Dr Paul Allen

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...

Will you keep your faith in university? Odds are you won’t, at least according to Barna Research. Barna estimates that roughly 70% of high school students who enter a university as professing Christians will leave with little to no faith. These students usually don’t return to their faith even after graduation, as Barna projects that 80% of those reared in the church will be “disengaged” by the time they are 29. Will you be one of the 80%? Will you abandon your faith when surrounded by peers who don’t know God? Most people assume their early faith will carry them through their lives. King Joash probably did. He began to reign at age 7 ( 2 Chronicles 24:1 ), and he “did what was right in the eyes of the Lord all the days of Jehoiada the priest” ( 2 Chronicles 24:2 ), King Joash’s mentor and most trusted advisor. When Jehoiada was alive, Joash faithfully followed God’s laws and made sure others did as well. He even inspired others to give joyfully to God: “All the princes and all th...