My Hardest Assignment on the Mission trip

Rietvallei, South Africa, Wednesday August 5^th, 2009

Some days prior to leaving Charlotte for  South Africa, I was given my finalized speaking schedule and had a discussion about it with the missions director . From what I understood, my hardest assignments would be before professors and students at Potchefstroom University on Monday August 3^rd and Tuesday. My other engagements were to be before audiences in Coffee Shops and Churches, and I remember thinking to myself, these couldn’t be as difficult as the engagements at the University. On Monday, I spoke at a colloquium with physics and philosophy professors at 5pm, and later on at 7pm  to about 150 students on “God and Science”. On Tuesday, I was the guest lecturer at Prof. Anne Karstens’ Philosophy class on “Quantum Physics and Truth” in the morning, and spoke on the Resurrection of Christ at  the Veritas Men’s dormitory in the evening. All these engagements were full of vigorous interaction, but I had no idea then that my hardest assignment, – the most would be the most demanding of me as an apologist, would be on Wednesday at Rietvallei Church.

After the two and a half our drive from Potcheftroom University, I was to meet with about 7 pastors from various churches, and introduce them to the current debate surrounding the question of Origins and the Age of the Earth by comparing the 4 broad views that are held by thinkers on the subject: 3 views holding to an Old Earth/Universe – the Atheistic Evolutionary View, The Theistic Evolutionary View, and the Old Earth Creationist View, and 1 view on the Young Earth side, the Young Earth Creationist View.  The purpose of my talk was not to pick one view and promote it over the others, but rather to give an overview to the pastors so that they would have a point of reference when addressing the issue with their congregations.  My method consisted of explaining each view, with the critique of that view as offered by proponents of the other 3 views.

When we started the discussion at 10 am,  we actually had closer to 13 since several others had joined the pastors. I was asked to give a bit of background about myself, at which time I mentioned that I had spent almost 5 years as a kid in Nigeria (West Africa).  I then started the presentation with the Atheistic Evolutionary view and then moved on to the others. I soon found out I could not proceed because of heated emotional reactions from 2 individuals, one of whom was a pastor with some very liberal views. After wrongly assuming that I had come there to attack evolution(which was their view), they became so distraught that they could not let me proceed with the rest of the presentation. I saw very quickly that I had my work cut out for me, and that the most important thing I could do at that point was to keep my emotions in check and make firm but peaceful progress through my powerpoint slides. These two men also happened to be well versed in science, while everyone else were not, leading to the interesting dynamic that the more I spent time on their questions, the less the rest of the group understood what the simplest issues were.

Finally the Senior pastor who had called the meeting intervened and pulled the 2 men back, giving me the signal to continue. For the next 60 minutes, the senior pastor and the apologetics team leader who had brought me there took turns repeatedly intervening to gently dissuade the two men from trying the lead the discussion down rabbit trails, while I focused on maintaining composure and remaining flexible to the questions that everyone put to me. I finally got to the end of the presentation, but this did not mean that the questions and criticisms ended, because one of the individuals decided to occupy the next 30 minutes of my time (which was supposed to be for coffee break and informal discussion) with a monologue in which he vigorously set forth his views with various printouts while I munched on snacks and sipped on coffee and listened respectfully. In fact when it was time to go, he followed me out to the parking lot, and made  my team leader wait, while we tried to finish the “conversation”.

That was the first session. I returned to Rietvallei in the evening at 7pm this time to address their congregation on the subject of the Scientific Accuracy of the Bible. This was significantly easier than the morning session, despite the vigorous question/answer session. In fact, we discussed a wide variety of issues pertaining to Intelligent Design, the significance of the doctrine of Creation to Christianity, and the debt of Scientific progress in the West to the success of Christianity. But when it was all over, the senior pastor, an elderly gentleman of fatherly bearing came to speak with me. He apologized saying he really did not anticipate the individual who had tried to monopolize the discussion time, but was particularly touched at the manner in which I had dealt with the situation. He expressed how happy he was that I had spoken that evening as well, and considered the subject matter on which I had spoken to be a difficult one. But I could tell that it was the morning session about which he was particularly happy. He made reference to the fact that I lived in Africa before, and said to me over and over again, in his thick Afrikaaner accent, “Thankyou for coming back to Africa!”. The thing is, I could see that he really meant it from the bottom of his heart, and that made me feel extremely small, realizing how little I deserved that kind of compliment from someone of his bearing and years of service to Christ.

Having had time to reflect on the difficulties of that day, and the comments of that pastor, I have come to a new realization of the importance of the second half of what has become the flagship verse of Christian Apologetics – 1 Peter 3:15 “…but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect”. At seminary, for the past 5 years, I have had the privilege of training to make that defense. But for the ability to demonstrate any degree of “gentleness and respect” in the face of opposition, I can take no credit – that has always been a matter of grace. God poured grace upon me that day, plain and simple. That day has reminded me that being in the kind of relationship with God that enables one to receive grace for difficult situations will remain for me the hardest part of being an apologist.

