Lee Strobel is an atheist-turned-Christian apologist and former award-winning legal editor of The Chicago Tribune. He is the author of more than 60 books and curricula including The Case for Christ, which was adapted into a movie starring Mike Vogel in 2017. He is founding director of the Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics at Colorado Christian University, and was a main stage speaker at the 2023 Amplify Conference.
In the following interview, we discuss the transferrable skills to evangelism that he learned as a journalist, how apologetics has changed over the decades of his ministry, and why your church needs an evangelism champion—and why that champion just might be you.
Let’s jump in the time machine and take it back to when you were a journalist and when you wrote The Case for Christ. What were you able to bring from journalism into your career in apologetics? What were some of the transferable things that you were able to find?
Well, I think one transferable skill set that I had was that being a journalist, I knew how to do research, I knew how to ask questions, I knew how to investigate. I did a lot of investigative projects for the Chicago Tribune and that trained me well for two things. One, my own spiritual journey where I had been a skeptic and atheist and used those skills to investigate the evidence for Christianity and ultimately came to faith on November 8, 1981. It [also] prepared me to help introduce others to apologetics, because you’ll notice virtually all my books involve a format where I’m not the expert. I go and seek out world-leading scholars, philosophers, scientists, historians, and ask them the tough questions I had when I was a skeptic or that other skeptics are currently asking. I let them present the case, and then I see myself as sort of a link between the world of scholarship and the everyday world.
We need scholars—God bless them, I love them; my son is a New Testament scholar and professor at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University—but we also need people who can be that link to take that scholarly material and “put the cookies on the bottom shelf,” as the saying goes, to be able to share it in a way that the average person can understand it and put it to use. And that’s what I see myself doing. I see myself as a bridge between the world of scholarship and the everyday world.
So using those tools that I use as a journalist, I’m able to ask questions and then to write in a way that hopefully communicates compellingly to everyday folks this rather lofty material that apologists deal with.
The way that we do apologetics changes over time. When I was coming through Wheaton College circa 2007, it was the New Atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett we were responding to, and now we’ve entered into a post-truth era. So, what does apologetics look like in the 21st century? And how’s that different from how you started out?
J. Warner Wallace [who wrote Cold-Case Christianity] said not long ago that evangelism in the 21st century is spelled apologetics. And I think there’s something to that. In the sense that we’ve got increased skepticism in our culture, a lot of it driven by the internet. When I met my wife for the first time back in late 1966 in Chicago, the percentage of American adults who believe that God exists was 98%. Today, that number has dropped to 81% according to Gallup. That’s the lowest percentage in American history. We look at Generation Z, and we see that in this generation the word atheist is no longer a dirty word. Twice as many members of Generation Z are willing to call themselves atheists compared to my generation. So we see those troubling trends.
And yet, at the same time, we’re seeing heightened curiosity and interest in spiritual topics. My new book [is titled] Is God Real? And the reason I named it that is because I found out that 200 times a second around the clock, someone on planet Earth is typing that question into a search engine. We’re seeing that three out of four American adults say they want to grow spiritually. Forty-four percent of American adults are saying, “I’m more open to God now than I was before the pandemic.” Millennials are overwhelmingly looking for purpose in life. So there’s increased skepticism, but at the same time, I think increased openness and increased curiosity about the Christian message.
How we respond to people is different in many ways. The theme verse for apologists is 1 Peter 3:15, “Always be prepared to give an answer to anyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.” And that’s been stressed by apologists for centuries. But now, I think the stress is coming to the next few words, which say, “But do that with gentleness and respect.”
I’ll give you a practical example of how apologetics has changed for me. Often, when I get into a conversation with someone who’s not a Christian, I’ll ask this question: “If you could ask God any one question, and you knew he’d give you an answer right now, what would you ask him? And 80% of the time, the question is some [variation] of Why does God allow suffering? And I would [in the past] respond and give him a five-point little serenade on why God allows suffering. But I don’t do that anymore. What I do now is I say, “Well, that’s interesting. Let me ask you a follow-up question. Of all the possible questions in the universe, why did you ask that one? I want to get to the why question. I want [give them room] to say something like, “Because my wife was just diagnosed with cervical cancer, and I want to know where’s God in the middle of that,” or “We lost a child in childbirth five years ago. I want to know where was God in the middle of that?”
