Answering the Skeptic’s Hardest Questions

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Rebecca McLaughlin
It’s because you care about spreading the message of Jesus to those around you, even if you think it’s going to be a hard conversation, and that means that you are Sam and my peoples like, this is what we’re all about. The way we’re going to structure this time, Sam is going to talk for a few minutes, then I’m going to talk for a few minutes, and then we’ve got two mics set up where we want you to come and ask questions, because we want this to be a live and interactive experience. So I’m going to kick it over to Sam in a second, and I don’t know that I’m going to introduce you, because they probably know from the programs like who you are. So we’re just going to take that as read, ladies and gentlemen, Sam Chan,

Sam Chan
oh, hey, I don’t think anyone here does know who I am. They’ve all come here for you, Rebecca, and I think they just want me to speak as little as possible and just get out of the way as quickly as possible. But if you my seminar yesterday, you will know my standard introduction is. The reason why I’m standing up here is I’m short. I can’t present sitting down. I’m in the shortest 1% of the population in a room full of 100 men. I’m the shortest man in that room, and I’m also Asian, but grew up in Australia. I work as a medical doctor, also in full time Christian ministry, but I have three boys. I’m married to Steph. She should be in the room somewhere, but she can’t find Sagamore ballroom one to four. That’s all right. I couldn’t either. So she’ll be coming in a little bit later. But we have three boys, and if you were the seminar yesterday, you will know that I have told them that when they grow up, chances are they will be just like me, not very good looking and very, very short. So no girl is ever going to like them. Their only chance in life is to study hard and make a lot of money. Now it’s a joke. I’ve never said that, but every Asian in the room right now saying, hang on. Are you sure you’re joking? Because that’s what I tell my kids. No, it’s a joke. Okay, so my experience with evangelism and sort of answering questions is I work these days with city Bible forum. I do workplace evangelism. So I speak in secular settings to secular people. I usually give a short talk, 10 minute talk, and then we open up to question and answer time. I also do crew camp ministry. I talk to high schoolers. Again, I give a short Bible talk, and we open up for question and answer time. So that’s sort of my experience with question and answer time. I’m also involved with a school of evangelism called evq.org.au, we know about IQ, but for evangelism, we need evq. So have a [email protected] and there’s a little quiz there you can take to measure your evq and see how your evangelism and answering questions can be better. I also wrote a book on how to talk about Jesus without being that guy and and also, there’s a book on evangelism in a skeptical world, and there’s a bit of a section in the back on how to answer questions evangelism in a skeptical world, and also, how to talk about Jesus without being that guy, just a few more things from me on maybe little tips from what has kept me going as an evangelist and answering questions, just being happy with who I am and where I am in my Christian journey. Because as Christians, we always wish we were better, but the Bible has that verse where jars are clay that God uses us, not despite our weaknesses, but because of our weaknesses. So it’s okay to be not as good as we want to be, but we still want to improve. But every apologist does want to be better. So I wish I was like these Australian apologists called Dan Paterson, Max, Jagannathan, but they and me wish we could be John Dixon, who runs undeceptions And who teaches at Wheaton, and he’s also an Australian, but I’m sure John Dixon wishes he was William Craig, and wishes he was better. And I’m sure William Craig wishes he was Rebecca McLaughlin. So we all, we all aspire to be better than where we are, but just be happy with where we are at that moment, and God will use us not despite our weaknesses, but because of our weaknesses. Also. It’s also good to know our context. And so for example, if someone asks me, why does a good God allow suffering? And if that’s in a university setting, they’re going to want sort of a philosophical answer. But of course, if someone asked me because their sister’s been diagnosed with cancer, well that’s going to need a pastoral answer. So they’re two very different answers to the same question there, and that’s why I am learning. I’m still learning. I’m learning the best answer, then is a question, why do you ask? And now New Testament studies are showing that Jesus himself asked 300 questions. He was asked 200 questions, but only directly answered the question eight times the rest time He answered with a. Question like, Jesus, should we pay taxes? I don’t know. Whose head do you see on this coin? Jesus? By what authority do you do? You do these things? I don’t know. By what authority does John the Baptist do his things? So he answers with a question. So I’ll give you just two quick examples of what I’m talking about. And forgive me again, if you were in the seminar yesterday and you heard these examples, I was working as a doctor, young nurse asked me, Hey, What books should I read? That was my chance to be the powerful doctor. Man to her the canon of Western literature. But instead, I just asked, Why do you ask? And she said, Because I’m from China, I feel so young and naive, I want wisdom. So I was able to say, Hey, I work for city Bible forum. I have a female colleague. She’s a chaplain. She speaks fluent Chinese. Would you like to talk to her? And she said, Yes. Another time, I was working with a surgeon, and he asked me for my views on same sex marriage. Well, I used to teach in a seminary in ethics, so I gave him a 20 minute monolog, informed, nuanced, sensitive answer, but I should have said, Why do you ask? Because I later found out his sister’s brother was gay, so I needed to give him a partial answer, not not the information answer. So context is everything. And I also find that the way I answer to workers in the workplace is very different from the way I answer high schoolers on, say, a ski camp. So context is very important. Anyway, that’s enough from me. I’ll hand it over to Rebecca. Oh, that

