The email message said it all. It was from a young Christian, I’ll call Steve, who had just returned from a business trip on which he had shared his faith with a colleague. Or should I say, tried to share his faith, because it had not gone well. The colleague had once been a devout Christian but had rejected the faith and was now an ardent and very knowledgeable critic of Christianity.

For every point Steve made, his colleague was one step ahead of him. He knew the point and immediately raised a problem with it and Steve found himself unable to respond. In addition, his colleague raised new challenges Steve had never heard before. The longer it went, the worse it got and when the weekend was over, Steve returned home with a faith crisis of his own, and a long list of unanswered questions about his faith.

When I related Steve’s story to a close pastor friend, he admitted his own lack of confidence that his parishioners would fare any better if faced with these kinds of criticisms.

There is a new and well-informed kind of skeptic today, one who in the past worshipped alongside the rest of us. Some, in fact, were leaders in the Christian community, pastors, professors, theologians, and people preparing for ministry. They are now some of Christianity’s most adamant and well-informed critics and many are actively encouraging other Christians to follow them out. Judging by the testimonials on their websites, they are meeting with success.

Why do people leave the faith and how can our preaching prepare our people?

When one reads their stories one finds a complex variety of influences contributing to their departures, some personal and some intellectual. Let’s consider four which are often mentioned along with guidelines for how our preaching can engage them.

Unrealistic Expectations concerning God and Christianity

A former pastor was asked why he stopped believing in God, his answer was he had finally “run out of excuses for God.”[i] His theological training had stressed that God would protect Christians, answer their prayers, provide them with wisdom and strength, and give them an abundance of everything they need. It was part of what he preached and was something he loved about Christianity.

Over time, however, this pastor noticed that more often than not, these promises failed to materialize. Bad things happened to him as frequently as to his non-Christian friends. He began collecting answers to his prayers precisely because they were so rare, he said. At first, he made excuses for God which he referred to as the fine point of his theology, but this could only go on for so long. Eventually he ran out of excuses and his belief in God came to an end.[ii] This was an unfortunate case of misguided expectations.

In our preaching, we should guard against over-promising on God’s behalf or committing him to actions which he may decide not to carry out. When our sermons include promises from God, our people are listening and we run the risk of creating false expectations and even sowing seeds of doubt concerning God’s good character, or even his existence, if he does not see fit to deliver on them. Godly people sometimes experience pain and grief, and young children sometimes die even when their parents or pastors pray for healing. Our people need to hear that God does not always conform his actions to our wishes, and it’s a good thing too.

They also need to hear, however, that we have a Savior who understands our suffering because he, himself, has suffered more acutely than any of us will. Moreover, this same Savior promises to walk through our suffering with us right to the end. In contrast, those who leave the faith for atheism are choosing a worldview which has virtually nothing to offer the suffering person.

Disillusionment with Christian colleagues and friends

One pastor and Christian writer who left the faith tells us of a personal setback in his life as a Christian leader which quickly became ugly and blew up into a public scandal. When he tried to come clean, he found himself being treated like damaged goods. Even some long-time friends withheld their confidence in his side of the story. This hurt deeply and was one key factor which led to other questions and started him on a downhill slide which, over time, ended with him leaving the church and God altogether.[iii]

As pastors we have an opportunity to prepare our people to respond to our brothers and sisters well in their lowest times so as to stop this downhill slide. There are at least two ways we can do this in our sermons.

First, we should teach and illustrate Jesus’ no-condemnation—no-approval principle. I suspect this would be as surprising if Jesus taught it today as it was to his audience when he dealt with the woman caught in adultery. He made it clear that he did not approve of her action. “Go and leave your life of sin,” he instructed her. At the same time, however, he did not condemn her as a person, and this in spite of the fact that her guilt was not in question. “Neither do I condemn you,” were his words (John 8:1-11).

No condemnation of the person-no approval of the action. It’s a duo that many of us, preachers and laypeople alike, find difficult to hold together; our tendency is to emphasize one or the other. In fact, one gets the distinct impression that Jesus went a step further and restored this woman’s dignity which had just taken a beating from the self-righteous group that had brought her to Jesus.

