S. Michael Houdmann speaks at Calvary University chapel service

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July 17, 2018

President and Founder of GotQuestions.org, S. Michael Houdmann, speaking at a Calvary University chapel service in April of 2018.

00:04: So, good morning, everyone. I attended Calvary Bible College, graduated in 1998, and I graduated from the seminary in 2001.
00:14: And I was talking with some current Calvary students and performers, and you guys have it pretty easy.
00:20: When we were here, there was chapel five days a week. We had to walk uphill both ways to the chapel in the snow, wearing skirts, both the men and the women.
00:33: I mean, it was terrible, so you guys have it pretty easy, but it's my privilege this morning to come and just share some of the amazing things
00:40: God's been doing. And at Calvary, my undergraduate degree was biblical studies, which is the degree program you take if you have no idea what
00:49: God wants to do with your life. Graduated, still had no clue, so did the logical thing, went to seminary, got a master's degree in Christian theology, which is the degree program you take if you have no idea what
01:01: God wants to do with your life. But now looking back, it was the perfect training for what
01:06: I do every day, which is providing biblically -based answers to people's spiritually -related questions on the internet, which, when
01:13: I started Bible College, barely even existed. So you may be studying and not have any idea what
01:20: God's calling you to, and there's a chance that what God's calling you doesn't even exist yet. So if you feel a little unclear, unsure of what
01:27: God wants you to do, don't worry. He'll reveal it to you at the right time. I just wanted to share a little bit about what
01:33: God's doing through gotquestions .org. So just a quick show of hands, how many of you have ever used the website before?
01:39: Good. The vast majority, so that's awesome. Pretty simple concept. We wanted to provide a place where people could come, ask any spiritually -related questions, and they would provide them with a biblically -based answer.
01:50: I launched the website in February of 2002, so it's been around for a little over 16 years now.
01:56: There are over 4 .1 billion people worldwide with access to the internet.
02:02: That is approximately 54 % of the world's population. This is growing rapidly. Since we launched the website in February of 2002, we've sent email answers to over 536 ,000 questions.
02:14: That's a lot of questions. There's probably no one who's asked more questions over the last 16 years than me, so that's exciting and frustrating at the same time.
02:25: Pretty simple concept. If someone were to ask a question, they'd just give us their email address, in this case,
02:30: Dr. Cohn. He would ask us the question, does God exist? Well, I've talked with Dr. Cohn. He does know the answer to this one.
02:36: Let's say he didn't, and we would respond with an email that answers that question. The anonymity of it is really powerful.
02:43: How many of you have ever had a question you really want to know the answer to, but you didn't know who you could ask? Maybe you're too embarrassed to ask a pastor or a friend or a teacher.
02:52: The fact that we don't know them and they don't know us really frees people up to ask the questions that they've always wanted to know the answer to, but have always been a little embarrassed about.
03:00: Well, once we started allowing this, we started seeing the same questions coming in over and over and over again. So we started building up the website to have all the most common, frequently asked questions there for people to find.
03:10: So if people had the question, does God exist, they could perform a search for it. They could browse to our questions about God category, find our article that answers the question.
03:20: And on this webpage, there's multiple different ways people can find an answer to that question. We currently have over 5 ,800 frequently asked questions on the website divided into 30 different categories to help people to easily find the answers to their questions.
03:37: At one point, I can't remember which professor it was, and this was a long time ago, so none of you are guilty of this, but I think it was in the soteriology class that people had to write a paper on, can a
03:48: Christian lose salvation? Well, the professor started noticing not plagiarism, but a lot of the papers he was getting were very, very similar in their theme and their flow.
04:00: And so he went online, performed a search, and found that a lot of students were using our gotquestions .org
04:06: article as a help for their paper. And so he came back to the class and told them, look, if you're going to use another source, you should at least reference it in some sort, especially if it's from a
04:20: Calvary graduate of a site that we're all aware of. So that was interesting to us, the thought of us being plagiarized never even crossed my mind.
04:29: Tough questions, top questions. Think of anything controversial, and these are going to be the questions we get most often.