Rebecca McLaughlin
was less than 10 minutes I was I was just sitting back and enjoying myself. Here I’m going to stand to make Sam feel extra short, because, you know, it’s good to good to put men in their place. Sometimes, I was at a kids birthday party a couple of weekends ago, and I was talking with a woman whose son was friends with the host of the party, having a great conversation. She’d been raised sort of loosely Catholic, and had not been in church in some time, you know, many years, but was clearly sort of feeling the loss of something, and was interested, and we were having a kind of spiritual conversation, and I was able to share pieces of the gospel with her. And then I said, Hey, if you’re ever interested in coming to church, we would love to have you come to our church. And she said, can I ask you a blunt question? I said, Yeah. She said, Is your church inclusive of queer people? And I said, I’m going to give you a long answer and a short answer, because that’s the question, right? I think many of us in this room, especially if you live like I do in the wilds of the Northeast, of the US, I’m in the People’s Republic of Cambridge up near Boston, where that is going to be the question that I’m going to be asked by pretty much every non Christian neighbor or colleague or sort of fellow parent at school. Um, I’m okay with your church so long as it is inclusive of queer people. But as soon as you time your church is not inclusive of queer people, I’m out and and there’s a temptation, I think, for those of us who are followers of Jesus and wanting people to know Jesus, there’s a temptation for us to sort of dread that question, and for us to think, Oh, if only I can kind of circumvent around the edges of that question, because I don’t want to tell people the brutal truth that my church, in fact, upholds Christian sexual ethics and therefore believes that sex only belongs in marriage between one man and one woman. So what am I going to do when I get that question? Am I going to sort of dread it? Am I going to try and sort of shove it under the carpet? Am I going to try and sort of him and her and distract to a different topic of conversation? And I get that temptation, but instead, I think that question is actually a wonderful gospel opportunity, and I’m going to tell you how I answered it in that instance, and then how I answered a similar question In another instance, just a sort of a flavor of of some of the things that I’ve ended up doing in in the wilds of Cambridge, Massachusetts. So in this particular instance, I knew that she was wanting to sort my church into one camp or another. So what I said to her was number one, I’m somebody. I’ve been a Christian as long as I can remember. I said, I’ve always actually been attracted to other women. I said, I’m a dear friend at our church who became a Christian after her girlfriend at Yale broke up with her. She had previously identified as atheist, and she had a number of same sex sexual relationships, and then she became a follower of Jesus. I have another friend who recently, just 18 months ago, became a Christian and started coming to our church. She has lesbian tattoos on her leg from the period when she was identifying as a lesbian and exclusively dating women. I said there’s another dear friend of mine at church who’s a single man who were he not a Christian, would all. Certainly be married legally to somebody of of the same sex. And I said, I can go on and on and on with this, with this list, I said, but our church believes in some crazy things, like the fact that Jesus rose from the dead, and like the fact that sex only belongs in male female marriage. I think sometimes friends when, when we’re faced with a question that puts us at odds with the culture around us, we’re tempted to sort of make our Christianity fit in, when, in fact, if you look at any element of what we’re saying from a Christian perspective, it’s, it’s, it’s craziness, right? It’s wild claims like this, this first century, Jewish man who died on a cross was raised from the dead on the third day afterwards, like he will be the judge of the living and the dead at the end of time, like it’s through him that God created the universe in the first place. Like this is, this is crazy stuff, but the reality is our skeptical friends and colleagues and neighbors and family members, they might think that they are standing on sort of very solid, secular ground and looking over at us Christians on our crazy, sort of weird, flaky ground, when, in fact, they’re like the person in the cartoon who’s sort of run off the edge of the cliff and doesn’t realize it. Yet, I’m not going to risk my breaking my legs by doing it. But you know those cartoons where you see the sort of the run, and they actually get quite a long way off the edge of the cliff before they start falling down, because until they look down, they don’t realize there’s no ground beneath their feet. So if I think about that question, is my church inclusive of queer people? And there are various sort of different formulations that could have been asked, but we all know what that question is about. There are some assumptions that are lying under that question that are actually Christian assumptions. Now, that may seem very strange thing to say, given that the place that that question is coming from is in many ways, a sort of anti Christian place, but the person who’s asking me that question, I know that they are going to assume that all human beings are fundamentally morally equal, and that they think that it’s actually wrong for the strong and the rich and the powerful to trample on the weak and the poor and the marginalized. And I’m going to know that they think that men and women are fundamentally equal in value, and I’m going to know that they’re going to have all sorts of sort of beliefs about the importance of sexual consent, and I know that they’re almost certainly behind that question as well. Are going to have some loaded in, some deep concerns about the ways in which Christians have sometimes treated people who identify as gay or lesbian, and actually, all of those concerns come from a Christian place. Because if we pull Christianity out from the foundation, and if we say, okay, like, let’s imagine that there is no God, and let’s imagine that Jesus isn’t who he claims to be, and then let’s look at sort of the history of thought, we’ll realize that our ideas of universal human equality, our ideas of men and women being fundamentally morally equal, our deep belief that rape is wrong, our beliefs about the care for minorities and those who are oppressed and marginalized, those actually all come from Jesus. And that’s not only sort of a curious fact from history, but actually today, if you’re trying to ground those beliefs philosophically without Jesus, you are going to really, really struggle, because if there is no God, then you and I are at best mammals. We’re really nothing more than atoms and molecules. Nobody looks at a mammal and starts sort of trying to legislate their sexual ethics. Rape is very common in the animal world, and nobody has a problem. We don’t expect animals, pure animals, mere animals, to live according to what turned out to be Christian ethics. And so as I as I’m talking with a friend or a new connection who has a whole bunch of actually kind of Christian ethics loaded into their their arsenal. I can, I can help them to see, oh, your your beliefs on these questions have actually come from Christianity. And if we take God out of the equation, then we don’t have a more moral universe. We don’t have greater equality and justice and love. We actually have, as my fellow countryman, Richard Dawkins, puts it, a universe that has precisely the properties we should expect if there is a bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. So that’s sort of one. I’m not saying I would launch all of that onto the one person who’s just asked me that question. You know, we sort of start a little piece here, but it’s easy, I think, for us as Christians, to feel sort of intimidated by the idea that everybody around us is probably a sort of highly educated skeptic, and they’re standing on this very solid ground and we’re kind of clinging on flimsily to something that’s probably hard to justify under our feet, and asking them to believe in crazy things like. Think that Jesus rose from the dead, but actually that the ground under our most secular friends is is often far more fractured than they realize, and the basis, even for them most deeply held beliefs, turns out to be a pure illusion, another sort of area that we might encounter, this, this question, and I think this understanding of the frail ground on which our friends are standing can be helpful to us. Is around the pro life questions. There are many people, again, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I live, who think that in order to be pro women, you must also be pro choice, and that, in fact, it is a terrible assault on women’s rights, to say that somebody who is unintentionally pregnant does not have the right to abort their child. And again, in that kind of conversation, I’d want to raise the stakes. And I want to say, yeah, do you know what if there is no God, and if Jesus isn’t the Son of God who came into the world and died on the cross and was supposedly raised to life so that you and I could live in everlasting love with him, then, yeah, the baby in a mother’s womb is just a collection of atoms and molecules, just fetal tissue. But if there is no God, and if Jesus isn’t God’s Son, if he didn’t die on a cross and wasn’t raised from the dead, and He is not returning to judge us one day, then that’s just what the mother is as well. That’s just what I am. That’s just what you are. And again, we have no basis for saying that that rape is wrong. We have no basis for saying that infanticide is wrong. We have no basis for our deepest moral beliefs and our longings and yearnings for justice, if Jesus isn’t who he claims to be, think

