Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Concerning him. An Emmaus podcast is a ministry of Emmaus Bible College. Concerning Him seeks to enrich Christians around the globe by educating and equipping them through various media. For more information about Emmaus, please visit Emmaus.edu.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Welcome back to another episode of The Concerning Hymn. Podcast. Today we are joined by Chris Heron. How's it going, Chris?
[00:00:28] Speaker C: What's going on? Hope things are well.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Good. I'm happy to have you here. Chris is new. As of when did you come to Emmaus? When did you get here?
[00:00:38] Speaker C: It was like February 1 or like, January 31. I don't remember. I moved in in, like, a day and a half later. I showed up on campus. I was like, yeah.
[00:00:46] Speaker B: So the new director of admissions.
[00:00:48] Speaker C: That's right.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: For Emmaus Bible College, for here at Emmaus Bible College, we're excited to have you here on campus. So it's been would that be like six months? Six months, yeah. That's awesome.
And so today in the podcast, we're excited to get to know you. We're excited to talk about something you're really passionate about, which is apologetics and apologetics training.
But let's get right into it first. Who are you and where'd you come from? Chris?
[00:01:14] Speaker C: Why am I here?
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Exactly?
[00:01:16] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas, and I've never lived outside of Texas until now, but I've had a few stints all over the state of Texas. So, like I said, born and raised in Dallas, went to school. My undergrad is in philosophy from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacadocious, Texas.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Which is where is yeah, so so.
[00:01:38] Speaker C: We do this funny thing at SFA, where if you put your hand up like this, it looks like the state of Texas, and your pinky lands on top of Nacadoches.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:01:47] Speaker C: So it's in what we call Deep East Texas. It's basically a school in the middle of the woods. And when I was trying to find it when I first got there, I drove past it, like three times until I finally was like, Where is this place? And then when you actually know where you're going, you're like, oh, there's like a huge state university here with, like, 15,000 students. But yeah, so I did a BA in Philosophy, minored in Religious studies there, state school, public school. So there's not a lot of ministry or Christian apologetics opportunities, anything like that, but fell in love with Christian philosophy, christian apologetics.
When I had a professor that just pushed me on my faith, and he was a pretty ardent atheist and just loved to kind of shoot little, I say, like, lob rockets at students in class. And it was pretty obvious that by the end of that semester, there was quite a few students who I don't want to say that they've lost their faith, but they were questioning at best. They were probably full blown doubting or had walked away okay. I guess, at worst. And so I wanted to find answers. So that kind of drove me towards philosophical answers for the philosophical questions and criticisms that he was bringing up and things like that that led me towards apologetics. And I said, this is really interesting, I want to do this also just generally fell in love with philosophy and the kind of intellectual pursuit of just big questions and kind of weird and strange answers sometimes. So after that, I went to grad school at Houston Baptist University. Now, Houston Christian University. So that's kind of cool. Yeah. But yeah, went there for an Ma in Philosophy and focused in philosophy and also Christian apologetics. Picked up a Grad certificate while I was there doing that.
And then through that master's program, I think I kind of felt like I was done with philosophy. I don't think I have ever really wanted to pursue a PhD in philosophy, just hard philosophy.
I really wanted it to be applicable and land with people, not just keep literally head in the clouds all the time. It's just what if and ask kind of silly questions, which are sometimes fun to pull that string a little harder and see what's at the end of it. But either way, that drove me. While I was writing my master's thesis, actually on the LDS faith, I wrote a philosophical criticism or critique of their concept of God, their theology proper. And in that in researching, I think the Lord just really burdened my heart again for ministry.
As a teenager, I was serving in my church in middle school ministry and just absolutely loved it in college, kind of fell away from that. And then I think the Lord used philosophy and apologetics to kind of rekindle that burden in my heart that, hey, there are people that need to know the truth. They have really tough and maybe easy questions that need answers.
