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Hello and welcome to the Unapologetic podcast. My name is Brian Seagraves and I will be your host. This is episode zero, so it’s going to be a little different than the future episodes. It’s more of an introduction, if you will.

Why Unapologetic? Well this is a podcast about Christianity and more specifically, how we can defend and not apologize for our Christian convictions. It’s extremely common today to see people that don’t know enough about their faith to be able to defend it, they almost feel like they need to apologize for it when they’re confronted or maybe they speak up at a family gathering. They say, “Well, this is just my opinion and I’m sorry, I don’t really know what to say. I don’t want to offend. These are just my beliefs.” Well, what I want to do over a podcast that comes out each week is strengthen people’s faith, strengthen their convictions, give you evidence, ways of defending, so you don’t have to apologize. That’s my goal.

Now, for those of you who maybe know a little about this type of thing, UnApologetic might actually seem like an unusual title, because the area of Christian study that concerns itself with defending the faith is actually called Apologetics. Well, we get that term from 1 Peter 3:15, where it says, ‘always be prepared to give a defense for the hope you possess in Christ Jesus.’ Well, the word for “give a defense” in Greek is apologia, and that’s where we get our word, ‘apologetics’. It simply means ‘to defend, to give a defense’.

Now why do we need to defend our faith today? What’s up with that? Well, here’s the thing. I think the moral landscape of our culture has changed in the last five to ten years. So when we talk to someone, we can’t assume that they have a biblical worldview, like we used to be able to. I can remember in high school, as a youth group, we would go to people’s homes for outreach. And it was extremely common to go in someone’s home and they had heard about God, they weren’t opposed to Christianity. Now, they didn’t live like it, and they weren’t Christians, but we had a common ground starting place because they thought the Bible was true. And it wasn’t uncommon to see people come to Christ on our very first meeting. Now that’s not the case today. Our culture has been greatly influenced by the New Atheists, like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris, who have gone on the offensive after 9/11, writing books about how God doesn’t exist and how if He did exist, He would be an evil and immoral person. Well, that’s a very different culture and landscape than we had before 9/11. And culture has been accelerating on this moral trajectory that takes it farther and farther away from Christianity.  So that’s the first reason. We need to be able to defend our faith because we can’t assume people have the same starting position that we all used to have a while ago.  

Secondly, just having faith on its own is not enough. People say, “I don’t need to know things, I’ll just have faith.” Well, in a future episode, we’ll talk about what biblical faith actually is, but more than that, Jesus said that “those who love me need to worship me in spirit and in truth.” There’s a heavy truth component to Christianity. We need to know the truth, so we can worship Him in spirit and in truth.

Most people are either having kids or will have kids and as a parent, you need to be prepared to answer the tough questions that your children will have. “Mommy, Daddy, why is there a hell? Who goes there? Why are we right and the Hindus down the street, why are they wrong? That doesn’t seem loving. Or why would God create people gay and then say they can’t act that way?” These are the type of questions that parents get asked all the time. And we need to be able to deal with those. And that’s another goal for this podcast, is to equip you for those types of questions.

And the stakes are very high. Depending on the studies and surveys you look at, between 40 and 70% of high school students will no longer attend church once they graduate high school. Between 40 and 70%! If you look at the middle, that’s over half! That’s incredibly discouraging, and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that we spend 12 years in youth groups, in general, not prepping them for what the real world is like, for the resistance they will encounter to their faith. We don’t give them reasons, we don’t give them information or defenses, we simply say, “Well, just trust in Jesus,” and that’s it.

So that’s my goal, to equip you each week, little by little, in maybe 8-20 minutes, depending on the topic, with information, things for you to think about, tactics for you to use with people that you’re around at work, your family, maybe even your children.  And so, why Unapologetic? Because we don’t need to apologize, we have the truth on our side. We need to present it in a loving, a gracious, and a kind way, but we need to present it and we need to be able to defend it. So that’s what the UnApologetic podcast is all about. I hope you join me next time on Unapologetic.