Rebecca McLaughlin
about the question of suffering, which Sam has raised, and that’s a question that will almost inevitably come up with somebody who you’re talking to, regardless of their educational background or their life circumstances, at some point they will find themselves asking You, well, you claim there is a loving and powerful God. How can that loving and powerful God allow all the suffering we see in the world? And that can feel, again, like a really hard question for a Christian to answer, because we are making a crazy claim about a loving and powerful God in the face of all of this suffering. So let’s look at the alternative for a second. Imagine there is no God. Imagine Jesus isn’t who he claims to be. The suffering is still there, but there is no hope, there is no meaning, there is no moral value to anything. There’s nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. But if not only, there is a Creator God, but that Creator God has perfectly revealed himself in the first century, Jewish man known as Jesus of Nazareth, who died on a cross for love of you and me. Then suffering and love are at the center of the Christian faith, and we may not have a sort of glib answer to the circumstances of the person’s life that we’re talking to. We may not be able to answer all their questions about how the God of love allows the suffering that they see, but we know for sure that it’s not that God doesn’t care. We have in Jesus, a man of sorrows who is acquainted with grief. We have the most powerful man who ever lived, dying, the most painful death ever died for love, and if somebody deeply cares about the suffering in the world, and if somebody is deeply experiencing suffering in their own lives, that is a savior to point them to. When I have you guys come up and ask, ask some questions just in a couple of minutes. But I guess what I would want to say as we, as we think about engaging our most skeptical friends or colleagues or family members or neighbors or enemies, at least on their side toward us. Let’s not assume that they have a solid, firm foundation that they’re currently standing on. And let’s let’s raise the stakes. Let’s go straight to Jesus. In these in these conversations, let’s go straight to the gospel. Because actually, if we’re not going straight to the Gospel, then we’re not ultimately providing anything meaningfully Christian in response to their questions. And we’ll find if we start looking at all of these questions that come up sort of most often in our in our conversations, the kinds of questions that we honestly dread and find hard to respond to, we’ll find that actually the only really satisfying response is a Jesus centered one. So I said I share one more story of times when people have asked me, like, what do you believe about same sex, sexual relationships, which, again, is, you know, very much just the current question that will most often happen to me in the place where I’m located. And one of the things I say is that, listen, Christian sexual ethics is much weirder than you think. It’s not just that I believe that sex only belongs in marriage between one man and one woman, but I believe this is all about a metaphor. I. So according to the Bible, God created male and female, that he created sex and marriage in order to tell us about Jesus’s love for his people and the one flesh union between Jesus and His Church. So So can I tell you about that? Because actually, if that’s not true, then it doesn’t matter who I’m sleeping with or who you’re sleeping with. It doesn’t matter if it’s consensual or not. None of this matters at all. There is no right or wrong, there is no meaning and there is no truth. There is nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. And maybe, just maybe, this message of the gospel that actually puts love at the very center of the fabric of the universe is the kind of message that our secular friends are actually if they only knew it longing to hear. Let’s have some questions. So two microphones here, and you can play this one one way or the other. You can either just straight up ask me and Sam a question that you might have been asked by a secular friend, or you can ask us a sort of more kind of meta question that’s your own. Well done for being the first person. I want somebody else