I think that I'm well positioned to answer those, or at least I wanted to be. I wanted to get trained to do that. So then after I finished that master's, I started looking at seminary. And so I had a contact from Dallas Theological Seminary a long time ago that I met when I was in high school. And then I was looking at a few other ones as well. But really DTS always kind of stuck out to me. So I applied and for some strange reason they let me in. And then I pursued the THM, the Master of Theology, which is a big fat, honking, 120 hours master's degree. And the Lord, after a few years, the Lord made it clear that those were kind of my plans and not his. And so after just a season of discernment and saying, god, why did you bring me through all this? And like a BA and Ma in Philosophy and Apologetics and Mormonism and all this other weird stuff that I like to study, where is this going? What is this doing? And then made it clear that it was kind of more into education, broadly speaking. So switched out of the THM program into my new program I'm finishing up in December. I just have that internship, which is now just my job, which I love, which is great. Thanks, Emmaus, for giving me an internship location, I guess, to pair with my job. But yeah, now I'm in a Master of Arts in Christian Education in a dual Ma in Christian Studies, where I just jam packed a bunch of electives systematic theology courses. Yeah. So that's kind of where I'm at now.
I don't know how the Lord's going to redeem that and use that in the future. I don't want to say redeem. Like, that was like, wasteland, like it was worthless or whatever, but I don't know what he's got planned. But right now, admissions is kind of where I'm at. I was an admissions counselor at DTS for five years, and I never wanted to be an admissions counselor, but I needed a job that also paid for my tuition, which is kind of the sweetest deal you can get when you work at a school like that. And then I just fell in love with it. I loved hearing people's stories. I loved recruiting. And also you get to travel a little bit, which is cool, too. And then just really just seen how God is calling so many different people from so many different walks of life, having gone through so many different experiences to prepare them for ministry training, and then just getting to kind of like, grab a hand and say, come on, let's go do this. If the Lord's calling you to this, he's going to make a way for it to happen. I want to help you get through that. And then in those pursuits, that's how I found Emmaus. I say I found, like, you guys weren't here this whole time.
But in Dallas, we have some feeder schools that we like to look at and say, man, we always get these solid, solid, solid applicants that are coming from all these different Bible colleges and Christian universities, and by far one of the top ones was Emmaus. And I kind of say it was like a little secret that everyone knew, but I think I put it on paper and said, hey, can I go and do a visit at Emmaus in the middle know, we say Nowhere, Iowa when we're in Texas and we don't know where Iowa is. Why I landed here, I was like, I don't know how far or close I am from Canada, but I'm just in the north now, because when you're in Texas, everything's just the know.
But either way, I came here the first time, and there's so many DTS alum that are at Emmaus, so I kind of already felt a little at home, at least with my people, right, which is really cool. And then just over the years, getting to meet so many different people and developing just recruiting relationships. Right? I think that's where my name kind of came up when we, as EMA, were considering a new director of admissions. So got an email, said, hey, want to talk with you. I was like, yeah, let's see what's going on. And then a few phone calls and conversations later, we're here. So that's a long story short.
[00:08:19] Speaker B: And as a Texan, you moved from Texas to Dubuque, Iowa, in the beginning of February.
[00:08:26] Speaker C: It's true.
[00:08:26] Speaker B: What was that like?
[00:08:29] Speaker C: Jokingly. I tell my wife that we basically in Texas.
We gave all of our friends and neighbors the contents of our fridge and freezer because we were like, oh, it's not going to stay good in the.
[00:08:44] Speaker B: Back of the truck.
[00:08:45] Speaker C: It absolutely would have stayed fine in the back of the truck because it was like, when we stopped halfway or a little bit over halfway in Kansas City, it was like, two degrees outside. And I was like, man, everything in the freezer would have been perfectly fine. We didn't have to get rid of anything.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: And you still had to go quite a ways north, even just from Kansas City.
[00:09:04] Speaker C: Yeah, right.
But it was like, two degrees outside.