Now we’re getting to the real issue. Now we’re getting to the personal issue. Because often these are not intellectual hurdles for people. They’re personal challenges that people are going through. And that person does not need me to give them a five-point sermon on why God allows suffering. That person needs me to put my arm around their shoulder and cry with them and empathize with them and sympathize with them and offer them some words from Jesus that can give them comfort and courage in the midst of their pain.
Now ultimately I want to get to the reasons, but we’ve got to deal with the root cause. Why are people walking away from God? Why are people walking away from church? Why are people likely to say they believe in God? For many people, the real hurdle is sinful behavior in their life that they know they’d have to change if they became a Christian.
So yeah, I think the approach to apologetics is changing, but I think the need for apologetics is ever more present today.
Shifting gears here a little bit, churches are pretty good about discipleship. And if they’re not good at discipleship, they’re really eager to figure out how to do it better. When it comes to evangelism, they’re less eager, less excited, a little bit more hesitant. So how do you how do you get churches past that tipping point where evangelism becomes a part of their culture, the DNA of their church?
Well, I think every senior pastor needs to realize that they set the high-water mark for evangelism in their church. Your church is probably never going to be any more evangelistic than you are personally. They take their cues from you, they’re watching you, they’re listening to the stories you tell, they’re listening to the illustrations you use. They need the sense that you are actively involved in sharing your faith. My ministry associate, Mark Mittelberg, has written a great book called Contagious Church that provides ideas and ways that pastors can increase their evangelistic lifestyle. So that’s one key.
Secondly, pastors need to learn how to inculcate that value into the congregation through teaching, through small group studies, through guest speakers, through evangelism events, and so forth. We need to inculcate that value that lost people matter to God into the culture. But then—Mark and I have been championing this for years—every church needs to have an evangelism point leader in the church. For a small church, it’s a volunteer. For a medium-size church, it’s part-time. For a larger church, it’s full-time. But we need one person who’s not encumbered by eight billion other responsibilities, but whose job it is to stay up late, praying, strategizing, How are we gonna penetrate our community with the gospel? And so that’s one of the things we’re doing at our center at Colorado Christian University, is to train people how to be that evangelism point leader in a local church.
We think it’s critical, because a pastor can’t do it all. He can be the lightning rod, he can be the vision caster, but he needs someone who he can put his arm around and say, “This is my gal, this is my guy. They’re gonna be my hands and feet in the trenches of ministry in this church to fulfill the mandate of the Scriptures to reach our community with the gospel.”
Rick Warren said, “If I were to start over a church, start from the beginning and just have four people to start the church with, one of them would be the evangelism point leader.” Now that doesn’t mean that they do evangelism for the church. One of their key roles is to train everybody in the church, 100% of the people in the church, how to naturally and effectively share their faith with people in their sphere of influence.
So, Ephesians talks about the office of the evangelist. And that office is an equipping office to equip everybody in the church to do evangelism in their sphere of influence. And then also to quarterback the creation of ministries and events that the church can use to invite nonbelievers to. Everything from perhaps debates to golf clinics to, gosh, there’s a million ideas. Outreach magazine is great for talking about all the various ideas that churches have to bring people from the community into the church into a safe place where they can hear a very dangerous message of the gospel. I think the office of the evangelist is critically needed if a church is gonna be successful in reaching the community for Christ. And I’m thrilled that more and more churches are recognizing this and saying, Yeah, we need to do this. We need to ignite that office in the local church so that we can be more effective than we are currently being.
The unexpected adventure of evangelism is the joy and the excitement and what gives spice to the Christian life. Being active evangelistically raises all other areas of our Christian life. I remember being a brand new Christian in journalism and praying and saying, “God, use me as you will.” And that led to leaving everything I trained for my whole life, and taking a 60% pay cut and joining the staff of a local church in the evangelism department as an assistant director. And it was the greatest decision I ever made. It was the most fun, the most exciting, the most fulfilling role that I could have ever imagined.
So I hope people make personal decisions: What can I uniquely do? Why do I keep doing things that anybody else can do and not doing those things that I uniquely can do? How has God wired me up to make a contribution that’s unique to me? I hope they look at themselves and say, How can I amplify the impact that God wants me to have in not just the broader culture, but in the local community, the local church? I think there’s nothing more exciting than that.
Preregister now for the 2024 Amplify Conference on October 22 and 23 hosted at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, and take advantage of discounted super early-bird registration pricing to hear from other leaders who are championing the gospel in their unique spheres of influence.