When the Old Maps Stop Working: Rethinking Apologetics with Luke Cawley

And so a lot of Christians, at least in North America, have noticed that things have changed culturally, but they struggle to articulate what it is.

What have you seen in how people are relating to Christianity today, people that are not already in the evangelical arena?

Yeah, it's a good question.

I'm conscious of and have plenty of firsthand contacts with the US situation.

I think the UK and Europe is quite different to where you're at.

I can describe Europe, it may be, and then we move on to the US.

I mean, in our setting in Britain, for example, church attendance has maybe been around 10% for about 40 years.

So we're dealing with a situation, I guess, of ignorance.

and of lack of contact firsthand with the Christian faith.

So quite often a person's view on the faith will be filtered through media or different secondhand impressions that they have.

I think that's an opportunity as well.

I think we have a rising openness in the UK towards the faith.

I think in the US you have a slightly different situation where rather than people perhaps have had more experience and more proximity of the church through people that they know or through their upbringing and the negative or positive impressions are born of experience and not not only of something received so I think we're wrestling with slightly different different things there

I

think we I think the ignorance thing is interesting in Britain because I think that 15 years ago, maybe people had objections to the Christian faith.

I don't really think people have objections.

So this really affects your apologetic because you're not responding to identifiable questions.

I would say.

We've made a shift from objections to intuitions and we actually, we have to respond in a way to things that people struggle to even articulate for themselves, which then affects not only the topics that you're dealing with, the type of environments that you create that should do enable people to articulate those and enable us to hear them and enable us perhaps to articulate them on their behalf and give them a chance to kind of dialogue, interact, that kind of thing.

And that reminds me of what I've seen firsthand.

I've

noticed a shift in the university setting.

And usually what's happening in Europe trickles later into the States and universities, large cities.

These different cosmopolitan settings are the places that feel at first where I don't see the animosity.

I see an indifference.