It was fun. It was fun. I got to drive a truck that I still believe to this day normal people should not be allowed to drive because it was so long, and it was this diesel, and it was like 26ft 8ft, whatever. And I called it the Arc. As I was driving it, I was like, I'm driving an Arc. I got to call you later kind of thing.
And actually, funny story, when I lived on campus at DTS for two years, and then my wife and I purchased a home outside of Dallas proper in a city called Forney, Texas, about 20 miles away, which in Dallas is not far in Iowa, that feels like you're.
[00:09:46] Speaker B: Holding three towns over, right?
[00:09:48] Speaker C: In Dallas. That's still kind of Dallas, broadly speaking.
Anyways, we moved into that house in July in Texas where it's 100 degrees outside, sustained for usually like, two months or so. And then when we moved to Iowa, we did it when it was two degrees outside.
[00:10:09] Speaker B: You only move in extreme?
[00:10:10] Speaker C: I do, yeah. Yeah. I don't know what's up with that, but it's great.
I was fortunate enough to travel a pretty good amount when I was a kid. My parents, we like to travel and go different places, and I've always loved the snow. I've always loved hiking. I'm an Eagle Scout, so I love being outdoors and those sorts of things, too, camping and whatnot. So being here where what I was telling my friends when I was leaving Texas, I said, I'm going somewhere where they have all four seasons, not just hot and then extreme cold for like, three days, and then just back to, yeah, I'm here where there's all four seasons.
[00:10:43] Speaker B: You'll love fall. You'll love the fall.
[00:10:46] Speaker C: It's the one I haven't seen yet.
[00:10:47] Speaker B: I promise you'll love it the most.
[00:10:49] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:10:51] Speaker B: Well, we're happy to have you on the podcast this last year at Iron, Sharpens Iron, the annual conference that we have here on campus. You took a breakout session. You talked about why the church needs apologetic training.
[00:11:02] Speaker C: Right.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: And that's what I wanted to have this conversation with you about, because this is kind of a passion topic of yours.
[00:11:07] Speaker C: Yeah, it is.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: And it's nice to hear your story, to hear, like, it's not just because you find it fascinating. I mean, that's part of it. But you felt, like, this need for apologetics to deal with this professor in college, right?
[00:11:20] Speaker C: Yeah, 100%. And I didn't have that in my church when I was in college, or at least not in a way that I could very quickly and easily find it. It's not been my experience growing up in the faith, and I've been a believer as long as I can remember, but I don't recall ever really having very big and serious doubts.
I think the Lord may have just protected me from that in a unique way, and that doesn't make me special. It's just not my story to have had major doubts, but, man, I have so many friends, and I've met so many people that have had major, major doubts or even just generally just questions. And I don't think that the modern church, the contemporary church has been particularly helpful in answering those questions. At least the stories that I've heard and the narratives that people have given me is that they've just been dismissed, and they've just said, oh, like, hey, it's a sin to doubt. It's 100% not a sin to doubt. It's just not. It's not a sin to doubt and to ask questions of God and to say, I don't understand this. Help me understand this.
I think it's a sin to tell God things that are not true, that he says are true, but to wrestle is not sinful, I don't think. And I think that God actually honors the pursuit of Him and to say, Man, I got to figure this out. I have questions about interworkings of the Trinity and the hypostatic union, how Jesus can be fully God and fully man at the same time. What happened on the cross when he called out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And those sorts of things. I think God honors us pursuing Him in them. I don't think that he says, don't do that. But we as pastors and church leaders and ministry leaders, when we tell a church member or a lot of times a student, this is where they're developing their faith. Right. And we tell them, like, let's not ask those questions. That's not a fair question, or, we'll talk later. We don't answer that, not necessarily on the spot, but just at all. If we don't have a forum for that or if we don't welcome that and you have to say that out loud, you have to tell students and even adults, you have to say, hey, if you have real questions, here is how you ask that question. Here's how we're going to give you the answer for that question. That was actually one of the follow up questions I got at that ISI breakout was someone was asking.
