How to be a Balanced Apologist

In your, how many years of apologetics are you dealing with Muslims?

And then I want to ask you, there's a lot of youngsters that are drawn to apologetics because it's a fight.

And you've mentioned earlier that it's not in everybody's temperament, in actual fact, to effectively participate in debates.

That's true. Do you want to comment a little bit to that and also speak to the youngsters that are coming up? And let me just say, they never had a theological interest in the

Bible, but now predominantly it's to find arguments in the text. So they go to the scriptures. They basically have the temperament of,

I need to find an answer for everything. Even in the devotion and didactic, it's all about picking the right responses and having the right say.

What would you say to youngsters like that? Because we've got quite a few, to be very honest with you. Yeah, yeah, we do. So Islam has been the last major subject that I've addressed.

My first debate was in 1990, so we're coming up on 30 years as far as the debates go.

And the ministry had begun about seven years prior to that, so we're coming up on 40 years of ministry.

But honestly, not everyone is called to do this kind of work.

And I normally tell people who come up to me after a debate and go, I want to get into apologetics.

I say, if there's anything else you can do, you need to do it. Because you don't see all the preparation.

You don't see all the other stuff that goes into it. And not everyone is. For me, when

I'm attacked, I just become all the more calm. I figure the person's losing the debate right now by the way they're behaving.

So a lot of people do not react that way and respond that way.

They just go toe to toe. And so those are some of the things you have to look at yourself.

You may not even be able to honestly analyze yourself. You might want to ask a mature, older person to analyze you as to whether you have the gifts to be able to engage in that type of stuff.

But I was talking to someone after a debate just last week, and they were struggling with some of these issues.

And what I said was, for me, the greatest thing that has helped me keep my balance over the years has been the fact that I've always been a churchman.

I've always been involved with the church. I've been preaching and teaching, and you can't preach every sermon as a primer on apologetics.

You have to deal with the word and what it really says, and not everything that the word says is about apologetics.

And so being involved with the church, teaching wide varieties of different types of people has kept me grounded.

And I really think for apologists, that's vitally important. Sadly, apologists are not well known for being churchmen.

They tend to be lone wolves, off on their own, doing their own thing. I think that's massively destructive to them.

I can think of lots of former apologists that are atheists today because they burned out and they didn't have the right motivations.

And so, yeah, being in the church is, I think, the most important thing, and being involved in doing ministry that isn't involving yelling and screaming at somebody, or always answering a question, or always answering an objection.