In my recent blog, An Apologist in Every Church, I wrote that pastors are often too busy to keep up with things like The Da Vinci Code or The Lost Tomb of Jesus or the Gospel of Judas and that these issues trouble many congregants and so build a wedge between them and complete confidence in Jesus. Thus, I wrote that we need an apologist in every church to help the congregation with these issues.
In a comment to that blog, Shawn asked, “While I agree that pastors are severely overworked/booked with their schedules…. isn’t this part of the requirements and role of the elders? Shouldn’t they be able to handle these types of issues and protect the congregation from error? Isn’t that what Paul charged Timothy and Titus with when selecting leadership?”
The answer is yes and no.
It is true that one of the requirements of the pastor/elder is that they should be able to defend sound doctrine. Thus Paul wrote in Titus 1:9 that the elder “must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.” So pastors and elders must know what is, and isn’t, sound doctrine and be able to correct those who misuse it. That is the kind of apologist that every pastor must be.
However, in this one-click age where new arguments against God are as ubiquitous as cow patties at a dairy farm, I don’t think that every pastor is obligated to respond to every one of them. It takes many hours to answer these notions!
Of course, sometimes the pastor may be very skilled in apologetics. For example, the pastor of my church has been an adjunct professor at Talbot for the last 21 years and has taught apologetic classes for our university, but not every pastor needs to be a skilled apologist (except in defending sound doctrine)!
But I wish someone in every congregation would!
The church needs people who can answer these tough questions and, at the end of the day, apologists are teachers trained to do this. If you are a pastor, I strongly encourage you to encourage some kind, spiritually mature people in your congregation to learn to answer the hard questions that trouble many Christians.
Why, come to think of it, they could even join our program!
2 Corinthians 10:5: “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”
Amen.
Dr. Jones,
Thanks for that short and sweet summary. I am working on preparing the churches in my city to adopt this very concept. Also, I will be joining you within the next couple of days for the start of my MACP!
P.s. I will stick with the title Dr. Jones, it will make talking with my friends about my course work seem not just intriguing but extraordinarily adventurous!
I like what you wrote, and agree…but it stirs frustrating thoughts in me that apologists I’ve had discussions with are very often stuck in communicating just what they have learned – maybe even more stuck than God fearing believers who dig in his word without so many rules trained into their heads. Sorry for the generalization. Where the Bible is more full of wonder than we ever will imagine, scholarly types seem to explain things in a much narrower view – seemingly protecting the world for God. I pray you are helping new apologists discern errors in doctrine vs. ideas they have never heard or considered before.
Hi Clay, I heard your interview on Apologetics 315. I see you’re an expert on the problem of evil and that you think people should take seriously the notion of free will.
I was wondering if you have read the two chapters in my book on the subject. Here are two blog posts I wrote on the subject:
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2007/09/nature-and-value-of-free-will.html
See also this:
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2006/10/paul-copan-and-free-will-in-heaven.html
Cheers.
Sorry for the delay, John, I’ve been busy. Do you believe that humans have free will?
Clay
I agree, and think that any church with an Education Pastor slot, and definately the youth pastor slot (look at the statistics of youth leaving church upon graduating HS) needs to have someone with an apologetics background fill that position. Too many churches have M.Div folks in almost all pastor positions these days, and as lauded as the M.Div programs are at just about every evangelical seminary out there, the quality of pastors and assistant pastors they have collectively produced across America is…well, just look at the current state of evangelicalism and make the connections.
I intentionally went for the apologetics program at Biola rather than an M.Div program anywhere so as to insure I don’t become part of the problem, but part of the solution with evangelicalism these days.
As long as “jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none” M.Div degrees are held in such high esteem among evangelicals they NO LONGER deserve (maybe it was different thirty years ago), the same cookie-cutter people will be churned out of seminaries to lead our churches into the intellectual gutter.
This may sound anecdotal, but every person I have met that got a M.Div in the last ten years from anywhere can’t really proclaim the Gospel, can’t exegete and exposit texts, and can’t answer tough questions. They just look for a post somewhere to give themselves the opportunity to spew out their versions of the five week sermon series on whatever latest “relevant” drivel that crosses their minds paired with three proof-texts or so.
There is a correlation between the anemic modern evangelical churches and the seminary programs that put out the leaders of them…armed with the M.Div as it is today.