So yes, we want to provide questions, but what if no one wants to ask them? Like how do we get them to ask the questions? And that was part of the thing that I talked about was, yeah, you have to create a forum, you have to almost create a culture where we're going to investigate all this together. And I think that if you do that under the umbrella of saying there are good answers for every question, it kind of disarms the fear and the guilt and the shame. And now you're just an investigator of your own faith.
It's something you believe and you confess it. And we have faith in all these theological truths and all these things about the Bible and revelation and everything else. So let's look into them and let's ask questions, let's tinker, let's explore that. And if it's more of an exploration versus I'm kind of like cowering in fear and saying I don't really think I understand, where do I see the divinity of the Holy Spirit in the Bible? That's a great question. Let's talk about that. Right. That should not be anything that someone should feel bad about asking. You're exploring your faith. So I think that's the way that I have found success in opening that door is know, even if you don't believe I'm welcoming you to explore my faith in our faith, our collective faith. But yeah, and I just don't think that our church does that particularly well. I think we're really myopically focused on preach the gospel, go home and man, we've got to have other options of tethering people to the church and this is one way that we can continue to do that.
[00:15:14] Speaker B: Before we get too deep into this, could you take a couple of minutes and just explain what is apologetics?
[00:15:20] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, a lot of people.
[00:15:22] Speaker B: Have probably most people listening to us have probably heard the word sure and most people probably have a sense of what that means. But you talked about apologetics, kind of been talking about who you are and your background, your story and you're connecting it to philosophy and these things. Right, which obviously there is a connection there. But yeah. Could you take a couple of minutes and just talk about how those things are related? What is apologetics? What does it mean?
[00:15:43] Speaker C: Yeah, apologetics comes from the Greek word apologia, which simply just means a defense or even an account of a statement of belief, of the facts, something like that. So apologetics properly speaking, is just the study of, or maybe we might say the practice of defending your faith. And so it does not mean to apologize for your faith. I always like to say that, although I feel like every apologist in the history of Ever has always started their talk with we're not apologizing for anything here. But I think it's still important to say, no, we're not apologizing for our faith. We're giving an account of our faith and why we believe what we believe.
First, Peter 315 is the quintessential apologist verse which is always be prepared to have a defense or a reason for the hope that is within you and do so with gentleness and respect. And I think we sometimes forget that last part, which we need to remember. And also the beginning of that 314, I think it is, it says Honor the Lord. So you honor the Lord, have a reason, defense, a good accounting of why you believe what you believe and communicate that in gentleness and respect. So I always say this way, that there's really kind of two different ways that apologetics kind of plays. You have offensive and defensive apologetics. So offensive, just think like football. There's two different sides, two different teams, if you will, kind of within the broader team.
[00:17:05] Speaker B: First, a Texan is using a football.
[00:17:06] Speaker C: Come on, maybe we need to go to soccer. How about that?
[00:17:10] Speaker B: Football is good.
[00:17:11] Speaker C: Forwards and defenders, right? Yeah. So at least it lands really well in football, which I'm actually not a huge football fan, but whatever. Anyways. Yeah, I digress. So the offense team is trying to move the ball down the line and score points, right? And in this euphemism, in this analogy, scoring a touchdown is winning a soul, right? Getting someone to confess and believe that Jesus rose from the dead. That's our faith. That it's true.
But in playing football, you can't throw Hail Marys every single time. Sometimes the best strategy is these little bitty moves and you can move them up and up and up and down the field. You're changing players in and out just like there are people coming in and out of people's lives and they're just moving one thing or maybe they're blocking one thing to stop someone from experiencing something that's terrible or whatever it might be. I mean, the Lord's using all of these different things to move someone down to a touchdown, right? But then we also have defensive apologetics, which is responding to attacks, which is responding to someone trying to push us back the other way. Right.