04:36: Controversial doctrinal questions or questions in society that people struggle with. Tough questions.
04:42: These are often ones where, why did God allow this, and then insert some horrible life tragedy that just happened to them.
04:49: Questions where we can't really say, biblically, here's why God allowed it. We can try to comfort them, try to encourage them, but some questions we really can't answer.
04:59: In addition to the autocorrect fails, we just get a lot of funny questions. Questions that people really don't know what they're asking, or they do know what they're asking and they asked it very wrongly.
05:13: So I thought I'd share a few more of these just to show you some of the stuff we have to deal with. With all the people at the
05:19: Pool of Bethesda, why did Jesus only heal one paralegal? Think paralytic is what they were going for there.
05:27: Is it wrong if a small part of you doesn't want Jesus to come back until after? Avengers Infinity War.
05:36: And I'm ashamed to admit that might be my question. Can GotQuestions .org
05:42: help me with my Sunday massages? No, we can't. What does the
05:49: Bible say about shellfishness? I think that's when Professor Williamson eats all the shrimp, that's what shellfishness is.
05:57: If two of every animal could fit on the ark, how could the Israelites carry it around? Noah's Ark, Ark of the
06:07: Covenant, two different arks. Is it wrong to marry a demon -possessed woman?
06:17: Not only is it wrong, it is also a very, very bad idea. And then, is it wrong to take homeless people bowling and then gamble on which one of them will win?
06:30: So, this is a very condensed version of the question, but this is the gist of it. And to answer, that's wrong on so many levels,
06:36: I don't even know where to begin. We take the top questions, the tough questions, the funny questions.
06:43: God's doing some amazing things. In just the first three months of this year, we've had over 26 million visitors to the website.
06:50: Viewing webpages over 57 million times. Answered over 13 ,000 questions. We have a question of the week email that goes out to people, over 333 ,000 subscribers to that.
07:00: And we have over 250 volunteers who help us answer all the questions that we receive and write articles for the website.
07:06: So, it's growing and growing and growing. Most exciting thing I love to share. We have webpages on the site that are just dedicated to sharing the gospel based on a different way of answering the question.
07:17: How can I know for sure I go to heaven when I die? Is there life after death? How can I receive forgiveness from God?
07:23: So, same answer, but it's presented a little differently. In the first three months of this year, the pages that present the gospel have been viewed nearly 1 .3
07:31: million times. And we've had over 51 ,000 people make professions of new faith in Christ.
07:37: How many of these are first time, genuine decisions to receive Christ? We don't know. This is just what people are professing to us.
07:43: But imagine if even 10 % or 1 % of those are people coming to faith in Christ. That's a lot of people.
07:52: The search engines are our primary mission field. I know everyone's familiar with Google. It's a great research tool for homework.
08:00: But 85 % of our visitors find GotQuestions .org through Googling something. Something spiritually related, they
08:07: Google for it. One of our articles comes up near the top of the results. So, to give you a quick example, what is
08:15: Good Friday? Good Friday was not that long ago. For 363 days a year, no one really searches for this.
08:22: For two or three days of the year, this is a very popular search term. Well, you search for it, the GotQuestions .org
08:27: article is in the number one spot right below the definition. So, on this one day, hundreds of thousands of people land on our article that answers the question, what is
08:36: Good Friday? Most people, oh, that's the Friday before Easter. What's the big deal? Why is it good if that's the day that Jesus was crucified?
08:43: Why is this day on my calendar? That sort of thing. On this page, there's multiple different ways that people can find the answer to the question.
08:51: There's video, audio, a printer -friendly version, links to two different pages of the Gospel, ways to share it on social media, and then translations of the article, which we'll talk a little bit more about in a minute.
09:03: God has really given us a passion for translation. I mean, it's not just people in the United States who have access to the internet.
09:09: It's not just people who speak English who have questions. So, people all over the world are searching online for answers.
09:15: We have content online in 156, 166 different languages. Approximately 57 % of our traffic is from outside the
09:25: United States. We have question and answer teams in 15 different languages, where we actually have teams of people who can receive questions in Portuguese or Spanish or Chinese, and then provide a biblically -based answer.
