In today’s episode, we’re honored to have J. Warner Wallace is a Dateline featured cold-case homicide detective, popular national speaker and best-selling author. He continues to consult on cold-case investigations while serving as a Senior Fellow at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He is also an adjunct professor of apologetics at Talbot School of Theology, Gateway Seminary, and Southern Evangelical Seminary, and a faculty member and one of our favorites here at Summit Ministries.
Episode 13: Summary & Transcript
Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
Episode Summary
In this episode of the Upside Down Parenting Podcast, J. Warner Wallace, a Dateline-featured cold case homicide detective, bestselling author, and senior fellow at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, shares his insights on equipping the next generation to defend their faith. Wallace discusses how Gen Z represents the first post-Christian generation in America, making apologetics more crucial than ever for parents. Drawing from his experience as both a detective and youth pastor, he emphasizes that young people need evidence-based faith rather than just experiential Christianity. Wallace stresses that parents must model authentic commitment to Christ through their daily priorities, habits, and conversations, warning that children can easily detect when parents are more passionate about politics, sports, or other interests than about Jesus.
Episode Transcript
Gabriel Pagel (00:00):
Welcome to the Upside Down Parenting Podcast from Summit Ministries. Parenting can feel overwhelming and disorienting, but you don’t have to do it alone. We’re here to walk with you as you raise your kids to embrace God’s countercultural truth, his upside down kingdom and champion of biblical worldview.
In today’s episode, we’re honored to have J. Warner Wallace, who is a Dateline featured cold case homicide detective, popular national speaker, and bestselling author. He continues to consult on cold case investigations while serving as a senior fellow at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. He is also an adjunct professor of Apologetics at Talbot School of Theology, Gateway Seminary, and Southern Evangelical Seminary. He is a faculty member and one of the favorites here at Summit Ministries. Jim, welcome to the Upside Down Parenting Podcast.
J. Warner Wallace (00:53):
Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
Gabriel Pagel (00:54):
Yeah.
J. Warner Wallace (00:55):
Yeah, good to see you too. It’s been years. I’m glad we have an excuse to be reconnected again. This is awesome.
Gabriel Pagel (01:00):
Yeah, it’s really cool. So we wanted to have you on today because you being experienced in apologetics and having worked with youth quite a bit in different capacities, we thought you would be just a very wise and helpful source of information for parents out there and the importance of apologetics. So my first question for you is this, what inspires you to equip the next generation to defend the truth of the Christian worldview and is there a moment or experience that made you really realize that parents in particular really need to know about apologetics in the faith?
J. Warner Wallace (01:39):
Well, I think anyone who’s serving in the church, either you love working with students or you don’t, you see extremes, right? Either you feel like I’ve got a friend who’s a Christian apologist, pretty well known, and I won’t, he said this publicly before, but I’ll let him say it for himself. He always says that, yeah, speaking to kids, he calls ’em kids, any high school students or whatever, just so hard. He always thought it was so hard to do. He equated it to, he’s not getting the response he would like to get from maybe his older audiences.
I look at it like this is the most important demographic in the church. This is the future of the church. And as you get older you realize that that’s where the energy and passion is, and if you’re interested, and that’s what moves movements, is energy and passion. It’s being unflinchingly willing to do whatever it takes to serve your master, to serve Jesus. For example, if you’ve ever been a youth pastor and you’ve asked your students, Hey, we’re going to go do this mission trip, it’s going to take a week, it’s going to be hard. You’re going to be sleeping on the floor, we’ll be eating food. That’s going to be whatever we can get our hands on.
(02:45):
But we’re going to put you in this position where you’re probably going to be preaching to people outside or trying to reach people door to door. Students will say, okay, great, let’s go. Parents are like, I think I got a vacation planned. I got every excuse in the book. And part of that is just because students are passionate. When they believe something is true, they are committed and willing to do something powerful for that truth. Well, what group would you rather serve than that group? I mean, that’s where all the energy is, and all you have to be, even as an old guy like me is if you’re still passionate about this, you can still transfer that passion to students.
So I think that’s part of what I realize now as an adult, as an old guy, and part of it for me too is that I didn’t become a youth pastor until I was probably 40, 41. So I was already probably older than most, and I was working as a cold case detective, but my kids were high school age kids. Also, if you’re not passionate about leading your own biological children, there’s probably something wrong with you. So it gave me at least an advantage of starting with a sense of energy. And also I live in southern California where I grew up here and didn’t really have anyone kind of approach me about going to church until I was in my thirties.