The second way is to frame at least one good take-away question our people can pose to someone in their own conversations who has walked away from the church and God over this kind of disappointment. A question I find helpful is this: If this is what moved you to leave the faith, exactly which tenet or teaching of Christianity did your experience disprove? It’s helpful to put this question, or one like it, up on a power point slide so people can make note of it or, at least, concentrate on it.

The point of the question is that if the actions of the Christians around you were second- or third-rate, does it follow that Jesus is no longer the Savior, or that he never rose from the dead, or that, somehow, God no longer exists? We need to move with grace here but, through a question like this, our preaching can refocus our people on the foundational question of the truth of Christianity.

Christianity’s perceived restriction on the freedom to reason

Does Christianity prevent honest rational thinking? Even worse, does it do this by its very nature? A large number of those who have left certainly think so. They have concluded that while Christians may claim to value evidence, in the end, their views on every issue must agree with the Bible which is given to them in advance of any enquiry they undertake. If you want to be free to really think for yourself and carry out honest inquiry, you’ve got to throw off the restraints of religion.[iv]

What could be more appealing to someone with an enquiring mind? This new-found freedom is, in fact, a cause of celebration. One need only look at the names given to the organizations such people either start or join once they leave the faith: The Rationalist Association, The Good Thinking Society, Project Reason, and The Center For Inquiry, to name a few.

Our people will look to us to address this challenge and there are a number of ways we, as preachers, can do so.

First, our sermons should encourage our people to think and question the teachings they hear just as the Berean Christians did, and were commended for doing (Acts 17:11-12).

Second, we should resist the notion that this is somehow dangerous or risky to people’s spiritual health. The text tells us just the opposite. When the Bereans went home to check out the teaching of none other than the apostle Paul, many came to faith as a result. It’s the Christian way. Let’s encourage our people to make our churches and homes places where questions are welcome. Christianity does not call us to set aside evidence or careful thinking. It’s entire foundation, in fact, pivots on a historical moment, namely Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, and even Paul writes that, if this did not happen, the whole thing is a false hope and we should all walk away (1 Corinthians 15:17-19).

Thirdly, we should remind our people of the sheer number of high level intellectual leaders in our world who are or have been Christians. We can put examples before our people; names like Nicholas Wolterstorff, widely respected philosopher and former head of the American Philosophical Association, John Lennox, British professor of mathematics at Oxford University, Blaise Pascal, brilliant 17th-century French philosopher, to mention just a few. Somehow these intellectual leaders, and many others, have found ways to do the highest level enquiry and, at the same time, maintain a vibrant faith. This can be a strong encouragement to our people who may wonder whether one needs to reject Christianity to pursue thoughtful intellectual inquiry.

Fourthly, in our preaching we should look for ways to educate our people on the nature of worldviews since we are living in the midst of so many of them. We should acknowledge that Christianity is a worldview and, as such, does exclude certain ideas. But so do all worldviews, including atheistic-naturalism, the newly adopted position of many who have turned from Christianity.

When a person moves from one to the other, they do not remove all restrictions on their thinking; they merely replace one set with another. Ironically, on certain key issues, atheism turns out to be more restrictive than Christianity, an insight explained by G. K. Chesterton way back in 1908. He mused that the materialist disbelieves the reports of all miracles not because his viewpoint permits him to reject them, but rather because “his very strict materialism does not permit him to believe them.”[v]

Finally, our preaching should bring home the point that to reject Christianity, or any other claim for that matter, because one finds their teachings restrictive is to live dangerously. If it turns out that Christianity’s claims are true, then it will not matter that one finds them restrictive any more than if I find it restrictive to be told that I must follow the rules of the road or I will not arrive home safely. Once again, we have an opportunity as preachers to bring back the focus to the foundational question of the truth of our gospel.

Loss of Confidence in the New Testament

What if the four Gospels, or the rest of the New Testament, cannot be trusted to give us a credible portrayal of Jesus? A number of highly articulate critics of Christianity who at one time embraced the faith, have come to precisely this conclusion and the charges they are bringing against the New Testament, if successful, would effectively undercut it as a credible source.

Their criticisms call into question the identity and reliability of the human authors,[vi] the presence of textual variants in the manuscripts upon which our New Testament is based, other discrepancies in the texts, [vii] and even the process whereby the canonical Books were chosen.[viii]

There are at least three ways our preaching can prepare our people to engage these issues.

First, and most foundationally, we can find appropriate times to set out the two criteria used by the early Christian community to determine which documents were included in the canon of Scripture: earliness and connection to the original apostles. [ix] These criteria ensured that the information we have about Jesus is credible. Again, a power point slide stating them, along with brief explanations, emphasizes their importance and helps people recall them later when discussions arise.

Secondly, what about those discrepancies among the various Gospels? In my own preaching and public lecturing, I’ve found that people are fascinated to learn that when historians find differences in the details in multiple sources for the same event that, in their professional view, this is a mark not of unreliability but of credibility. It makes sense. Word-for-word agreement would indicate collusion among the authors.

In the four Gospels, we find agreement on the core events coupled with differences in the way these stories are described. It is exactly what we would expect from independent eye-witness sources. N. T. Wright, commenting specifically on one commonly mentioned passage puts the point this way,

The surface inconsistencies between Mark 16:1-8 and its parallels, of which so much is made by those eager to see the accounts as careless fiction, is in fact a strong point in favour of their early character. The later we imagine them being written up, let alone edited, the more likely it would be that inconsistencies would be ironed out. The stories exhibit . . . exactly that surface tension which we associate, not with tales artfully told by people eager to sustain a fiction and therefore anxious to make everything look right, but with the hurried, puzzled accounts of those who have seen with their own eyes something which took them horribly by surprise and with which they have not yet fully come to terms.[x]

Finally, we can inform our people of the massive amount of excellent scholarship which has been done to find plausible harmonizations between these Books over the past 2000 years. New Testament scholar, Craig Blomberg, notes that these alleged discrepancies have been answered many times over by scholars and adds that the vast majority of readers of the Synoptic Gospels in all ages have been struck not by the differences among them but by their remarkable similarities. It’s a very different perspective, indeed, on what some see as an insurmountable problem.”[xi]

The way forward

Whatever else we do, let’s fill our sermons with encouragements to pray for those who have walked away. They are not the enemy even though at times it may appear that way. And let’s remember that atheism is not necessarily their final intellectual destination. Many Christian intellectuals in our midst once embraced atheism but as a result of rigorous intellectual evaluation, left it behind.

[i] Testimony by Michal Pleban at http://clergyproject.org/michal-pleban/.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] This paragraph refers to John Loftus, author of the book, Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity, New York: Prometheus books, 2008. See especially pages 20-24, 32, and 57.

[iv] This was told to me in a personal conversation with Matt Dilahunty on May 18, 2012. The same argument has been made over the past decade in detail by New Atheist thinkers and is obviously having some effect. One example is the following: Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), p. 76. Richard Carrier, an atheist historian who grew up in a religious home, believes that Jesus may not have existed at all. He contrasts himself with Christians. For them, he writes, “. . .if Jesus did not exist, their worldview topples. . .It would be hard to expect them to overcome this bias, which makes bias a greater problem for them than me.” Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason to Doubt. (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014), xii.

[v] Chesteron, Gilbert, K. Heretics/Orthodoxy. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2000, p. 279-80.

[vi] Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 7, 11.

[vii] Loftus, John. Why I Become an Atheist, (Amherst, New York: Prometheus books), 357. This statement is made by David Edwards, quoted by Loftus.

[viii] For a fuller discussion of the claim that the New Testament books were a result of power brokering in which the Orthodox side won, see Darrel Bock, The Missing Gospels. (Nashville: Nelson Books, 2006), xix-xxvi.

[ix] Jones, Timothy Paul. Misquoting Truth: A Guide to the Fallacies of Bart Ehrmann’s ‘Misquoting Jesus’. (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2007), 81.

[x] Wright, N.T. The Resurrection of the Son of God (London: SPCK; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003) 612.

[xi] Blomberg, Craig. The Historical Reliability of the Gospels (Downers Grove: Intervarsity press, 1987), 152.

Paul Chamberlain is the Director of the Institute of Christian Apologetics at Trinity Western University, where he is also professor of apologetics, ethics, and philosophy of religion.