09:38: Approximately 90 % of the world population can speak one of these 15 languages as a first or second language.
09:45: Our top 30 countries. USA is by far the number one, but a lot of countries on this list, maybe ones you wouldn't expect, some of them you would.
09:56: It's amazing to see some of the other countries on the list. I think the two visits from North Korea were someone trying to hack our website, and I hope that the one visitor from Vatican City was the
10:08: Pope, because I think he's got the wrong answer on a few things. And then even getting local.
10:17: I think GotQuestions is all over the world, but look at Missouri, over 380 ,000 visitors in the first three months of this year.
10:24: Some of the top cities listed there. Did you know that YouTube is the number two search engine in the world?
10:34: So more people use YouTube to search for stuff than Yahoo, Bing, or any other of the search engines.
10:41: Well, we're finally getting caught up with video. The autocorrect fail video is not really what I'm talking about, but it's okay.
10:48: We have around 100 video -based answers to questions, so that people search on YouTube, they can find answers there as well.
10:54: And just in the first three months this year, those videos were viewed over 483 ,000 times. We have a few other sites in our network.
11:01: We have compellingtruth .org, which is kind of a site a little more apologetics and worldview -focused.
11:07: We have 412teens .org. 412 standing for 1 Timothy 4 .12. Can anyone tell me what 1
11:14: Timothy 4 .12 is? Come on, you're Bible college students. Surely someone. Did not anyone look down on you because you were young?
11:24: 412teens .org. Bibleref .com, which is an online verse -by -verse commentary on the
11:30: Bible. There are 31 ,000 -plus verses in the Bible, and it's our goal to have a webpage on every single one of them trying to explain what that verse means itself and in its context.
11:42: And then GQkids .org, which is our site for smaller kids. It's based on the theme of a
11:47: Christian kids' camp, and it's really interesting that... So Melissa, my wife, grew up at Raccoon River Bible Camp in Iowa, and Raccoon River Bible Camp actually has a representative here today.
11:58: Not planned at all. So I served there for two summers. Melissa served there as slave laborer with her parents for the first 18 years of her life.
12:09: So if any of you are looking for something to do this summer, I would highly endorse Raccoon River Bible Camp. It's a great experience, great people, great chance to minister to kids there.
12:18: So please see their tables in two different spots out there somewhere if you're interested.
12:26: How can you help? Well, I'm glad you asked. Volunteer to serve. So I know with all the papers you have to write, nothing would excite you more than to be writing more stuff for more people.
12:36: But maybe after you graduate, if writing is a passion of yours, we'd love to have you serve.
12:44: Bible college educated people are ideal writers for us. Please spread the word. If people ask you a question, maybe you don't know the answer or don't know the best way to answer it or don't have time, just tell them, hey, there's this website, gotquestions .org,
12:57: that this is what they specialize in. And please be in prayer for us. The Internet's a spiritual battlefield just like anyone else.
13:05: Some of the other top sites on the Internet that provide biblically -based answers are by the Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses.
13:11: So it's a conflict online just like anywhere else. So please pray for discernment, for protection, for guidance.
13:18: There's so many things we could be doing online, but we want to focus on what will God use us in the most effective way.
13:25: So I think this is the Q &A time. I want to start by saying that someone has dubbed you the co -author of more than half of all
13:42: CD papers. Do I get credit for that? Honorary doctorate, maybe?
13:53: So do you have a particular passage in the Bible that really kind of sparked you this direction and is kind of your driving force behind what you're doing?
14:02: We've got questions .org. I'm probably going to get the reference wrong. I hope not.
14:08: 1 Timothy, no, 1 Peter 3 .15. Always be prepared to give an answer for anyone asks you for the reason they hope that you have.
14:18: But do this with gentleness and respect. A lot of people get the first part right, they give a good answer, but they fail to do it with gentleness and respect.
14:26: You've got to do both. You can win a battle and a debate, but lose the war by turning someone off.
