Cultivating Intelligent Engagement with Common Objections

Recently I was looking over the Effective Ministry stuff again. These common objections caught my eye (numbers are percentages for people in their twenties):

• Irrelevant        13
• It’s for non-copers        17
• Set of rules        5
• Science disproves it        6
• No proof        10
• For the well off        2
• The only way?        9
• Problem of suffering        31
• Truth of the Bible        27
• Good, but not for me        21
• Too many hypocrites        5
• I’m not good enough        5
• Other        3

It got me thinking, "Where are we equipping our people to intelligently engage with these common objections?". It's not hard to relate any of them back to the gospel, either, as (for example) Tim Keller has shown in The Reason for God.

But then a second reflection came to mind: perhaps there's an implicit assumption that undergirds all of these objections. Let me put it positively in the language of a hypothetical objector:

"I want to be thoughtful about how I live in this world, and why I live that way. And I just don't think churches are in the habit of intelligently engaging with real issues with satisfying depth."

As an axiom, it's kinda the flip-side of the naming of the Brights Movement, for example.

So what? Well, if I'm right, then...

• we've gotta assume that our public communication (e.g. advertising for church) has to punch through that assumption to register anything more than glib dismissal.
• where we fail to engage with current issues, it will more likely be taken as deriving from our inability to do so, rather than our burden for evangelism-ahead-of-apologetics.
• the task of training our people in winsome apologetics paves the way for evangelism methodologically, as well as topically.
• the way we engage is important--and I don't mean rhetoric. But as we carefully articulate our engagement with any of the above topics (or indeed, something else altogether), we undermine the knock-down strength of all of them by illustrating the depth and integrity of Christian thought.