Koukl: Put a stone in a non-believer’s shoe
By Paula R. Kincaid, The Layman, November 23, 2009
CHARLOTTE, N.C. –“My goal is to put a stone in your shoe,” Greg Koukl told the crowd gathered at the 2009 National Apologetics Conference.
Greg Koukl received his masters in philosophy of religion and ethics at Talbot School of Theology, graduating with high honors, and his masters in Christian apologetics from Simon Greenleaf University. He is an adjunct professor in Christian apologetics at Biola University. He hosts a radio talk show advocating clear-thinking Christianity and defending the Christian worldview. Stand to Reason’s stated goal is to equip Christian ambassadors with knowledge, wisdom and character.
When talking to someone who isn’t a Christian, Koukl said that he is “a person who plants the seed,” and he wants his words to make the non-believer think, “because I think Christianity is worth thinking about.”
“My role is ambassador, not evangelist. If I can move than person a little closer to my side, then I am satisfied,” he said. “If I start, the Lord will find another good ambassador to take the person further on.”
Koukl was one of many speakers at the conference, “Apologetics and the Local Church,” sponsored by the Southern Evangelical Seminary and at Hickory Grove Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C. Approximately 2,500 attended the event Nov. 13-14.
Koukl is founder and president of Stand to Reason. During his seminar, “Diplomacy vs. D-day: Getting from the content to the conversation without casualties,” Koukl said many Christians become educated about the faith, but still don’t know how to “get into the conversation” with a non-believer. He asked “How do you get from the content to the conversation?”
“When I start a conversation with someone, I almost never had it as a goal to lead a person to Christ,” he said.
He said that sometimes there is just too much in the way – so much misunderstanding, so many objections and false beliefs, “so much clutter in the way that if you talk to someone about the Gospel, it has no place to land.”
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“I have a game plan to put a stone in their shoe,” Koukl said, then outlined his strategy. “Listen to what people say, because they are going to tell you things that can help you share the Gospel.”
Ask questions
Koukl said he would ask people questions to start a conversation and to draw them out. “There’s no banging of heads. … just pleasant conversation, no line drawn in the sand.”
He called asking questions a “foundational tactic to manage the conversation in a gracious fashion, … so it goes where you want it to go. … The Christian goes on the offensive in an inoffensive way, asking carefully selected question to advance the conversation.”
And the model question is: “What do you mean by that?”
Koukl related one of his own experiences, when he saw a woman with a pentagram necklace. “I asked her, ‘What do you mean by that?’”
He said the question brought her into a conversation without being confrontational. When you ask a question, he said the focus and the pressure is on the other person, and when they talk, you will learn about them, and you “may see an opportunity to insert something you learned in a conference.”
If there is anything ambiguous in their response, ask again, “What do you mean by that?”
Don’t be surprised, he said if “you get the sound of silence, because it turns out that people have been socialized to say slogans and never thought about what they mean by what they say.”
Burden of proof
The second step, he said, is to reverse the burden of proof. If someone makes a statement, they have to give evidence to what they believe is true.
“If someone says it is so, why do they say it is so? … Don’t give them a free ride to say whatever they want,” he said.
So, the second question is “How did you come to that conclusion?”
“You are presuming that they came to a conclusion, and have not been socialized to toss out a slogan,” he said. “You want their rational reason for believing as they do.”
“‘What do you mean by that?,’ and ‘How did you come to that conclusion?,’ that is the game plan,” he said.
Koukl warned about letting anger get into the conversation. “If anyone gets angry it is not a good environment to persuade someone into thinking about a new idea.”