So we kind of do both. Right? So offensive is making the positive case why we believe what we believe. This might be like evidences for the resurrection, right, or why we should trust Scripture, the reliability of Scripture and those sorts of things, or even just the existence of God, right? And then defensive apologetics might be answering questions like, well, there are two different accounts of creation in the Bible. So clearly they're contradictory. Are they actually contradictory? Or are they maybe complementary? Or maybe they're doing two different things, right. Or the four Gospels explain one scene, one narrative in Jesus'ministry in three or four different ways. Well, there's three or four different people, and not all of them were eyewitnesses. Even Luke would say that. He went and he interviewed eyewitnesses, and he wanted to make sure that when he was writing this two part series book about Jesus'ministry and the Acts of the Apostles, what exactly happened? He didn't see it, but he went and found people who did. But then you've got like, Matthew and Mark that know there, right. And so they're saying, I saw it. This is what he said. Well, they saw from their perspective, right. And then know John follows that too. So we have differing ways that we can read the Gospels, but we have to answer some people that might say those are all contradictions. Well, not necessarily, and I would say, no, they're not. But we take that objection and we respond to it, right. Different things like that.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: So sometimes people, when you talk about apologetics, I think think of more philosophically, like, how can you prove that God exists? Right. Sometimes when you think of apologetics, some people are thinking, like, scientific or archaeological, right? Like, did a worldwide flood really happen? Those types of things. And sometimes it's more almost like faith based, right?
Maybe. What are some of these different streams of apologetics? And could you kind of talk through them a little bit, if that makes sense?
[00:20:18] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. I have a controversial opinion. Okay, let's put it out in public. Let's do it.
[00:20:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:25] Speaker C: I don't believe that apologetics is its own academic discipline.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: Okay?
[00:20:30] Speaker C: The reason why is because I think all of us are apologists, and so we are all making the case, or we're all responding to objections from our own. And if we could take this to the academic sphere for a second here.
The New Testament scholar is a New Testament scholar. They're studied in Cornet Greek and all the manuscripts, they can do the translation work, they can do the historical work and all this other stuff on the text itself, right? Same thing with the Old Testament scholar. But if they were to look at the veracity of the New Testament manuscripts and then they answer a question or they put out a proof maybe, or something like that, where they believe this is saying why we should believe it, we have a good evidence that this is what the text says. They're doing apologetics. They're doing New Testament apologetics, kind of in a way you say, like textual criticism. They're doing whatever else. The same thing in the Old Testament, which is where we get a lot of archaeology, right? Where they say, like, hey, we have Shiloh, where actually some of our students just went part of that dig site, right? And they were there. And then it's like, well, we have this named place, but I don't know where that is. And then they go find it. Well, that's evidence, right. So that's archaeological apologetics, we might say, right? It's saying people saying there's no evidence that I think there's no evidence of Pontius Pilate, that we've never found any archaeological evidence of this character. And then they find, I think it was like a ring that said literally on it, Pontius Pilate. Boom. That's apologetics. Right. In its own way, that's archaeological apologetics. It's making the point to saying, yeah, here's all this evidence that the scripture is telling the truth and it's real and it really happened, right, and all these other different things. But, yeah, you're right. You have like, scientific apologetics, philosophical apologetics. You even have like, cultural apologetics. I think if apologetics is necessarily tied to evangelism as well, if you don't believe, if you don't know what you believe about your faith, how are you going to go tell other people about it, right? And also, if you're going to go tell people about it, which you absolutely.
[00:22:34] Speaker B: Should, they're going to ask you questions.
[00:22:36] Speaker C: They're going to say, well, why?
You're a Christian, but why should I be? The next words out of your mouth is an apology, if we want to use the technical phrase, an apology. So that's your apologetics, right? It can look so many different ways, but I just think that from your own perspective and what you're doing, whatever you're studying, like history or like I said, text criticism philosophy, which is asking those big abstract questions and things like that. As soon as you relate that back to the truth of Christianity, that is apologetics. Whatever it is and from whatever perspective you're doing it from.
