New idea for a ministry to reach young adults: meet at a bar and focus on scriptures that challenge your faith, rather than just the ones that affirm it. Discuss how God told the Israelites to commit genocide with the command to kill all the Canaanites and not intermarry. Or mention that the very specific specifications for the temple somehow very much resembled that of polytheistic places of worship in the region, and bring up the idea that maybe Moses took a hint from his surroundings when he was divinely inspired to write about it. Or maybe an answer that we are less comfortable with. On that note, bring up how science and archaeology do not always back up what we read in Scripture, at least on the surface level. A city the size of Jericho did not exist, so how do we interpret that?
In the banter, compare our knowledge of the Jewish and Muslim faiths to our knowledge of our own. Though many of us have had personal experiences that reinforced our previous beliefs, it would be unwise to avoid recognizing that the aspects of other faiths which we are so quick to criticize actually share many similarities with our own. Struggling with that can bring about an intellectual maturity to replace the status quo of fairly blind faith, which by all accounts seems based more in the fear of our worldview being wrong than in a search for truth.
The thing is, if we want to reach the lost in this increasingly educated world, we need to challenge ourselves. When we share our faith with someone of intelligence who has researched enough to know the flaws in the Christian faith, we should at least be at a point where we too have recognized these discrepancies, and, at the least, have attempted to reconcile them.
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