Create a safe culture where asking questions is understood as a good thing.
New generations are often suspicious of churches giving one-way teaching and unintentionally creating a feeling that it’s a bad thing to ask questions. Create an environment that encourages questions—even difficult ones.
Sadly, I have heard many stories of those who have approached the pastor of a church with a question that may have been troubling them, and the leader treated them as though they were doing something wrong by even thinking of the question.
In contrast, the people of the city of Berea (Acts 17) were seen as “noble” because they heard teaching but then looked deeper. In sermons and other public forums, specifically state that asking questions is a good thing.
Encourage inquiry. And make it easy for people to raise their questions, whether through email, a question box at a kiosk or through social media.
Hold forums on difficult topics and theological questions.
Create opportunities for open dialogue on theology and apologetics. We have great success whenever we bring in theology or Bible professors and have open forums with them.
During a teaching series on a topic, we sometimes end it with a theology forum of open questions. We sometimes follow a one-week Sunday teaching by a guest speaker with an afternoon or evening open forum with that speaker. We have done them in our church with professors on the difficult questions from the Old Testament, on the validity of the New Testament documents, on sexuality and the Bible, on the issue of science and the Genesis account, on the doctrine of hell, and others topics.
It is amazing to see the interest, the interaction—the positive response to a different way of teaching doctrine and apologetics.
Don’t offer simple answers if there aren’t simple answers.
I believe there are some apologetics teaching and books written that give overly simplistic answers to very difficult questions. It’s not enough to quote a verse or two to prove a point.
A simple, take-it-or-leave-it, case-closed approach to difficult questions will quickly lose people’s trust. When we teach on difficult or sensitive topics, we need to make sure we are not dismissing challenging questions or understandable perplexity with simplistic, tidy responses.
When there are clear answers, we should not shy away from giving them just because they’re difficult teachings. The flip side is that it’s not a weakness to say, “I don’t know for sure”; it actually increases respect.
Our primary “apologetic” is love. But we must also be ready to offer reasonable answers to this generation’s most difficult questions, both in our individual contacts with people and in the life and teaching of the church.