[00:23:14] Speaker B: And so you're of the opinion that the church is not necessarily thriving in training on apologetics.
Maybe let's start off where are some ways in which we're doing a poor job of this, and then what are some solutions? What's the path?
[00:23:33] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. So I have to be careful because at least in the Evangelical Church, it's been pretty clear to me that most people, when they come up through the church, maybe you've gone to like, VBS or Iwana, you've learned some things, you've learned some scripture and other stuff like that. But if your church was mostly about midweek, keeping the kids happy, basketball and pizza at church, right, and you get a 15 minutes sermon because kids are just constantly all over the place. So how do you keep their attention? If that's all it was, then you legitimately don't have any good reasons to believe your faith other than maybe what the Lord has done in your own life. I mean, obviously you have your own inner witness of the Holy Spirit. If you're a born again Christian, of course you have that. But then external, outside of that to know the truth of the scripture or to evangelize your friends at school or whatever. And I love this that there's a popular apologist who's been at it for a long time. His name is Dr. Frank Turek. He has a ministry called I don't have enough faith to be an atheist. And he also wrote a book called that, which is pretty awesome. He says it this way, that the students are getting talked out of their faith because they've never been talked into their faith. And that's not to say that you're just berating them and intellectually pressuring them to just confess it, say it. No. Are you giving them substance, intellectual substance to actually grip onto? I've also used this idea of having roots. How deep are your roots of your faith if they're just you just believe it because you say it or because mom and dad believed it. And they've always took us to church, and I don't know anything different. How in the world is that different from a Muslim or a Buddhist or a Hindu or Jehovah's Witness a Mormon or anything else? If that's all you've ever known? That doesn't mean it's true. Right. So we have to do better, and we can do better. And I think the church is absolutely the place that should do that, because who is better equipped than a pastor, who ideally has been to seminary, has been trained themselves, and they're passing that same stuff down. So I just don't really see a lot of ministry opportunities where students are getting trained on the deeper parts of their faith. It's more of show up, learn a little bit here or there, have some fun. Great. Make some relationships, build some friends, and then kind of go home. And then we launch them to college where someone says, how can you prove God even exists? And then they sit back and go, I have absolutely no idea. Yeah, so we've got to do better.
[00:26:11] Speaker B: So then what is that step for people that might be listening? It might be elders or serving a pastoral role or having some sort of influence in this area, and you're like, you're right, we're not doing a very good job of this.
Obviously, you don't have the foolproof solution, but what are some steps to start taking?
[00:26:31] Speaker C: Yeah, I think the very first step is to identify the people who can teach these things. And it could be your ministry staff, but it could be some lay leaders. You'd be surprised. Apologetics, I would say, is not particularly difficult, especially now. We're kind of in, like a golden age of apologetics. So there is this revamp, and I don't want to be like this Debbie Downer that says no one's doing it. Oh, there's so much great content out there. There are student guides, there's books out the wazoo everywhere, just people that are churning out this information now because we're in the technology age, and we can. Do that. Right. So there's so much really good content out there. So not knowing how to get the content is not a really good excuse anymore. It's out there for sure, identifying the people that can and will do it. But I think, like I said in the very beginning, is create a forum. Maybe it's a Sunday night. I've seen some pastors do the Sunday night, stump the pastor, where the pastor is sitting in the hot seat, which also, pastor, keep your theology up so you keep your apologetics up so you can answer those questions. Right. Or bringing in scholars, hosting conferences. But even just down into the little things is just offering it. Offering it to your students. I think that we can ask more of our students. They're capable of it. I mean, their minds are so right and ready to dig deep. They don't have to be grad students to just ask simple questions like, what's a good reason to believe that God created the heavens and the earth other than it says it in the opening verses of the Bible? Well, we can look at evidence for that. Right. So I say doing it there, offering it. Maybe it's a curriculum. Maybe it starts as a summer series. Six weeks on apologetics. Every week we're going to hit a new major proof text, or we're going to hit a major archaeological discovery that shows the veracity Old Testament or scientific apologetics. Just lots of different things like that. There's a lot of different ways it can start, but we got to do something. We have to do something. Another thing that you can do is also at summer camps, offer, if you have some sort of like a program of classes, the things that they can go to or what number.
