Be A Wise Ambassador
We are all called to be ambassadors of Jesus Christ (2 Cor 5:20) and that includes students who are followers of Jesus Christ.The ministry of Stand to Reason has helped me become a more effective ambassador for Jesus Christ. Their slogan about effective ambassadors rings true. Effective ambassadors exhibit knowledge through an accurate mind, wisdom through an artful method, and character through an attractive manner.
How do we gain these things?
We gain knowledge as we read scripture regularly and seek to love God with our minds. As for character, it is shaped through the process of radical obedience and submission to Christ, and the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit.
As far as wisdom goes, some of that is gained through personal experience and a lot of that is gained through mentoring.
Permit me to take a small rabbit trail.
Mentoring is an important and often misunderstood area of life. My father has co-authored a book on mentoring that is extremely helpful.
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There is a lot of material out there on mentoring, but Dad's book truly has fresh content. It presents two powerful concepts that I have not seen done in other mentoring books: the constellation model of mentoring, and the mentoring continuum. I used to simplistically view mentoring as the same thing as discipling. It is much broader than that. This book opened my eyes so that I can be intentional about setting up mentoring relationships in my life.
Get his book here:
Connecting: The Mentoring Relationships You Need To Succeed In Life
Returning from my rabbit trail.
In the area of tactical apologetics, Greg Koukl of Stand To Reason has mentored me. Mentors do not have to know those whom they are mentoring, btw. Though Greg does not know me, he mentors me through his webcast and his excellent training materials. His series on Tactics in Defending the Faith is superb.
I have talked about one of the tactics he teaches already. It is the Columbo tactic.
See The Dawn Treader: Worldview Case Study 2: Using Columbo
It is an adaptation of the Socratic method of asking good questions. You go on the offensive in a non-offensive way with carefully selected questions.
The Columbo method is what I would recommend to Betsy See The Dawn Treader: Confronting The Professor or any other student facing a professor who is interested in putting down truth, promoting moral relativism, or promoting a false view of the Bible. The basic problem is that the professor is in the power position. He controls your grades. In some cases, you may have a scholarship that is tied to your grades.
However, I don't think you should sit idly by why he and others in the class bash away at truth. We can look to Daniel in the Old Testament for how to respond to false ideas. We need to walk in faith, show integrity and have courage. God is big enough to see you through any challenge. Sometimes you will be put in position and asked to take a stand. But you don't have to be aggressive and pushy about it. This is where wisdom kicks in. An artful method is to learn how to ask a good question. Here are two good questions to tuck away. What do you mean by that? How did you come to that conclusion?
Don't ask those questions in an aggressive mean-spirited way. Show respect, and ask them genuinely. After all, you are the student and she/he is the teacher.
Some professors will stoop to use fallacious tactics like Appeal to Force(argumentum ad baculum). Basically, arguing through threat. Just reply, "I am not trying to be argumentative. I am trying to learn. I was asking a question to help me understand why you came to the conclusion you did."
Other professors simply choose to intimidate students and switch the burden of proof over to the student. Here is a short article from Greg Koukl on how to counter that. "Oh, You Believe in Absolutes? What are They?" Greg's point is that "students should not be afraid to challenge their professors if they do it with grace and respect."
I believe the truth does need to be defended, even in the classroom. If you have a professor that is into bullying Christians, do what Betsy did. Set up a private meeting and it would not hurt to take along some friends who are in the class. Recruit others to pray for you, and go and make your point as humbly and graciously as possible. In the classroom, it requires more guts, but if you use Columbo in a wise and humble way, you will not come across as a rebel rouser. Most teachers love to have students engage the material in a good discussion; they are far more used to students either sleeping through class or being so indoctrinated by postmodernism that their most englightened comments are typically, "...whatever..."
As far as evolution goes, I would follow the advice of my commentators who said to answer test questions, "according to evolutionary theory, blah blah blah." You are not in agreement with it, but the teacher is covering the material he was assigned to cover. I would not be afraid to ask a good question though and get a good discussion going.
Here are 10 questions you can ask the next time you are bored in biology class and would like to get a good discussion going. Ten Questions about Origins Pick one and try it.
Friends, the point is that we in the church cannot retreat onto our Christian reservations any longer. We have been largely doing that for the last 100 years. It is not biblical. We were not called to live divided lives. We are called to integrate our faith into all of life, and engage our culture redemptively. That does not mean going around trying to get people saved (unless God presents an evangelistic opportunity, of course). It means letting your Christian worldview influence others. For those of you who are students, that includes the classroom. For the rest of us, it includes our work. The story of the Christianity does not begin with salvation, btw, it begins with creation and goes forward through the Eschaton (the culmination of history). Christianity is a full worldview. We need to live it 24 x 7 and in all of our spheres.
More tactical posts to follow.
