Canadian Evangelism

I was thinking again about how I, as an Alpha person should interact with atheists sceptics or even seekers. Should I preach hellfire and brimstone? Frankly, I don't think that works very well anymore. I'm not sure that Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, preached before a crowd of today's non-believers would meet with the same response as when Jonathan Edwards first delivered it. So here is an approach I think might be reasonable, at least to those with ears to hear. My real objective is to get people at least questioning, to the point that they may want to come to an Alpha to hear more. I believe there is a God who created the atoms and molecules that go together to make up everything we see around us. I believe this God has offered us the opportunity for a relationship with him, by entering this world in the person of His son, Jesus Christ and dying on the cross. I believe we are free either to accept or to reject this relationship. I believe this life is not t...

The next thing I want to examine, and I think many atheists haven’t thought this completely through, is the whole area of free will and rational thought. In fact Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist who has, apparently, given this some thought (although I would argue, not enough) has said, “This is a question that I dread.” And here’s the problem – the atheist, or let’s say, the naturalist (a person who believes that everything must be within the realm of the purely natural, or physical) must believe that our minds, like everything else, are nothing but, as atheist Lawrence Krauss puts it, “particles in motion.” Krauss in fact gets the ramifications of his position. He says that we really don't have free will. I, of course, don’t pretend to know the entire workings of the human brain, but to put it very simply, all our thoughts are just the result of electrons travelling along certain pathways in our brains – everything is physical.    So let me try something....

I have said that I grew up in a small town in Southern Ontario. My walk to and from school was about a kilometer. I remember in 1953 coming home from school and, from a distance, seeing something brand new - a television aerial on the roof of our house. My whole family had been talking about getting a TV and looking forward to it for weeks. Finally it was here. We were so excited. It was a grainy little black and white TV, as deep as it was wide, on four spindly legs, but we loved it. We got three channels. My brothers and I huddled around it watching all our favourite movies and shows. I now have a 42” colour flat screen on my wall. Larger and larger ones seem to be becoming available all the time. As much as I loved that first TV, I would never want to go back to it. To me, the Christian life is like the flat screen, and my life before knowing God in the way I do now was like that old grainy black and white. As much as we loved it at the time, I would never want ...

Walter Martin, founder of the Christian Research Institute, put it this way: There are two possibilities; either something in the universe is eternal, or something came from nothing. If something came from nothing, we have to ask, “OK, how?” How did something come from nothing? I mean absolutely nothing - anything that was there before the beginning is not nothing. And for those who insist on proving everything scientifically, how does one explain this.   So… first possibility – something is eternal. If this is the case, we have to ask, “What is it?" Two choices - it must either be matter, or whatever created matter. I can’t see a third alternative. Either matter – that is all the atoms and molecules in the universe - have been here forever, or at some time in the past they didn’t exist and then they somehow began to exist. But that still leaves the question; if matter is eternal, where did it come from? How did it come into being in the first place? If it came into be...

Alberta2013 was a media campaign for Alpha in Alberta, Canada, in the fall of 2013. The tag line was, “Question Everything.”   I remember seeing a comment on a website to the effect that if everyone questioned everything there would be a lot more atheists, and I thought immediately, “No, there would be a lot fewer.”   I came to faith at the age of 45, so I’ve been on both sides of this theistic fence, so to speak, and recently enough to remember both sides. And I’m not stupid. Years ago I applied for membership in Mensa and fell a half a percentile short. I don’t say that as a boast, just to point out that to be a theist, to believe in God, doesn’t automatically mean one has a low IQ. Many of the most intelligent people throughout history have been theists, and I don’t think any reasonable person could accuse them of being stupid or gullible. I have a sort of engineering mind – I like to see how things work. I like to see things make sense. I like to see how things fit t...