Offer apologetics as one of those. Offer apologetics. Learn how to defend your faith. Learn how to proclaim your faith. Attach it to evangelism training. You should be doing evangelism training because people are not always going to be the most gifted to walk up to a random person and say, hey, let me tell you about Jesus.
[00:29:03] Speaker B: It seems like your focus is primarily on what are we doing with our middle and high schoolers sure. Right.
Connect that maybe to kind of the purpose of Emmaus Bible College. Right.
What is our role as a school, as an institution, kind of in this problem that you see, if that makes sense.
[00:29:22] Speaker C: Sure, yeah. I mean, I see us as being a direct solution to that problem. I mean, the students that are coming here, the students that me and my team are going out and trying to find and trying to say, hey, you're a believer. You want a college degree?
[00:29:36] Speaker B: Great.
[00:29:36] Speaker C: Come here to get a solid biblically rooted degree. Solidify you as a believer first, and then wrap around that. As I kind of like to say, wrap around that your professional degree. So if you are a believer, but you want to be an accountant. Okay, well, let's make sure that your spiritual life, your understanding of God's Word and how it applies to people theology is rooted and is solid. And then go become a fantastic accountant or a nurse or a business owner or computer science, a network manager or a teacher or whatever else it is, a coach or work at a maze, whatever you want to do, but take care of the most important part of you first. And that's what we are especially good at. It's our middle name. It's Bible. But then also we have the people that have gone and done that and specialized in those sorts of things that want to give you the very best we can so you don't have to go spend 2030 years to figure it out. We'll tell you in three semesters exactly what you need and give you the tools you need to continue on and grow in your own faith. And then hopefully, we launch those people out, as we say in our mission statement, to impact the world through their ministries, professions, and communities. We want them to launch and make immediate impacts, not just land. And then no one saw the impact. We want them to land and go, Boom.
[00:30:53] Speaker B: And make an impact for people listening. If there's recommended resources or books or anything like that that you might have for people that are like, oh, this is interesting, I haven't thought much about apologetics. I want to learn more.
[00:31:07] Speaker C: Yeah. There are three that I always say, and they're kind of different. The first one is I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Frank Turek and Norman Geisler. That's a really good one. It just shows a lot of different evidences for the faith and those sorts of things. But that's a good one. The second one would be William Lane. Craig's Book on guard. He has a more academically rigorous one called Just Reasonable Faith. But On Guard is very accessible, but it turns it up a little bit more, a little higher notch, a little bit more intellectually stimulating. And then if you want a really good one, a classic one would be Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis. So that one also, if you read it in your head with a British accent, it sounds so much cooler. Or if you get, like, me, you get the audiobook and then listen to it that way, too. It's an older style, obviously. It's from, like, mid 20th century, but, man, it's great. And it asks a lot of questions in kind of the Socratic method of asking, like, Well, I believe this, and I also believe that, well, those two things are in conflict. Well, how do I resolve that conflict? Right. So things like that.
[00:32:07] Speaker B: Great. Well, this has been great. Thank you for coming on. I'm sure we'll have you on again.
[00:32:11] Speaker C: Let's do it.
[00:32:11] Speaker B: All right. Thanks, Chris.
[00:32:14] Speaker A: Thank you for listening to concerning him on Emmaeus podcast. Ministries like Concerning Him are possible because of the generous contributions from our partners around the world. For more information about partnering with us, please visit aus.edu partner.