Sam Chan
just quickly jump in if anyone’s coming in late. There’s heaps of empty seats on this side of the room. It’s only like 1/3 fall on that side.

Speaker 1
Sure are those who have been predestined to hell, right, to hate God.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Are those who are predestined to hell? Right to hate God? Sam, do you want to take that one first?

Sam Chan
Wow, the pre so there’s so many layers in that question. Let me tease that apart so, because in my context, it’s often speaking to people who don’t struggle with predestination, but they struggle with the idea that a God might predestine anyone. I point out the problem predestination isn’t only a Christian problem. The atheist actually has exactly the same problem. So for the and that’s what they’re now discovering in atheism. So people like Yuval Noah Harari, who’s a secular, atheist writer, he points out there’s if there’s no God, and this is what he believes as an atheist, everything is material determinism anyway, and so we have no free choice. We’re determined by the neurotransmitters in our brain. It’s a cause and effect with the atom. So we’re actually predetermined for all our choices if there’s no God, and then we can throw it back to the atheist. Well, how, why? Where do we get moral accountability? Because we just have black lives matter. We had the metoo movement, which implies Free Will moral accountability. So we live as if, even though there is pre determinism, we have free will and moral accountability. So there’s some sort of compatibilism going in the universe for both the atheist and the Christian believer. So I think, in the end, wherever we find ourselves, and in this question, it was hell, we know that somehow, even if there was pre determinism, I was also accountable for my actions, because there was a form of compatibilism going on. All right, who do we work out? Who’s next? We need a more. I think we go, but we’ll go back and