(04:07):
It’s a very urban area. I’m sure it was always relatively well churched, but there’s so many people here that I had no problem associating only with people who weren’t churched. So because I had that passion of a new believer wanting to, and I knew that my kids often, let’s put it this way, I was a youth pastor the first year I graduated that first class, I took them over like May, so I was at the end of the school year. I had them for that summer, and then we did a year with them taking a very experiential approach, didn’t make a case for why this was true.
I kind of bought into the idea that this should be fun. It should also be engaging visually, should be engaging from a music perspective, should have a real sense of experience. I did that for a year and those students largely walked away from their faith in their first year of college and we watched it. We heard ’em come back and through all the juniors we had the year before were now seniors. They knew those kids and they would report to me that, yeah, so-and-so is no longer a Christian.
(05:15):
And I realized whatever we were doing, it was not effective in keeping young people in the faith. So we shifted all of our efforts and I simply started sharing with these students how I became a Christian, and that was by investigating the case evidentially. They were fascinated with that, and really that’s what started the trajectory with understanding the role that taking an evidential approach actually can make possible with high schoolers. I would’ve thought before I started that why would they be interested in this old man detective approach that I took? No, it turns out people want to know, is this true before they’re willing to give their lives to it?
Gabriel Pagel (05:53):
Good. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. We don’t tend to just jump both feet in with something we don’t believe is actually true. So yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now, I’ve seen that in one of your books you said that Gen Z is now kind of the first post-Christian generation in America. What do you mean by that and how does it affect the way parents should disciple their kids?
J. Warner Wallace (06:23):
It’s so fascinating to me. We had a kind of a slow trajectory and when Sean McDowell and I wrote this book, So the Next Generation Will Know, that was only probably what, five or six years ago, and I think we’ve seen the landscape change in America so dramatically in the last five or six years for a couple of reasons. Number one, I do think that when we wrote that book, we were seeing this steady decline of about a point a year in people who would identify as Christians. They weren’t necessarily becoming atheists, they were simply unaffiliated.
Now, they would call this the rise of the nones when they would check the box with, “Who do you associate?” They would say none, but they often where people still were theistic in some way. Well, that started a flat line and I think we’ve seen a revival and you see that even on the backside of major movies like Jesus Revolution, where you’ll see, I’ve seen it here in Southern California at some of the most recent crusades that are being done in the area by evangelists here.
(07:32):
They’re having huge turnouts unbelievably on the number of baptisms I saw last month here at the famous Pirates Cove where we baptize people. The numbers are staggering. What is happening there does appear to be, now it’s not just anecdotal. I think we’re starting to see it statistically across America, especially amongst young people.
(07:51):
And now I think there’s a couple of things, of factors that are going on. Now there’s an elephant in the room we got to talk about Charlie. Charlie Kirk I think had a large reason why we are seeing a resurgence because the popularity of Charlie happens to coincide with this kind of flat lining of the decline and even some evidence of an incline. But also I think what we were seeing was that we were in a culture for a long time here that kind of felt like it was prohibiting people from stating the obvious.
So I think there was going to be a natural reaction to some of that that was going to be a little bit more conservative in response, and that happens to coincide with the work that Charlie was doing and we are seeing a revival. And so I think this is a generation where we have a precious opportunity because it doesn’t mean this is a Christian revival, it’s a sense of search for meaning and is the world purposeful?
(08:50):
Do I have a role to play in a purposeful world or is this all just an evolutionary accident and nothing really matters? I can just make it my own purpose. I think people are looking now for something stable. You’ll see for example, a rise in traditional church kind of engagement where you’ll see people who are interested again in the main line kind of ancient Catholicism, Greek orthodoxy, creeds, yeah, the creeds for example.
They want to have some sense that what they believe is not just true for us in this fleeting generation in which we live, but it comes out of some ancient tradition that has stood the test of time. I think you’ll see this is happening. Now the question is, as parents, what do we do to leverage that and are we prepared to speak about Christianity in a way that is calm and reasonable and beautiful?
(09:46):
Two things together, not just evidentially reasonable. Is it beautiful? Is it a philosophy of way of living that actually makes life worth living, that is the grounding of all essential purpose and meaning and beauty? Can we ground it in both of these things? And what that means is we can’t take this for granted.
