Behind the scenes of the Life Answers Team
Emily Gissandanner, Contributing Writer
If you overhear a discussion in the student center about the teleogical argument, the multiple attestations of the gospels or Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism, those students are probably members of the Life Answers Team.
The Life Answers Team is an apologetics ministry founded at North Greenville University in 2012 under the direction of Alex McFarland, director of Christian worldview and apologetics, and Tony Beam the vice president of student life. The nine student members on the team learn how to defend the Christian worldview through research and speaking engagements in local churches and Christian schools. North Greenville University is one of the few schools with this type of apologetics team.
“The word apologetics, it doesn’t mean to apologize, we’re not sorry for anything,” said Dylan Baxter, the student team leader, “It comes from the Greek word apologia, which simply means to give a defense.” 1 Peter 3:15 commands Christians to always be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within them, the hope of eternal life through Jesus Christ.
In all of the stories of how God has used apologetics to strengthen each student’s faith, there are both similar themes and nuances. Patrick Coggins, a senior team member said, “As a believer, it’s just awesome to see how God meets us in the most random circumstances ever, and how he meets us all individually in His own way.” These are two stories of doubt, revelation, and hope.
Patrick Coggins is a senior history major at NGU. Like a lot of his classmates, he grew up in a Christian home and was saved at age 15. During his sophomore year of college, he went through a period of doubt and questioning. “I was asking questions like, ‘Why is it reasonable to believe God exists when there’s all this pain, all this evil, all this suffering in the world?’” Coggins said.
Coggins struggled to defend Christianity against the loud voices of the new atheist movement and Islam. He found comfort in reading “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel and “Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Christianity” by Nabeel Qureshi. Even so, Coggins wanted to explore options other than Christianity for the answers he was looking for.
At the time, he was enrolled in a course on the history of Islam, so he decided to explore it as a worldview. “I wanted to make sure what I believed was true and that it could pass all of the tests like making sure the manuscripts are reliable, making sure the character of God is who He says he is,” Coggins recalled, “Needless to say, I didn’t find what I was looking for in Islam, at all.”
Through watching debates and reading the works of Christian apologists, Coggins learned how to answer some of these questions and better defend his faith. He took a class a class under Beam on modern cults during the spring of his junior year, who persuaded Coggins to apply for the Life Answers Team in the fall.
Coggins has spent the year researching and presenting on various topics like the arguments for God’s existence, proof of the resurrection and the problem with evil. “This semester we had a lot of questions about Islam, which I think is very important because Islam has been in the news a lot recently, but it was especially cool to answer given my history with Islam,” Coggins said.
Ultimately, he said using logic to defend faith has helped reinforce his own faith just as it has helped others. Coggins said, “ At the end of the day, God is so much bigger than all of those questions and He can stand up to those questions because He existed before those questions existed.”
Coggins will graduate in May 2016 and hopes to pursue a Master of Arts in Apologetics and Christian philosophy. He wants to be a professor of philosophy and apologetics at a private Christian college like North Greenville, or one of the seminaries.
Dylan Baxter is a senior Christian Studies major and team leader of the Life Answers Team. Baxter was saved at age 16 and found it necessary to use apologetics to defend his faith in his public high school. “It’s kind of like saying invention comes from necessity. Apologetics came from necessity too,” Baxter recalled, “Because if you don’t have they ‘why,’ then people will tear you up.”
Like Coggins, Baxter was also heavily influenced by the writings of Christian thinkers. He has most inspired by “Mere Christianity” by CS Lewis and “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel.
Most North Greenville students will agree that pursuing a Christian Studies degree while navigating the life changes of your early 20s is no easy feat. Baxter says that apologetics works as a kind of “safety net” for his faith when God otherwise feels absent in the trials of life.
“It’s really hard for me to reason my way out of God existing, Jesus rising from the dead, and things like that,” Baxter said, “So apologetics is kind of like a failsafe when my emotions are like, ‘You don’t want to believe this,’ but my reason says, ‘You HAVE to believe this.’”
Baxter said he is called into the ministry through pastoral work of some kind. He is the current youth pastor at Holly Ridge Baptist Church in Simpsonville. At the end of June, he will resign and move to Louisville, Ky. to start school at Southern Seminary.
A new generation of ten students will rise up to continue the Life Answers Team ministry in the fall of 2016. Students of all majors are encouraged to apply with Beam at the end of each semester.
Apologetics can be a useful tool for defending your faith to skeptics. However, these stories remind us that the loudest voice of disbelief often comes from within. The Life Answers Team often repeats 2 Corinthians 10:5 as a reminder of that dual-mission, “We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.”
