I am a preacher’s kid who left the faith, declared myself to be an atheist, returned to the faith after a cancer scare, nearly lost my faith again and was saved by evangelical theology and apologetics.  So, I am passionate about helping others avoid the decade of destructive sin and despair I spent wandering through the atheist wilderness.

A few years ago I was intrigued by David Kinnaman’s book You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church…and Rethinking Faith (Baker 2011).  Kinnaman argued that there are at least six reasons why men and women between 18-30 leave the faith behind.  He posted a summary of the six reasons on the Barna website and they were:

Young people are fleeing the church faster than Nickelback fans to a sale on Ed Hardy shirts and Axe Body Spray.  As I argued yesterday, the answer, as far as the church is concerned, is to preach deeper messages and to train all Christians in becoming capable lay theologians and apologists.  But how?

I recommend every Christian leader undergo some form of formal training in defending the faith.  I earned a certificate in apologetics from BIOLA, hope to attend Frank Turek’s CrossExamined Instructor Academy this August and will begin an M.A. in apologetics from Houston Baptist University this fall.  I would tweak BIOLA’s distance program a bit but I still recommend it and I have heard nothing but great things about CrossExamined and HBU.  I hope you will check them all out.

The fascists and other totalitarians of the twentieth century didn’t treat opponents as wrong but as dangerous. Thus, they felt they did not need to be debated but eradicated.  Such a mindset is how you rack up a body count in the tens of millions.

Where was the church during the reigns of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Castro and Pol Pot? In his powerful little book How Do You Kill 11 Million People?: Why the Truth Matters More Than You Think, Andy Andrews tells the story of a church which sat next to a set of railroad tracks.  When a train packed with Jews. gypsies and fellow Christians like Bonhoeffer passed by, the church would sing their hymns louder to avoid hearing the cries of those speeding toward their deaths.  The church was silent as first the culture filled with true intolerance and continued in silence as hate filled leaders fed off the culture to rise to power.

I’ve been reading Alister McGrath’s excellent new book If I Had Lunch with C.S. Lewis (Tyndale 2014).  Professor McGrath writes that one of the reasons Lewis moved from atheism to Christianity was that the latter provided a much more comprehensive and consistent worldview than the former.

There are numerous intellectual reasons to reject atheism and embrace Christianity and the scope of one’s worldview is only one of them.  So, Please don’t misunderstand me.  I am not saying that the following is THE knock out punch for faith in Jesus but it is one of the arguments that one may look to for choosing Christianity over atheism.  All that being said, here we go:

I went to boarding school with two young men who were devout Muslims and whose father helped lead the Algerian revolt against France.  I used to smoke cigs with them after ordering a half pepperoni-half cheese pizza from the local Dominos in San Marino, California.  We were good friends but I had no idea what they believed or why.