I had the opportunity to see Andy Stanley in person last year and he delivered one of the greatest pieces of advice I've heard a Christian deliver outside of the Bible and remain completely consistent on the subject with the Bible. The statement was (me paraphrasing a bit):
Don't make a point, make a difference.
I tend to read a lot of news, and one of the recent stories passed around was in reference to one of the leaders of the New Atheist movement, Richard Dawkins. If you don't know the name, a Wikipedia quick search will tell you all you need to know. Dawkins was actually in an interview with the former canon of St. Paul's (who had a run-in with supporting Occupy protesters and subsequently resigned), a man who would qualify as a fairly liberal person in Christian circles. Yet, he [Giles Fraiser] was able to make a difference:
Dawnkins made the statement, in a radio interview, that: "[an] astonishing number [of Christians] couldn’t identify the first book in the New Testament”."
[This exchange followed.]
Fraser: Richard, if I said to you what is the full title of The Origin Of Species, I’m sure you could tell me that.
Dawkins: Yes I could.
Fraser: Go on then.
Dawkins: On the Origin of Species…Uh…With, oh, God, On the Origin of Species. There is a sub-title with respect to the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/9082059/For-once-Richard-Dawkins-is-lost-for-words.html
Returning to my initial statement about making a difference versus a point, I wanted to say that a point is sort of scoring an intellectual goal or touchdown. The idea is that we are able to spit off a zinger (often like the New Atheist movement or many Christian movements) that makes the other person look bad. Our western culture likes the idea of running the person into the ground. You don't defeat the debater, you crush him/her.
Christians, in turn, have often responded in the same way. We've enabled the oversimplification of a belief in Science on one side and at the other end of the ring is a belief in Religion (Christianity). In turn, this sort of places us in the paradigm of each side throwing red meat to its followers. On the New Atheist side, Christians are just ignorant, superstitious, and backwoods people who just deny Science because it doesn't jive with their worldview. In the other corner, we Christians tend to say that New Atheists/Atheists in general are so caught up in their desires to make themselves all-knowing, essentially gods, and just desire to spite Christians.
I, as a Christian, like movies such as Stein's documentary, Expelled. I think we need more of these. However, we Christians need to absolutely self-examine on how we approach this issue. We need to use reason against reason sprinkled with grace(Colossians 4:6). I mean I agree that there is a sense of conspiracy here in that there is a race to build and complete this worldview without God, but as Christians we should pity the desire to construct such a dynamically opposed environment. We should also acknowledge some blame because we often opt for a point over a difference.
Where the difference comes in is what the Bible talks about as a seed. Making a difference is difficult because it's not initially evident. In fact, chances are the person will disagree with you and will often continue to make his/her point, but I promise that seed will undermine more when it germinates over time than any point you can make. Just like the above radio exchange, the Christian could have proceeded to bury Dawkins rhetorically because of the slip-up. Instead, he's letting the point speak for itself, and it's firing conversations about Creation.
Christians tend to shoot their own in this. Are we going to write someone off because they believe the world was created 8,000 years ago? Are we going to write someone off because they believe that God used evolution in Genesis? Are we going to write off young earth or old earth? Or, at the end of the day, can we acknowledge that God created it and quit knifing each other of the details so that we prevent a unified front to a different but still religious worldview as to how the earth formed?
Eugenics - now that is a totally scary area! We have forgotten how much and how close this came to being a mainstream thing not only in Nazi Germany, but here in America as well. Have you folks heard of the sterilization cases in North Carolina, for instance (just last century and less than 100 years ago). Dangerous stuff that needs to be categorically opposed from the Christian perspective.