Speaker 2
back and forth. Thank you all. I’m actually a college professor in a secular university, and so I really appreciate Carol’s work. It’s been very helpful. My question is really coming from more Christians in my church that have adult children or older children that have walked away from their faith. And I guess I can, I could come up with a theological answer to some of their questions, but I’m really looking more for a pastoral answer kind of contextually, like you said. And in one case, this family had a daughter came, came to Christ real early, brought up in the church, just a wonderful Christian testimony, and then she turned 30 and walked away from her faith, and then his embraced a lesbian lifestyle. Has married a woman, and the parents are asking me, you know, what happened? What did we do wrong? Why is God allowing this to happen? And I guess, just looking for counsel on how to try to give them some encouragement, and they’re asking, What can we do? She has nothing to do with them now that cut off all relationships, and very tough for them. So just looking for some pastoral wisdom, yeah, I mean,

Rebecca McLaughlin
great and incredibly painful question. And as somebody with with three children, my my greatest fear is not that my kids will die young from some terrible disease or that they will encounter serious sort of suffering or persecution. My greatest fear is that they will turn away from the Lord. And so I, you know, feel the heartbreak of everybody in this room, who’s who’s had that, that experience? I do think the reality that we see is in the gospels themselves, we see Jesus basically telling us that we need to be to be ready to leave our families in order to follow him. And I think one of the places that this becomes kind of real to us is when members of our families turn away from Jesus. Jesus. I think one thing we need to be really careful not to do is to put people who have turned away from Jesus and engaging in, like, a particular kind of sin in, like, somehow a different category than, you know, if your child grew up turns away from Jesus and, you know, is very sort of politically conservative and lives, you know, a happy kind of family life with their husband slash wife, and 2.4 children, that person, sadly, is equally far from the Lord if they have turned away from Jesus. And as parents, we cannot control the eternal destinies of our children. We can pray for them, and we can love them. And actually, this, this jacket I’m wearing. It’s given to me by a friend who started dating another woman in college, spent four years with her, got engaged her during that time, her parents completely cut her out of their lives. Actually, she’d been raised in the church, and then, sort of she thought she wasn’t walking away from Jesus when she walked into that relationship, but really meaningfully, she was and she, two weeks after getting engaged, actually broke off the engagement, realized she just couldn’t go through with it, came to our church, started exploring Christianity for the first time as an adult with like, a serious earnestness, and is now deeply committed follower of Jesus. So just to say, until somebody’s story is over, it’s not over, and that we as as lovers of Jesus, we have something more precious and better than any sexual or romantic relationship is going to be able to offer any of us. And we need to make sure that in as much as I’m like raising my children with that, I want them to know. I don’t want to make marriage an idol to where living as a single person, following Jesus seems like a sort of impossible way to live, or a sort of unfruitful, non beautiful way, way to live. I wanted to know that Jesus is actually the one relationship we can’t live without, and to sort of bake that into them as as they grow up, but at the end of the day, only the Lord will be able to determine their eternal destinies. Hello.

Speaker 3
Just for a little context, I have a lot of friends who and myself in the past, we’ve struggled mentally, like, with our mental health. So my question is, why does a loving, merciful and just God allow people who haven’t experienced any like, deep emotional trauma to like, suffer in their own head to the point where they commit suicide.

Rebecca McLaughlin
It’s your side of the room. Sam, okay, yeah.