14:32: So you've got to do both. Is that 1 Peter 3 .15? Is that the right verse? Okay, good. Yes, ma 'am.
14:54: So when someone submits a question to us, one of our employees then logs in and sees the database list of all the different questions, and they'll assign that question to one of our volunteers, one of the 250 people who help us answer it all.
15:06: And that person researches it, writes it, and even gets help from other people that he or she knows, and then sends the answer back to us, and then a member of our team then reviews the answer before it's approved and sent out to the person who asked the question.
15:24: Exactly. There's an application process. We ask someone to state whether they're in agreement with our statement of faith, and if not, what points do you disagree with?
15:34: There's certain points we can, okay, if you disagree with us on our view of the end times, okay, we're not going to assign you any questions that are related to the end times, but you can answer a whole bunch of other questions.
15:44: But we get people who want to serve and they disagree with us on virtually everything. Well, that's not a good fit.
15:51: So we ask them to share their testimony with us and then answer a test question, both to see can they answer a question biblically and can they write intelligibly?
16:03: Because writing is hard, and there's a lot of people I've met, pastors who are amazing public speakers, but who are just terrible writers.
16:12: You can ask two more. Keep asking, it's fine. Okay. So my wife and I, Melissa, when we launched the site, we had no idea it was going to be anything big.
16:29: We truly thought it was going to be a hobby that we did in addition to whatever real ministry
16:34: God called us to. So I graduated from Calvary Seminary. I was teaching at Red Ridge Baptist Church, was where we were going at the time.
16:45: And I was the supervisor of the shipping department for a ministry here in town, not exactly using my biblical and theological training very much.
16:51: So we were just praying, Lord, give us a ministry outlet that would be a perfect fit for me.
16:57: I've always loved technology, always loved to write. The internet was just starting to really get popular.
17:04: So launched it, and within a few months, we're getting 30, 40, 50 questions a day because there's such a huge need for it.
17:11: No one was doing it. If they were, they were burying their ask a question page 10 pages deep to make it really hard to find.
17:18: So the fact that we were out there, come here, ask us your questions. That's what we're here for. That's really what drove the growth, especially in the beginning.
17:27: How often do you get questions that are from,
17:33: I guess, I wouldn't really say skeptics, but just people that are against what you're doing, and are they easy to identify?
17:40: No one has ever disagreed with us on anything. It's amazing. Fairly often, and even when someone's expressing disagreements, as long as they're doing it respectfully, we will respond with an answer to their question.
18:00: If it's filled with four -letter words, the bad kind of four -letter words, the delete key comes in very handy sometimes.
18:08: But as Jesus taught, don't throw your pearls before swine. So when someone's identifying themselves as swine very early in the process, it's very unlikely we're going to have an effective outreach to this person.
18:18: So we'd rather invest our time and resources in people who really want to hear our answers. But we'll engage in debates as long as it's respectful, as long as there's a chance of it actually being productive.
18:30: But we've gotten pretty good at recognizing trolls when they show up. We are funded about 80 % donations, and then about 20 % other
18:56: Christian ministries we allow to advertise on the website. So we're a 501c3 non -profit organization.
19:01: Emphasis on the non -profit side. God's been amazing. When I first became an employee of the ministry, the ministry had $1 ,500 in the bank, and that was going to be my one month's salary at the time.
19:18: We've never missed a paycheck. We've got eight employees and contractors doing all kinds of stuff. It's been amazing to see
19:24: God work. We've never struggled financially, and that's a huge blessing.
19:32: How can we as Christians become teachable through asking questions? When you're answering a question, apply a message to yourself.
19:47: You think with 500 ,000 plus questions we've been asked everything possible, but it's not true.
19:54: We're still getting questions like, wow, I can't believe I've never thought about this issue before. Just being teachable in yourself,
20:00: I want to learn this. With me being the boss, I can go through the system and pick out questions.
20:06: I really want to answer this one, and this one, and this one. I'll leave all the others for someone else. It's picking stuff that you don't know about and not always picking the easy ones.