I get to speak all over the country and there are places in the country still where people’s religious faith, their religious identity is kind of like their state identity. I’m a Californian, but you can’t ask me too many questions about California before I can. You’ll expose the fact I’m not a very good historian. I don’t know a lot about California. The reality of it is though that can’t be the way I wear my Christian beliefs. Is this so important that I’m willing to give my life to it?
And I think so, as I see it now, as we’re raising these, our kids, we have to help them see this matters enough to us that we have invested our heart, mind, and soul into this claim about reality that Christianity is true. We as what comes down to us, we have to be as intense about this as we have been about any other number of things. I come from a family that’s always been into, my dad’s always been a sports fan. I don’t think he could have been raised in this family if you weren’t a football fan.
(11:17):
And he could pass on his fanship. To me, most of us can pass on our fanship of our favorite team far better than we can pass on our faith in Jesus because we end up talking about that team all the time. We carve a time away to go to the games, we buy the paraphernalia, we watch it on TV, we watch the draft, we put those players on our fantasy leagues, we become experts in things that don’t matter. And we show our kids where I think our students still are looking for authentic commitment and they know what we are authentically committed to and they know if it’s Jesus or not.
So I think this is a time when this kind of rational discourse in which you actually believe something is true and can make a case publicly even like we have been seeing on college campuses, that is going to become the earmark of people who really embrace this belief as though it’s true.
Gabriel Pagel (12:13):
Okay, yeah, I know it’s been a common thing that we’ve said a few times over and over that in this podcast that the things you spend your time on is what your kids know you think is important. And so we want to catechize them. We want to make sure that they spend time understanding. You can know what the Bible means. When I taught at the Christian school that you volunteered with us, sometimes it was hard because people would like Bible’s not an academic subject, but it is, and we can hold them to that standard.
J. Warner Wallace (12:56):
Yeah, it’s so interesting. If we’re going to raise up our kids with a sense that they ought to worship God, that God is the object of worthy of worship, well then they’re watching us to see what our objects of worship are and they can kind of tell what our objects of worship are because they’re the things that number one, and this is where idolatry is so important as a Christian parent, I have to make sure that they know that the thing that matters most to me, the thing I’m usually going to be talking about and not in a preachy way, but it’s just the thing I’m thinking about all the time.
So I think about this and what must it have been like for Jesus about that and how does this theological dot connect to that theological dot? And I’m geeked out about that stuff, so I’m always talking about it. They’re going to know how I’m spending my money. They’re going to know if I’m spending my time serving, am I actually committed to the causes of Christ? They’re going to see that. They’re going to know, what do I get angry about? What is the thing that’s happened today that makes me so mad?
And if it’s something that’s silly, often it’s something that’s happening politically well, it’s really easy to mistake our devotion to Christ for our devotion to conservatism or anything that seems to straddle that political realm and getting upset about those things just shows you that my worshiping, my objects of devotion are something other than Jesus. They’re often the systems that are in place, and I often will try to connect those two and our kids are seeing that.
Look, in the end, I don’t have to worry about what my kids’ political positions are, if I can ground them in the truth of Scripture. In other words, if they love Jesus and love what he has to say about any topic, we’re going to end up downstream in the same place. I don’t have to worry about targeting the place where we’re going to land and trying to get my kid there. I need to target the upstream thing that it causes us to land at the same destination anyway.
And that is, is Jesus who he said he was? Is he essential to living a life that transcends any other life you could live? I know I want my kids to know that Jesus died to pay the price for their sin, but that academic truth can feel like an academic truth anyway, but it’s actually a truth that changes the way we see everything else.
(15:08):
And the outcome of this is often very beautiful. I don’t want my kids to chase it because it’s beautiful though, because we’re going to have a hard time. I want them to chase it because it’s true, regardless of what kind of life it might create for them. This is what Peter said. I mean, look good or bad, where else can we go? We know who you are. What are our choices here? We don’t have any choices here. If you are who you said you are, and we now know that you are, this is it. Whatever comes, it has to come because we can’t change it. And this is where I want my kids to be like, there’s no other better place. Forget about better. There’s no other true place they could put their faith.
Gabriel Pagel (15:49):
Yeah, perfect. Parents have the kind of tightrope they have to walk where they have to have a relationship with their kids, but they also have to teach them in truth. And you want to have the correct relationship, which is a parent to child relationship, not a best friend relationship and all that. What is the right balance, do you think, between parents being approachable and able to be asked all the questions? We want them to ask questions first, but also hold firm boundaries.