Sam Chan
So I think for those questions of suffering, what I when I answer I like to I first of all acknowledge the pain, and then also even dig a deeper hole. I say, Yes, I hear you, and the problem is even worse than that, because and then for evil and suffering to exist, our real struggle is it’s unfair, it’s undeserved, it’s disproportionate and and that’s and that’s just what makes it evil and suffering, and that’s exactly it. So CS Lewis says we can only recognize a crooked line if there’s such thing as a straight line. And so the problem can only exist because there is a good, loving, powerful, fair God behind the universe. Because if there’s no loving, powerful, good God behind the universe, just God as well. Then, then we can explain away the problem of suffering. So if we believe in karma, the answer is, well, you must have done something to deserve the mental illness. If there is no God, then that’s not suffering. That’s just what happens in the natural world. It’s not evil, it’s not bad, it’s not pain, it’s just what happens, if we like, in some Middle Eastern religions, God is powerful, just such is the will of God, not loving. Doesn’t care about the suffering and grief you’re going through Eastern religions. It’s an illusion. Get over it, escape it. But we say no, this is a real problem. It’s disproportionate, it’s unfair, and it’s undeserved, and that can only mean there’s a loving, powerful, good, fair God behind the universe. And that means I can’t have it both ways. If there is such a God, as hard as it is, I just have to trust there’s a loving, powerful reason behind it. And a good example is when I had my young child take him to the doctors. He’s looking my eyes like, Oh, what’s this? It’s a car trip. Up until now, everything my parents have done has been loving and fair, and they hand them over to the doctor, and they plunge that vaccination needle into your child’s thigh, and there’s a look a horror in their eye, like how could you let this happen to me? But within half a second, they stop. They think, no, and you can see what they’re thinking. Up until now, I’ve had every reason to trust you, so even though I don’t understand what’s going on, there must be a loving reason behind what’s going on. And then we can go further and John, let. Nick says, got really good answers to this. John Lennox from the UK, and it’s that. And then whatever this reason is, it’s so loving, so powerful, that Jesus himself became one of us and suffered an unfair, disproportionate death on the cross for us. And of course, we know there’s another chapter still to come. So I’m so, so old. I actually saw The Empire Strikes Back live in the cinema, and I remember as a little boy walking out at the ending what just happened, because that’s where Luke loses his hand. Han Solo’s frozen. And spoiler alert, Darth Vader is Luke’s father, and then you walk out, whoa, and your whole world is your universe is turned upside down. But of course, we know there was another movie to come where all wrongs are righted, and it all comes out well. And so there’s a saying in Christianity, it will be okay in the end. If it’s no not okay, it’s not the end yet. There’s a future tap to come, resurrection, restoration, healing, and just gonna say one more thing. Oh, forgot him. I was gonna say, so sorry about that.

Speaker 4
Yeah, we’ll come back. Yes, brother, well, forgive me. I didn’t come in with a question prepared, but my older brother, a couple of years ago came out as agnostic. He’s the only guy in our entire family that is not a pastor, and so we’ve had a lot of interesting conversations. We have a beautiful open dialog that he’s expressed a lot of appreciation for. However, it’s very difficult to have conversations about these things because he’s extremely intelligent, and he has gone down deep YouTube rabbit holes that have basically, he’s sending me a full thesis essay with sources cited about why God is a God of confusion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And he’s consistently sending these, probably once a week. I get a new video where he’s wanting us to walk through this entire and it’s a lot. And in addition to that, I don’t know that there’s an emotional design. I think there is deep down. But he’s obviously searching for something, but it’s difficult to address these things whenever he’s giving me something that basically is a full thesis essay about why, basically the Bible is incorrect. And so how do you approach those kinds of conversations versus a one off conversation with someone at a birthday party that feels easier to handle?

Rebecca McLaughlin
Honestly, yeah, yeah,

Sam Chan
oh, sure, yeah. So there’s a it’s fascinating, because this is the sign of the time. So maybe if I can just zoom out meta and come in a bit closer. So 20 years ago, the questions we got was, how do I know the Bible’s true? What about other religions, the problem of suffering? And Tim Keller answers a lot of those in is the reason for God. Then 10 years ago, most of the questions had to do with sex, identity, gender, so it’s a very they’re very different questions we’re suddenly getting about 10 years ago, but now where we are now, and people have phrases for it, we’re post post Christian, not just post Christian, but post post Christian. Or we’re post secularism, or we’re called meta modernism. So now people we deconstructed here, but we haven’t reconstructed anything to replace it with. So now people were searching for anything. So if 20 years ago, we were debating New Atheists like Dawkins, what we’re dialoguing now are with people who are exploring anything, UFOs, hallucinogenic drugs, paganism, witchcraft, narcissism. So this is a sign of post post Christendom. There’s a guy with a podcast, and I’m just so and I just wish I could remember his name. I think it starts with Eddie. We got a medic.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Do we? Is there somebody on TGC staff who can do

Rebecca McLaughlin
you want to Okay? Do they have, do they have a doctor? You’re a doctor.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Sam’s gonna do a little Doctor triaging, if, if we don’t Have somebody else already there. Are

Speaker 5
we? Are we? Okay?