20:16: Pick ones that will challenge you, yourself. What does John 3 .16 mean? That's a great question to answer, but it's something
20:22: I've hoped you've dealt with before. Sometimes pick the challenging ones. Pick the ones that require you to research and really dig in.
20:29: Yeah. Have you ever gotten a question...
20:35: Yes. That's going to be your answer.
20:41: Have you ever gotten a question you couldn't answer or felt like you couldn't answer? We'll tack on, what did you do with that?
20:49: I mentioned earlier, why does God allow questions? Why does
20:55: God allow this certain tragedy in my life and my family, or so forth? You can speculate. You can say,
21:02: God works everything together for good for those who love Him. You've been called according to His purpose. You can give those type of answers, but usually the person's just hurting.
21:11: Sometimes giving them, well, God comforts those who struggle. God will eventually explain to you why this happened.
21:20: That may not even be true. We've all had tragedies in our life that we still don't understand. So sometimes those type of questions are best to just give a compassionate response.
21:30: I'm so sorry this has happened to you. I'll be praying for you. Please continue to trust in God, even when you don't understand why
21:37: He allowed something. They're not looking for a theology lesson when they ask that type of question.
21:42: Yeah. So is there topics you have a policy not to talk on?
21:50: Where you would just say, no, we're just not going to answer that question? Or are you just kind of open to anything and everything?
21:56: So we have several trained counselors on staff, but an email conversation or even reading an article online is not the best method for counseling.
22:07: So anytime we answer, especially if the person is suicidal or threatening violence or something like that, we're like, look, we give them a response, but we strongly encourage that you speak with a pastor or Christian counselor, someone in person, because we can't minister.
22:26: Or you get marriage counseling questions where you're only getting one side of the story, the wife or husband's telling you how horrible the opposite spouse is, and I'm like, you know, please see a
22:39: Christian counselor. But look, if everything you say is true, here's the biblical answer, but things tend to get messy in those situations.
22:49: Adam? Definitely. The hardest part about online ministry is follow -up, because you can only give them information if they give it to you.
23:07: You can't even recommend a church in the area unless you know where they live. So if they ask us, we have several different biblical counseling agencies that we can refer people to, but a lot of times they don't.
23:19: The reason they're asking in internet ministry is they don't want to talk to a real person, and that's frustrating. There are strengths and weaknesses to internet ministry, and a lot of things are done much better in person, so we do as much as we can while at the same time encouraging them to seek elsewhere.
23:35: So you said that there was a lot of I don't remember the number, but a lot of professions of faith.
23:42: What you were just talking about is difficult to follow up. What's your follow -up process? Is there one? How do you continue the discipleship process?
23:51: Absolutely. When people come to Faith in Christ, often they have a ton of questions that they've wondered about.
24:01: So in a sense, GotQuestions .org is built for discipleship follow -up. But when people make a profession of faith on our site, they land on a page where we ask for their address so we can send them some discipleship material in the mail or a
24:15: PDF if that's how they prefer it. We have a Church Finder that links to several of the best
24:21: Bible -believing denominations out there so they can find a church in their area that we can't recommend every
24:27: Southern Baptist church in the country, but generally speaking a Southern Baptist church is going to be a good Bible -believing church.
24:35: Then we have NeedHim .org is a online kind of counseling, kind of discipleship follow -up ministry, and there's a link to where they can chat with a
24:46: NeedHim counselor. Confirm their decision to receive Christ or have any...
24:52: Chatting, we've experimented with it and we literally have to hire multiple full -time employees to be able to handle it all, so being able to refer it to an organization that already has that set up is ideal for us.
25:03: So we do as much as we can, but I fully admit follow -up is hard and that you can only contact them as much as they allow you to.
25:11: Right, right. Tanya? I don't know if we have enough time, but several people have asked if any of your views changed since your time at Calvary, and I would say no, but a lot of them have softened.
25:40: Let me clarify that, but that's several of my professors here. I don't want them to misunderstand.
