets - a sort of "live-fire exercise" for Christian faith. Because of this event, these young people now know how they would react when faced with criticisms of their faith, as well as where the gaps lie in their knowledge. This information is invaluable to their development as followers of Christ.

I pray that more churches see the need for these types of events and appreciate how effective they are at shaking Christians - young and old alike - out of spiritual complacency.

I'm also available to teach on a number of subjects:

• Progressive Christianity
  • What is it?
  • Who is it?
  • Where is it?
• Biblical Literacy
  • Overview of Scripture
  • Interaction between Old and New Testaments
  • Bible Difficulties
• Apologetics
  • Apologetics in the Bible
  • Common Apologetic Arguments
  • Common Challenges

And more coming.

I'm also available for general consulting services.

• Are you looking for help setting up your own curriculum for church or small group?
• Are you trying to set up a conference, but don't know who to talk with?
• Are you trying to start a ministry?
• Are you researching something and need some guidance?
• Are you trying to use Logos Bible Software?

From general tech support to making connections with other ministries to sharing my experience in ministry, how can I help you?

*note: for Logos, you've got to check out the Logos Daily Circle!