Church Without Walls, Centurion,  Saturday August 8, 2009

It was about 1:15 pm on Sat at the “Church Without Walls” where the Faith & Reason Apologetics Conference had entered its final day. I had spoken in the morning session on “Science and the Existence of God”, a talk which was received well and followed up with a good Q/A session. Lunch was over, and the afternoon session had begun.

I was still in the church foyer since I had until 3pm before my second speaking session when a gentleman came up to me and introduced himself as an engineer who had heard my talk, wanting to speak with me. I will call him James, though that is not his real name. Both he and his wife had come to the conference, but he had to take her home as she had fallen ill. However, he came back to the conference alone, feeling the need to speak with someone. His wife was “born again”, he said, something that he didn’t quite understand. On the one hand, he said he believed in God, and was not an atheist, but on the other hand, he said he really didn’t see the need to become a Christian. Yet he had been drawn to the conference, and wanted to know what the “switch” was, i.e., the “button” that needed to be pressed in order to become a Christian. He explained that he thought he was a moral man, who was compassionate and cared for people so he didn’t see why he needed to be saved. “Saved from what?” was the way he put it.  Furthermore, he pointed out how in the course of his business, he had encountered several individuals who dealt dishonestly in business who wore their Christian faith on their sleeve and was thus put off by the church and by people who made overt confessions of being “born again”.

As I got to listening and talking to him, I found also that he didn’t see why it was necessary to reject evolution, (which was a part of my position in my morning seminar) and said that “evolution worked fine for him”. In short, he was a “theistic evolutionist”, i.e. one who believed that God used evolution. In responding to him, I pointed out firstly that I agreed with him that one did not have to be a Christian to exhibit good morals. Many people of different faiths, or those of no faith at all have lived stable lives, cared for families, and for society at large. So whatever Christianity was about, it couldn’t be about living a life based on good values or morals. The Jews had the 10 commandments, the Babylonians had Hammurabi’s Code, and other civilizations had various laws of justice and ethical behavior. Even many Christians have wrongly elevated “good behavior” to be the defining characteristic of what it means to be Christian.

I then backtracked to the issue of evolution to show him why his view of human origins was partly responsible for his inability to understand why he needed to become  a Christian. I asked him what he thought of growing old and dying, whether it had any special meaning at all. As expected, he said he didn’t think it was any thing significant: for evolution to work, death was necessary, and was inevitable in the struggle for survival – only the fit would survive( i.e. survival of the fittest) and the rest die out. So I pointed out how if evolution was true and humans evolved, then the death of humans was not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. However, the Bible taught that death was really God’s judgement on Sin (Gen 2:17; 3:19; Rom 3:23 & Rom 5:12), and that man was not really supposed to die at all. This is why it made sense that if Christ really paid for our Sin, then it followed as a matter of logic that the effect of Sin, which is death itself, had to be reversed. And this He did by His bodily resurrection, in the same body in which he had sustained his wounds(John 20:27). But accepting evolution effectively destroyed this logic by redefining human death as something ordinary. Thus my first point to him was, each of us are growing old and dying, and that is a sign that something has gone terribly wrong with us – we are reaping the “wages” of something called Sin.

Additionally, I asked him where morals came from. The notion that we should love not only our neighbors, but also our enemies, that we should be considerate of the weak and sacrifice ourselves for the good of others, turning the other cheek when wronged, seemed to fly in the face of what evolution would demand. Aggression and selfishness is what one would expect from millennia of “survival of the fittest”. We didn’t get here, according to evolution, by being kind and gentle to those weaker than us, but by a brutal process of survival. How then could God (if He really used evolution) then call such behavior in us as sin, and send us to hell for that ? Furthermore, evolution is about reproductive advantage –those organisms that are able to leave the most offspring are the ones which have the highest chance of survival –sexual promiscuity is the best way to achieve this end, a behavior manifested by most animals. If that’s how we got here, then why would God turn around and command monogamous marriage and condemn us for engaging in animalistic sexual promiscuity ? How is fornication a sin then? My second point was, “if evolution is true, you can’t really define sin, and there would be nothing from which you would need to be saved”

My third point was, “if evolution is true, you can’t have a soul that will survive after you die” I asked him if he could show where the human soul came from. Clearly evolution only claims to deal with how the physical body “descended” from apes, etc. It doesn’t even attempt to show how the soul that survives death comes about. I pointed out to him that we face judgement after the physical body dies (Heb 9:27), and thus either the Scripture is wrong, or evolution is wrong. Logically, if there is no soul, I could easily see why he couldn’t see the need to be saved.

