Rebecca Grace
AFA Journal staff writer
August 2008 – Do you know why you believe what you believe? Can you explain it?
According to a survey conducted by lecturer and author Josh McDowell, 84% of Christian college freshman couldn’t answer these questions satisfactorily.
Brett Kunkle, speaker of the Stand to Reason Student Impact program, believes the problem lies in believers not knowing how to respond to society’s sophisticated messages that undermine Christianity.
Therefore, Kunkle “is committed to equipping students to make a defense of their Christian faith and values,” as explained online at www.str.org. Stand to Reason (STR) is a ministry that helps Christians think clearly about their faith.
With more than a decade in youth ministry, Kunkle joined STR and “youthitized” their material. He developed theological and apologetic boot camps where students are placed outside their comfort zones, challenged in their beliefs and saturated in the knowledge of God.
Enlistment
The training in theology and apologetics allows students to take ownership of their faith and participate in the Gospel by exposing them to both truth and error.
“It seems to me that the best strategy to prepare them for the challenges that they’ll face is to expose them to the arguments against Christianity ourselves, when we actually have them in our care,” Kunkle explained.
Therefore, the Student Impact program is carried out in a two-fold manner – training and engaging – with a two-fold purpose of teaching and transforming.
Students begin with a pre-training session that includes a series of six to eight lectures that Kunkle delivers at the convenience of the participating group. This training is flexible and can be taught in a two-hour training session, regular scheduled church meeting or a weekend retreat.
These opening sessions teach students the basic doctrines of Christian theology and how to defend them.
The front lines
After pre-training, Kunkle takes the group on a theological mission trip to Salt Lake City, Utah, or on an apologetics mission trip to the campus of the University of California, Berkeley. Here the students receive further training by interacting with Mormons and atheists. They go from training to engaging.
For example, in Salt Lake City, students take in the Mormon culture and beliefs. They visit the Mormon temple, listen to presentations by Mormons, converse with Mormon missionaries, conduct conversational surveys and visit the campus of Brigham Young University (BYU).
At Berkeley, students listen to presentations by atheists, participate in question and answer sessions, walk around campus and interact with students. (This trip can be adapted for any local university or college campus.)
“[T]he Gospel ends up being the forefront for the trips, … [but] that doesn’t mean that every conversation gets to the Gospel,” Kunkle explained. “Oftentimes it’s a lot of pre-evangelism, pulling down certain obstacles, or, as we at STR call it, ‘putting a stone in people’s shoe.’”
Afterwards, there is a time of debriefing in which students ask questions and discuss the issues raised during the day.
Putting students in situations where they have to defend their Christian faith against intellects staunch in their own beliefs motivates them to get involved in the Gospel. Having their faith dismantled and their lack of understanding exposed causes knowledge to become a felt need.
“They see the huge need for it, and they see if they don’t know the basic message of the Gospel and how to defend it, they can’t be effective in sharing Christ,” Kunkle said.
The battle cry
STR training is often a turning point for students. Nominal believers embrace their faith and become impassioned for Christ. For others the whole course of their future plans is changed.
“I think one thing that we’ve lost sight of in Christianity is the fact that knowledge is so vital,” Kunkle said. “When I talk about knowledge I don’t just mean abstract thinking. The Bible never talks about knowledge that way.”
Rather, Kunkle is referring to the knowledge of God that transforms a life.
“Part of the whole knowledge equation is someone knowing not just what they believe, but why they believe it,” he added.
Therefore, according to Kunkle, the primary purpose of the Student Impact program is “the transformation of young lives through the renewing of the mind,” with Romans 12:2 as the scriptural basis.
“I think that a lot of groups are not experiencing the kind of transformation that God intended because they don’t understand the role of the mind in spiritual transformation. What we find is a shallow Christianity in a lot of churches. So we want to really help students plumb the depths of their Christian faith, which is intimately related to knowledge and the role of knowledge in transformation.”
For more information, visit www.str.org or contact Amy Hall at 800-2-REASON. The program targets students but is not limited to that age group. 