25:47: So when you're in Bible college and even seminary, you're... They want you to be very solid in the viewpoint that they're teaching because they think it's the biblically correct view, and sometimes they don't have time to really expose you to some of the alternate viewpoints out there.
26:01: And over the 15, 16 years of me doing GotQuestions, I've actually run into people with different viewpoints who, okay,
26:07: I still disagree with you, but I at least understand where you're coming from and I understand why you believe the way that you do.
26:15: So having that little bit more perspective and not... As long as they have the ultimate question answered, as long as they're a believer in Christ, yes, there are other issues you need to deal with, but don't major on a minor.
26:29: Don't feel like you need to correct every false belief that another person has.
26:36: It can be frustrating for us where someone will email and say, hey, I love your site, I agree with you on every article but one, but since you believe...
26:46: have a different belief on who the sons of God and daughters of men and Genesis 6 are, I can no longer trust your website.
26:52: Well, talk about majoring on a minor. So don't allow minor issues that you disagree with to hinder your ability to have an effective ministry with people.
27:02: That was big. That was hard because in the very beginning I wanted to convince everyone to believe exactly like me on everything, and I don't know if I agree with me on everything anymore.
27:14: It's a humble spirit in recognizing no one has all the answers. We all make mistakes and I think we're all when we arrive in heaven going to be surprised at some of the things we had wrong.
27:27: Why did... Sorry. It's okay. I'm used to it. Why did
27:32: Abram's ham have so many wipes and porcupines? That was good.
27:38: That was good. I would not be surprised if we've gotten something similar to that.
27:46: Oh yeah, I won't make you answer that. Porcupines. The internet can be a spiritually dark place in addition to trolls.
27:57: How do you stay encouraged and positive? I'm going to add on what's a particular portion of the
28:06: Bible that helps you in this area as well. Internet is a very dark place.
28:16: I was sharing questions at a church last night and something that blows my mind that Google, Apple, Microsoft, whatever big tech company you want to talk about, most of the people who founded those companies and work for those companies are strongly anti -Christian.
28:31: They're as liberal politically and socially as you can possibly get, and yet they're producing these platforms that allow us to proclaim the gospel and teach
28:40: God's word. But as I'm sure you're all aware, there's a lot of garbage on the internet.
28:46: Porn is a devastating addiction to people who get involved in it.
28:55: So, I'm on the internet literally all the time, so you have to be very careful in that sort of thing.
29:02: So, Philippians... Why am I so terrible with verses when I'm speaking? Philippians 4 -8
29:11: Think on these things, whatever things are good, holy. It's a big verse for me. Whenever I'm tempted to go to a dark place or think about things
29:22: I shouldn't, that's a very powerful reminder that we should be transformed by the renewing of our mind, not allow our minds to be what they were like before we came to faith in Christ.
29:32: But the internet's a very dark place, and at the same time, as you saw, you can do stuff with the internet that before 20 years ago were impossible.
29:44: I mean, one of the countries I had up there was Vanuatu. Does anyone know what Vanuatu was most famous for in the history of world missions?
29:52: It was an island nation in the Pacific that was filled with cannibals. The first missionary who went there, everyone told him, you're going to be eaten by cannibals if you go to Vanuatu.
30:03: He said, no, that's where God's calling me. He went, he didn't get eaten by cannibals, but now we've got thousands of people every month visiting our website from Vanuatu.
30:12: Why didn't you just publish a website? It was back in the 40s or 30s, so there were no websites. But yeah, just the amazing things you can do with the internet that you've never been able to do before.
30:22: Yeah, that's awesome. Well, Shea, thank you for coming. If you wouldn't mind praying for us, and then after he's done praying, we can be dismissed.
30:30: Father in Heaven, I just thank you so much for Calvary University and Calvary Seminary and the amazing things you're doing.
30:37: I'm so grateful for all that I learned here and how I grew spiritually here. I pray the same for all these students.
30:43: May you guide them very clearly into the ministries you're calling them to, and may you use them in mighty and amazing ways.
30:51: Help us as we learn truth today to apply it to our lives, to not just make it an academic thing, but to make it something that changes our hearts.