As the dots began to be connected his expression changed, and he said he began to see the unreasonableness of holding to evolution and to the Christian God at the same time. We then got to talking about  the “switch” or button for which he was looking: that Sin is not primarily against people, but only secondarily. Sin is primarily against God Himself. We see sin not when we compare ourselves with ourselves or with others (2 Cor 10:12) but when we compare ourselves with God Himself and with the life of Christ. God will judge us in wrath after we die, and the motive to become a Christian is simply this: Christ has paid for our sins, and we don’t have to be judged if we receive His salvation. We can flee from God’s wrath and take refuge in the work of Christ done to bring forgiveness. That’s the real reason to become a Christian.

James sat and thought about this for a while. I wrote down the references for him. He asked me what I thought he should do, and my answer was, get alone in a room and speak to Christ, acknowledging your sin and asking Him to save you. He said he believed in the resurrection, and so I told him, read the Gospel of John, and trust in Christ to save you from sin.  He thanked me for connecting of the dots, saying it helped him, and said he would leave the conference now that he felt he’d received what he came to find.  And I thanked God for James, for the Gospel of Jesus, and for the means to defend it.

Potchefstroom, Aug 4th, 2009

Prior to leaving Charlotte, I got a last-minute request to teach for Prof. Anne Karstens’ 1st year Philosophy Class on “Quantum Physics and Truth” and so was quite excited about it.  In this talk at 10am this morning, I spoke about how Quantum Physics has been wrongly used to propagate the false idea that nature is random, and so our ethics and morality are also random. There were about 20 students in the class, and since they didn’t have a physics background, half the talk was on understanding the  physics behind Quantum Theory, and the other half on the philosophical problems that have arisen from it. Several students stayed behind to discuss how theories from the scientific domain have been hijacked and misapplied to attack the notion that God exists or to deny that objective morality (universal understanding of right and wrong) existed. One student in particular was a 3rd year Law student who was now studying philosophy and had a keen interest in Christian Apologetics.

Potchefstroom, Tue Aug 4th

On Monday at 5pm, I spoke at a colloquium to the Philosophy Department, with both Professors and students attending, on the subject of Scientism. Scientism is the view that Science is somehow the only model for truth, and that if something is not Scientific, then it cannot be true. When Science speaks, other disciplines including theology. Of course this is a false view, and the purpose of my talk was to show that it is a false view. It was my first time speaking in front of a scholarly audience, and I got good feedback along with tips on how to refine my talk.

At 7pm, I spoke on the subject “Can Science show that God Exists?” in a large classroom, with well over a 100 students attending. I discussed how Romans 1:19&20 indicates that God’s existence and some of His attributes can be known directly from the creation, i.e., without the help of a Bible. I then prcceeded to show from Physics and Cosmology that the Universe cannot be explained without a First Cause, i.e. God. Furthermore, the talk focussed on Biological information in DNA and in various microscopic structures that demanded an Intelligent Designer. The response was very good, and there was a good time of interaction with the students. We got out of there only at 9:30pm and hung out at the men’s dorm before heading off to our host’s home for rest.

Pretoria, Sunday August 2nd, 2009

It is 10:45pm on Sunday and I am dog-tired as I write this account. My laptop containing my presentations has crashed and will be out of commission for the remainder of the trip. One of our teammates, Dr. Richard Tompkins has become ill, and I have been feeling ill. Despite these setbacks, I am thrilled at the events that unfolded today.

Tembisa is an all-black neighborhood in the suburbs, consisting of hundreds of tin-shack houses and some cinder-block structures, and is home to hundreds of South Africans and also to refugees from Zimbabwe. In short, it is a slum where some of the poorest of the poor live. The area is considered dangerous for white people and foreigners. By “dangerous” I mean that if you are white and get lost in Tembisa, you could get murdered due to the simmering racial tensions that are left-over from the apartheid days. Just last year in Tembisa,  several Zimbabwean refugees were murdered by xenophobic South African black mobs, a case of Africans killing Africans. So you don’t go to Tembisa unless you really know what you are doing.

At the invitation of a Church of God in Christ (COGIC) congregation in Tembisa, T.E.A.M. sent 4 members, myself included to minister at the church today.  One of us spoke to the youth while I and another member did a Question/Answer session. Here is a sampling of  some of the questions we fielded:

1. Who was Cain’s wife ?
2. Do Christians have to keep the Old Testament Commandments ?
3. What is the relationship between the accounts of Gen 1:27 and Gen 2:6 ?
4. How do we know the New Testament is Reliable ?
5. Moses forbade contact with the dead. How is it that Saul was able to contact Samuel after Samuel’s death ?
6. Isn’t the idea of the Trinity a contradiction ?
7. Where can I learn about apologetics?