Rebecca McLaughlin
Thank you for the question. We’re going to move to the next one, just so that we’ve recovering more, folks, I’ve

Sam Chan
just got one more thing to say. Sorry. Excellent. I. Ah, so there’s a podcast. I wish I could remember his name. I think it starts with Paul. Last time a he’s just, he talks about post, post Christendom, and he’s just put out something on how the matrix was wrong, because the matrix actually introduced Gnosticism to this generation, secret, hidden knowledge. Everything is not as it seems, and that detached us from everything work. And so have a listen to that podcast on how the matrix was wrong because it introduced narcissism to us. And narcissism is attractive because it’s like you have the secret and your parents are wrong, right? They’re the two most attractive things that we want to know.

Unknown Speaker
Yep, thanks. I think it’s their turn, right? Okay,

Speaker 6
yes, so thankful to have both of you all for this question, because it relates to workplace apologetics and sexuality. I’m a pediatric endocrinologist, and in our hospital system department clinic, we do have a transgender clinic out of only maybe three of our 20 providers participate in that clinic, but there are instances where, when patients will come in just for like a hormone injection or so, they’ll ask one other of us to sign the order for it, and such like that. So so far, I’ve refused to sign the order in those cases, and then staff will just find another provider to sign off on things, but I’m just wondering. I’m thinking of the day when you know some someone, everyone knows I’m a Christian there. And so when the question comes up, say, Oh, why? Why don’t? Why are you refusing to sign those orders? Or what do you believe about this that makes you not want to do that? Just any thoughts on how to even begin that conversation?

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah, great, great question. I’ll take this because you took one on you. You’re already you should have

Speaker 6
I’m pediatric though, so if they’re under if they’re under 18.

Rebecca McLaughlin
So one, I mean, if I was in your situation, one place I would perhaps start is actually with a report that came out in the UK about a year ago called the cast report. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that. So as a senior medic in the UK, he was commissioned by the UK government to do a review of the medications that being offered, especially to youth, sort of trans identifying young people. And it ended up being, as the economist put it, a damning indictment of what has been done to perfectly otherwise sort of healthy male and female bodies of young people. So there’s actually from a sort of medical perspective, there are major questions to be asked about trans affirming medications, as they usually described. From a not Christian, but a sort of secular, sort of feminist perspective, there are major questions to be asked about trans ideology, because once you say that me being a woman has actually nothing to do with my anatomy to where I could, you know, Sam could be just as validly a woman as I am if he identifies as woman. You know, the sort of mantra of trans women are women. In actual fact, that means all you’re left with is stereotypes. You’re left with needing to have, actually a kind of regressive understanding of what a woman is that is sort of divorced from our bodily reality. And from a Christian perspective, we have a an understanding of the goodness of God, making us human beings, male and female in his image, and we understand that there is a theological weight to being a man and woman, that in certain contexts, that men and women are called to different kinds of roles, we actually also have a lot of freedom within in light of our bodies and our sort of culture, the New Testament gives us actually a lot of freedom to live as a man or a woman in a way that is not as half as constrained as people might imagine. So it’d be interesting to look at the scriptures and to give people a sense of like, actually, as a Christian, I have a fuller understanding what it means to be a man or a woman that’s that’s grounded in biology and theology and doesn’t depend on a sort of stereotyped psychology to undergird it. Thank you. We’re going to be rapid fire now.

Speaker 7
All right, so I want if I could go back to your first example about the person who asks, Is your church affirming or accepting of LGBT folks? And if I understand your answer, it was help, you know, help them to see that baked into their very question are some assumptions that got into their head in the first place because of, because of Christianity’s effect on the world. But does that does that reasoning break down? Let’s say that question is not being asked in the US or in England. It’s being asked on a college campus, where in a Buddhist or in a Hindu concept where they don’t have concepts of freedom in their mind, I don’t think because of Christian influence. And so does that reasoning apply if you take it out of a Christian culture,

Rebecca McLaughlin
yes, so that’s, that’s a great question, you will struggle to ground our understanding of universal human equality, for example, from a different religious tradition. So for example, you know, look at Hinduism. You actually can really struggle to to ground that that sort of belief. You. People who are asking those questions in a western context are sort of pre loaded with a lot of Christian understanding, even though they don’t they don’t realize it. It is certainly the case that in a different cultural context, you need to understand more of what their background beliefs were and to be able to engage from from that angle. But it would still come back to the same gospel reality of Christianity is is proposing something actually in the history of the world quite novel, which is that men should be expected to live by the same rules that women are usually expected to live by, ie, only have sex with your husband. You know, in the Greco Roman empire where Christianity was born, it was expected that a free woman would only sleep with her husband. But for a man, it was absolutely fine for him to sleep with, you know, slaves or prostitutes or any, anyone who didn’t count. There was a whole category of people who just didn’t count. And it was, it was perfectly fine for him to sleep with male or female people in that in that category. And Christianity says no, actually say same sexual ethics for men and for women only. In marriage, no longer has married one man and one woman. So that’s going to be radical and sort of disjointed from another cultural context that doesn’t have a sort of Christian background, just as it was in the ancient world. Other side, we’ve got four minutes left, so it’s going rapid fire.

