HT: Tim Chester
Tim Chester has done a great review of The Christ Files DVD series which looks like a useful resource produced by John Dickson and his team. 
Do check it out and see if you could make good use of it.
In his review, Tim mentions the possibility of using it to answer people’s questions about the historical Jesus or the reliability of the gospels.
We started a training course yesterday at church on how to use Christianity Explored with the aim of equipping more people to be able to explain the gospel to their friends, not just through helping to run a formal course.
One of the questions that participants are invited to answer in week one of the course is:
If you could ask God one question, and you knew it would be answered, what would it be?
We went round to try and think of the kind of questions people might ask and how we would respond. It was a useful exercise.
When people come into contact with Christianity and are seeking to understand what it has got to do with them, questions like the one above are a good place to start with them.
A lot of the answers to that question are born out of real personal experiences that people have and answers that they are really seeking. However, it is rare, in my experience, to come across people nowadays whose biggest hang-ups with God/Christianity are evidence-based. They might well be concerned about the historical reliability of the gospels and whether Jesus really rose from the dead but often we need to spend time with them, working on their presuppositions so that they really engage with the crucial historical records.
I have been thinking a lot about this recently and wrote a paper for college earlier in the year about our use of apologetics in a post-modern/late-modern world. If you’ve nothing better to do and fancy trawling through a hefty footnoted essay then go ahead and give it a read:
