6 Tips for Sharing Christ with Skeptics by Dan DeWitt for The Gospel Coalition
Sharing the gospel with skeptics isn’t an endeavor to take lightly. In addition to risking your public reputation, you’re forced to come face-to-face with your true convictions. Your views will be laughed at, and your commitments scorned. Unless you’re adequately established, you’ll be tempted to dilute your beliefs in order to earn credibility.
A great deal of these temptations stem from a lack of confidence in the gospel and a misunderstanding of what ministry to skeptics entails. Many think evangelism aimed at this demographic is limited to apologetics, but such a notion is too narrow.
Evangelism in every setting should include both an affirmation of what the gospel is and a defense against certain objections, attacks, and misunderstandings. Without this balanced approach, you’ll be tempted to abdicate a biblical foundation in an effort to establish some elusive common ground.
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So what’s the best way to share the gospel with skeptics? To answer this question, I offer six imperatives.
1. Present Truth as Knowable
Christians can easily grow intimidated when sharing the gospel with the “intelligentsia.” Yet this shouldn’t be the case, for when it comes to describing reality, the Christian worldview offers more than most people realize.
Consider how we use the basic laws of logic in our everyday conversations. The law of noncontradiction, for example, is regularly used in evaluating truth claims. Something can’t be both true and false at the same time and in the same way. But have you ever considered how a naturalistic framework might account for such a law? How can eternal, mindless, and impersonal matter produce logical laws that guide our thought?
This doubt can be traced back to Charles Darwin himself, who questioned whether he could trust his mental thoughts if his brain is merely a product of evolution. He seemed to worry that, if nature is all there is, there can be no certainty our brains are aimed at truth or our thoughts reliable.
Apologists have consistently exploited this worldview weakness. C. S. Lewis claimed this difficulty for naturalism is a self-contradiction. G. K. Chesterton called it the “thought that stops all thought.”
Only Christianity provides a reasonable explanation for reason itself. Even arguments against God presuppose logical laws that only make sense if there is an eternal, intelligent, personal Creator. The Bible makes sense of the world we inhabit and provides a foundation for rational discussion.
2. Present God as He Reveals Himself
If we water down our conception of God to make the gospel more palatable, we’ll find that, in the end, we’re no longer doing true evangelism. We’re merely marketing a god of our own invention, attempting to woo people with a hazy image of an impotent deity.
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