Needless to say, an hour was inadequate to answer these completely, and service started at 10:30am. The “Church building” was a rectangular tent structure on a concrete floor, and the temperature was in the 40s. Everyone was dressed for winter, with hats and overcoats throughout the service. The Africans worshipped in a vigorous uninhibited fashion, with passion and loudness and John Njoroge of RZIM preached on being Agents of Blessing, from Genesis 17.   After the sermon, T.E.A.M. members served communion to the congregation.

After church was over, we were treated to some tea and cakes, and were overwhelmed by the love and hospitality of these precious saints of God whose joy in the Lord abounded despite the abject poverty. It became clear to us that the Lord was beginning a relationship with this church for His purposes. We ended staying there until past 3pm, answering questions from a variety of people in 1-on-1 private sessions. One of the men who spoke with me peppered me with questions on the historical reliability of the New Testament, while another TEAM member spent quite sometime talking about the Trinity and about how to answer Moslems.

It was glorious to see the hunger for truth in the hearts of the Tembisa Christians – they were passionate not just about their worship of God, but also about seeking and knowing the truth. They may have learned answers to some questions from us, but I suspect that when we left after 6 hours with them, we had learned much more from them than they had learned from us.

Pretoria, Aug 1,2009

PLEASE PRAY FOR ME!!

Unexpectedly, I have been invited to spend an evening with a  Professor of Microbiology, a man of considerable influence over students who believes in Evolution even though he is a Christian. This came about yesterday in Pretoria when I was visiting with the family of our Mission Team Leader, Simon Brace. When his Aunt heard about my area of interest, she told me about another family member for whom she has been praying and suggested I meet with him to discuss the issue of evolution. She then setup an appointment for Thursday Aug 6th at her home, so please pray that God will bless this time and that it will be a meaninful and honest interaction with this professor!

Johannesburg, August 1, 2009

This morning I was privileged to be the plenary speaker at Springs Baptist Church (http://www.springsbaptist.org.za/about.html) speaking on “Introduction to Apologetics: A Rational Defense of the Historic Christian Faith”. My  central points were first that we must engage in Apologetics due to simple obedience to God’s commands(1 Peter 3:15; 2 Cor 10:5; Jude 3), and second that the New Testament authors and Apostles engaged in it.  The audience was from all age groups, and there was good interaction during the Question/Answer session. One interesting question was, “Is Apologetics something new ? – since we’ve not heard of it so far” – and it was quite a thrill for people to realize that Apologetics has been something that has been in the Church through the 2000 years of Church history. Church Leaders like Justin Martyr, Origen, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, C.S. Lewis and so on have carried out the Biblical command to defend the historic Christian Faith, and so this is nothing new-fangled.

Dr. Richard Tompkins followed this talk with a seminar on the New Age, and then another one on the Problem of evil which was well received. Overall the audience was very appreciative, and 2 people came up to me to ask what the next step would be in getting involved in learning apologetics. This positive feedback was really good to hear as I initially had no idea what to expect from a South African audience. The feedback put us in good spirits and this helped us overcome the depressing cold weather  and freezing rain, and did I mention, the hailstones that pelted our vehicle, as we drove back to Pretoria !

Johannesburg, July 31st

This is my first blog post from South Africa, after having finished my first seminar on Exposing Scientism which was attended by about 50 people at a weekly coffee shop ministry event. I forgot to bring the power converter (SA uses 220 volts) with me so I couldn’t make use of the Powerpoint presentation, but this turned out to be a blessing because I felt I connected better with the audience, and spoke for just 30 minutes, leaving more time for Q/A. The discussion was lively and overall the seminar was received well, so I’m thankful to God  I was able to do this despite jetlag and lack of sleep.  Since I am free for the rest of the day, I can catch up on rest and prepare for the 1-day apologetics conference at SPRINGS church where I am the first plenary speaker. Thankyou all for keeping my family and me in your prayers !

Today I was given a new Passport, so very thankful to God for that, as I was first told I would not get one because the New York office that issued my previous Passport had not given clearance – but – because I said I was travelling next week, the office in Washington issued me a Passport that is valid for 1 year. Now I’m praying that all will go well with my application for the Visa to South Africa – they’ve promised to do what normally takes 5 business days in just 2 or 3….

When I handed in my application for a new passport, the Consular official initially told me that atleast 1 month was needed for processing, which would have meant I would not be able to travel on July 29th after all. However, when I explained my travel plans, she said the best date she could promise me was July 23rd – after which I need to get the passport over to the South African Consular office for them to stamp the Visa. Both these offices are in DC, so I have to go back to DC again and again (and work weekends to make up for the time taken)

God has been merciful in bringing this trip together so far,  so please pray that there wont be any hitches and that I’ll be able to get the papers in order and on time !