The Defending Your Faith online course is available 24/7 after registration, affording you the freedom of completing each lesson at your own pace and convenience.
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Course Summary

This 9-lesson course equips you to answer tough questions about the Christian faith without sounding defensive, narrow-minded, illogical, or out of touch. Defending Your Faith is presented in a practical manner to assist you in becoming more caring and skillful in conversational apologetics. The word apologetics means a reasoned defense or answer. The course will boost your competence and confidence to articulate, defend, and share your faith with friends and family in a loving way.


Course Format

The Defending Your Faith online course uses hour long recorded lectures, video resources and a written lesson plan to communicate the majority of material. We also strongly recommend three books to supplement the information in the course. In addition there are discussion questions that will give you the opportunity to start spiritual conversations with your friends and family.


Course Content

Defending Your Faith will focus on helping you formulate a reasoned defense to age-old questions that Christians are traditionally leery of. We will tackle specific questions such as:

  • Does God Exist?
  • How Could a Good God Allow So Much Pain & Suffering?
  • How Could a Loving God Send People to Hell?
  • Can the Bible be Trusted?
  • Is Jesus Really the Only Way?
  • Why Are Christians So Closed-minded About Sex?
  • Don’t All Religions Lead to the Same God?
  • What About Those Who Have Never Heard the Gospel?
Recommended Reading Materials
A New Kind of Apologist
Defending the Christian faith
in our changing culture
Purchase Now
Questioning Evangelism
Apologetics and Evangelism
Like Jesus Did
Purchase Now
Confronting Christianity
12 Questions challenging authentic
Christianity
Purchase Now
Resource Endorsements

Read this book [A New Kind of Apologist] and be armed to defend the faith and love the lost.

Russell Moore President, Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission

What Sean McDowell and his team have done in A New Kind of Apologist is give us a fresh look at what a defender of the faith ought to be and how to speak the truth in love.

Skip Heitzig Senior Pastor, Calvary Albuquerque

With its collection of diverse voices approaching apologetics from a myriad of angles, A New Kind of Apologist is exactly the sort of resource Christians need to respond winsomely to the unique topics, and the unique tone, of our time.

Brett McCracken Author of Hipster Christianity: When Church and Cool Collide

Questioning Evangelism…is a must read for those who want to bring apologetics into evangelism in a biblical and relationally sensitive sort of way.

J.P. Moreland Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology

Distilled out of twenty years of personal evangelism, this book [Questioning Evangelism] reflects both a deep grasp of biblical theology and a penetrating compassion for people. How very much like the Master himself!

D. A. Carson Professor of New Testament, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

Apologetics with heart, discernment, empathy, and rigorous study. Confronting Christianity will help you understand the hard questions of the Christian faith while also igniting a love for neighbor.

Trillia Newbell Author of If God Is For Us and Fear and Faith

Readers will find themselves expertly guided on a journey that involves them not only in confronting Christianity but also in confronting themselves—their worldviews, hopes, fears, failures and search for identity and satisfaction.

John C. Lennox Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, University of Oxford

In the West, many people…think they already know what Christianity is about. In this bombshell of a book packed with myth-busting statistics, McLaughlin reveals the many surprises in authentic Christianity.

Peter J. Williams Principal, Tyndale House, Cambridge
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Course Syllabus

The following topics and questions will be covered in a thorough systematic way throughout the nine (9) lessons.

COURSE SCHEDULE
A 9-Lesson Course to Help You Answer Tough Questions About Your Faith
LESSON FOCUS
  • 1 │  Foundations to Apologetics
  • 2 │  Does God Exist?
  • 3 │  How Could a Good God Allow So Much Pain & Suffering?
  • 4 │  How Could a Loving God Send People to Hell?
  • 5 │  Can the Bible be Trusted?
  • 6 │  Is Jesus Really the Only Way?
  • 7 │  Why Are Christians So Closed-minded About Sex?
  • 8 │  Don’t All Religions Lead to the Same God?
  • 9 │  What About Those Who’ve Never Heard the Gospel?
Learning Outcomes

This compelling course will equip you with knowledge, useful tools, and practical skills to articulate, defend, and share your faith with competence and confidence. Successful completion of this course will give the student the ability to:

  1. Analyze, understand, and be able to articulate the arguments for and against historic Christianity in a caring manner.
  2. Clearly explain and defend the biblical position affirming humanity’s need for salvation and God’s plan and provision for humanity’s salvation.
  3. Understand and be able to think critically from a biblical and Christian worldview.
  4. Learn verbal, theological, and biblical strategies in order to refute various types of fallacies while developing persuasive arguments in support of the Christian faith.
  5. Express the desire and right attitude needed to “always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have” (1 Peter 3:15).
Applying the Course

The Christian faith ultimately requires the learner to become an exemplary doer. The followers of Jesus who became powerful disciples have always embraced the evangelistic demands of the gospel. Defending Your Faith teaches a conversational approach to applying these apologetic lessons.

You will be taught how to use the following fourfold strategy to share Christ with the people in your sphere of influence. This strategic approach to conversational apologetics and evangelism will help better prepare you to convince men of the claims of Christianity and defend its relevance.

  1. CONNECT with—To effectively connect with others you must first listen to them. Understand their heart, their objections to the Christian faith, and their sticking points.
  2. PRAY for—In prayer, ask God for opportunities to have spiritual conversations with friends and acquaintances. Invite the Lord to remove their stumbling blocks and bring them to Christ.
  3. REASON with—Sharing your faith is most effective when you reason with the other person. They get a chance to ask questions and discover answers that they can call their own.
  4. INVITE to—To offer your friend an accelerated approach to drawing closer to God, consider inviting them to services or events at your church.