A vision statement we should all embrace

At our church, Emmanuel Faith, the board and pastor have released a vision statement for the year 2020. This sets up their view of what the church should emphasize over the next ten years. I wanted to tell you about one part that struck me as vitally important for Christians everywhere.

Here's the sentence that I wanted to focus on: "We will train all generations in our church family to know, explain and defend what we believe in order to engage and impact our culture for Christ."

Why is this important to me? Because this is the area of apologetics, a rational defense of the Christian faith. The church has awakened to the value of apologetics as part of a way to reach a secular age. Back in the 1980s a movie came out about Jesus that the church felt was unfair--The Last Temptation of Christ. What was the reaction? People went to the studios in L.A. to protest. Not a very intellectually satisfying thing to do, and not a way to show the world where the truth lay. Compare that to the Christian reaction to The Da Vinci Code, another in a long line of attempts to discredit Christianity. This time many good books poured forth, strongly rebutting the history and theology of Dan Brown. Christianity showed it had good reasons to oppose the message of this book.

Many Christian teens go off to college and walk away from their faith. Is it because the professor have some powerful insights that can wreck Christianity? Nope. Instead, these teens have never heard of how to defend their faith from false and misleading charges. They don't know there are good, sound, rational reasons to believe there is real truth, that there is a God, that the New Testament is reliable, that Jesus existed and did what the gospels say he did.

I'm glad the vision statement sees the importance of apologetics, which needs to be presented to "all generations" as the statement reads. It's not a philosophical exercise for pointy-headed older people. All Christians, no matter their age or scholarly abilities, should be shown how to think through their faith. Christianity, in the words of Greg Koukl, is "worth thinking about." I hope your church feels the same way.