Dr Paul Allen

We Are Now Headed into New Territory, But Christians Before Us Have Been There First, whom do I mean by “we?” I mean American Christians, especially American Christians who are determined not to compromise with a secular culture that is inimical to true, authentic Christianity. Second, whom do I mean by “Christians before us?” I mean Christians in the Roman Empire before Constantine and later Christians who walked the “narrow way” and suffered for refusing to compromise with the dominant culture that was inimical to true, authentic Christianity. We American Christians face a crisis and a decision. The crisis has been upon us for decades, but a final decision is looming in our immediate future. Will we allow the government to dictate whom we must hire to be in our institutions? It may be a do or die decision—“do” go along with the government(s), or “die” by declining to obey government dictates and lose our tax-exempt status and all federal and (sometimes) state funds—including guarante...

Christian researchers publish grim statistics every year about the university exodus of church-fleeing teens, but raising the alarm never seems to stem the tide. Churches and parents grasp at their graduating high schoolers, warning them about the temptations and ideologies waiting to consume them on-campus. Student ministries focus on apologetics, answering worldview questions, and defending the truths of Scripture. Campus ministries canvas the quad to draw struggling Christians into cheerful religious communities with pizza and froff. And yet the great collegiate apostasy continues. So, what’s wrong? When I walked away from Christ in college, I wasn’t won to the world by “lofty sounding arguments.” I just wanted friends. My experience since then confirms that I wasn’t alone. Though many students succumb to gnawing intellectual doubts about the trustworthiness of the Bible while in college, many others wander away from Christ in search of relational and emotional fulfillment.  App...

At some point in our lives, all of us have faced new challenges to our faith. If you haven’t yet, just wait! Depending on our age and maturity, new challenges can be quite unnerving. I remember the first time I was confronted with the claim that Jesus was a mythological figure patterned after ancient near eastern “mystery religions.” Now I can see that this charge has little merit, but it was quite unsettling at the time. Below are four points about how to best handle new, unexpected challenges to your faith. 1. Take a deep breath . Don’t freak out. Relax. Calm down. While some challenge may be new to you, chances are that someone else has already wrestled with it and provided a thoughtful response. Malcolm Muggeridge used to say “All new news is old news happening to new people.” This is especially true in apologetics. Few objections are genuinely new. In fact, if you probe far enough, you will often realize that the “new” objection has already been dealt with by one of the great t...