Speaker 1
Okay, so if we’re gathered under the gospel coalition, and you know, from what I know of Christians, they believe Jesus freely gave Himself on the cross, and there was no exchange in return. Why is the gospel coalition not allowing refunds for this event? No, that’s partly tongue in cheek. But why is the church appear to be such a transactional place sometimes, when operating within the world, I

Rebecca McLaughlin
thought you meant refunds for this specific event. I was like, Sam, we really bombed hard. If people are funding refunds right now,

Unknown Speaker
no, just more of a Why does the church if you have four minutes? I’m sure someone behind me has a better question, but

Rebecca McLaughlin
we might do we’ll bear that one in mind, but we might have to just thank you. Let’s pop over here. Yep, it’s

Speaker 8
coming from Seattle, so the other side of the country and very intellectual, oftentimes, people can’t accept the idea that they have no moral basis for their beliefs, they might identify like an evolutionary framework for their moral basis. And so we end up coming to a standstill. But I still want to be able to reach my coworkers any thoughts about that.

Rebecca McLaughlin
I mean, they’re going to really struggle with an evolutionary framework to under gather actual moral beliefs. And don’t take my way for that. You can look at the sort of secular folk who are examining a sort of as much morality as you can get from evolution, and at best, you can get taking care of your own immediate kin, but not nothing like the expansive view of morality that we have. So I would, I would point you to some secular folk who are going to undermine their positions. I want to go at the last one minute for another thing, but can you answer that person’s question in one minute?

Speaker 9
So most of my family are not believers. They know I’m a pastor, obviously, but what I find is that they avoid talking to me about hard topics, and they specifically steer conversations away from gospel. And so my question is, how do you answer their questions when they’re not asking them? Yeah?

Sam Chan
So you need to read the book How to talk about Jesus without being that guy. It’s done. Yeah, the art of evangelizing like a counselor. So ask questions and get them talking about their worldview.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Sorry. Super quick

Speaker 10
greetings from Barcelona. Yay, and sorry for my accent. I hope you understand my question. Yes, I’ve been working in Peru for nonprofit Christian organization in the social work area, and we’re in a point that we are switching our service towards foster care, much more than residential centers. And I wonder how it will be when the government asks us to work with homosexual couples for foster care and adoption. It could happen in Peru. It could it’s happening in Barcelona, in Spain. So I wonder what I will do with my conscience.

Rebecca McLaughlin
Yeah, yeah, hard question that, honestly, I don’t think we can answer in 23 seconds. But thank you for asking it. And it is a question. One of the underlying questions there is our ethics when it comes to church versus our ethics when it comes to engaging in broader sort of civil society. And there are some things we would require of believers that we wouldn’t require of non believers, and there are some things that are going to boil down to conscience issues, which is okay to two seconds to go, but I just want to say I. Yeah, I’m 45 years old. I have been trying to tell people about Jesus for at least 35 of those years, both in the UK and in the northeast of the US. I have never in my life before seen more openness to the gospel around me in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I’m hearing about it in the UK as well. It’s not connected to any sort of political movements, because the UK has just had a big political change in the other direction than the US has. But there is an incredible gospel opportunity now, and we need to be out there taking it. We need to stop assuming that everybody around us doesn’t want to hear or that they all have the most sort of difficult, skeptical questions. People are actually desperate for the gospel right now. They’re turning to everything else because they haven’t heard about Jesus, like Gen Z, in particular, they’re turning to tarot cards and crystals and meditation and, like weird Amazonian sort of religious practices and drinking potions because they haven’t heard the gospel, and they haven’t been invited to church, and they haven’t been invited into our homes, and we have literally the thing that they are dying for. So I would like everybody in this room to leave this place and just bang the doors down in your neighborhoods like talk to the other parents at the school steps and talk to your colleagues, talk to the people who seem least likely to turn to Jesus, talk to people who identify as LGBT, talk to the people who are scientists, talk to people who come from different religious religious traditions, because we are seeing those people coming to faith in Jesus. Now is the time to go on the offensive, evangelistically. The End.