J. Warner Wallace (16:25):
Yeah. Okay. So I think what we want as parents is can you just give me a model? Can you just tell me if I say these three things today and then just one of these, that’s a good mixture that I can get through a day and not mess it up. But that’s just unfortunately not how this works. We have to, I think, have a template in place and a view of how the world is, and from that template we can kind of try to make our own decisions.
So let me give you an example of what I mean by that. I was at a school in Houston, a Christian school in Houston teaching the entire student body. We had several presentations and then at the end of the day, I just had their teachers in a big session with all the high school teachers. So what I asked the high school teachers to do is to give me as many synonyms as they could think of for the word love.
(17:15):
And I had tons of charity and compassion and tolerance and understanding and just every other synonym you can think of for love in a romantic sense and in a service sense. I mean all these mean probably 2020 words, all of which in one way or another meant love. I put ’em all on the whiteboard. I said, okay, now we think that when we teach our kids about love, that we’re doing some version of any of these 20 words.
I said, well, let’s talk about is that biblical? So here’s what I do know. I do know from one John that God is love. That’s what it says in scripture. I can make an equation: God equals love. Okay, great. We also know from the Old Testament and the New that God is the fullness of justice and mercy or the fullness of truth and grace, truth and justice, mercy and grace.
(18:02):
The fullness of these two things and only one being in the universe holds those two things in fullness that is God. So when Jesus is described as coming in the fullness of truth and grace, that’s a claim to deity. Because humans, we don’t do that. We’re always out of balance. All of Scripture is trying to teach us how to get that balance better.
So I said, okay, so we know that God is the fullness of justice, mercy, the fullness of truth and grace. So if we know God is this and God is also that, it’s like that old math equation. If A is equal to B and b is equal to C, then A is equal to C. So if love is equal to God and God is equal to the fullness of truth and grace, we can take God out of the middle. And now we know that love is the fullness of truth and grace or the fullness of justice and mercy. And I ask the teachers, look on the wall, did you see one word that you offered for what love is that had anything to do with truth and justice? No.
(18:58):
We’ve been sold a bill of goods that to love our children well undervalues truth and justice, it’s all about mercy and grace. Mercy and grace, love, adoration. We would never speak. Now if you’re raising kids, you have to speak truth to them.
(19:14):
But I think we worry that if we speak the truth to them, now granted, if we’re doing that we’ve never been gracious and merciful to our kids, then truth just feels like a hammer. And if all we’re doing is mercy, then that mercy is just an empty platitude. It doesn’t mean anything. If you’re not teaching your kids what’s true in a merciful way, you’re missing how it is to love. God loves with those two dimensions.
So what’s a struggle for us as parents, the struggle for us as parents is that in everyday situations we have to ask ourselves this thing I’m about to do or about to say or about to enact, can I hold these two sides in fullness and so I know what’s about to come out of my mouth. Now look, if you do as best you can and we’re all just humans.
(20:05):
You might have some success. Some days you may not. But our goal, I know this, if you aim at nothing, you hit it every time. So the goal has to be aiming at the fullness of truth and justice while also holding onto mercy and grace. And if we can do that, I think we’ve got a better shot. Sometimes I feel like as parents we end up in this rut where it’s like in these situations, I’m all justice and truth, and in these situations I can be merciful. We don’t think about pulling the other side of the equation in depending on where we’re at. So I think that that’s the goal every day though is how do I do both? And you have to earn that opportunity with your kids by showing them both sides.
Gabriel Pagel (20:46):
Okay, yeah, that’s really helpful. I know that I tell my kids when they think that I’m being too truthful sometimes I tell them, look, if I didn’t tell you the truth in the end when the truth comes back to bite, you would look at me and not trust me anymore. So the stove is hot, don’t touch it. And then if they touch it and I never told them or I was like, oh, it’s no big deal, then I’m still the bad guy. So either way, I’d rather be the truthful bad guy and have a good relationship with my kids because they can trust me.
J. Warner Wallace (21:21):
Yeah, so much of what we talk about is at some point, where do you lose control of your kids? I remember hearing Matt Walsh one time talk about it this way. He said, it’s not about control, it’s about influence. At some point we can lose the influence we once had with our kids. And it turns out what typically helps them to reign in behaviors or to have some impulse control is that they don’t want to lose the connection they have to us.
For example, when we’re looking at suspect pools on certain crimes, we know that let’s say you don’t hold a biblical worldview, often you’ll reign in your behavior because you are connected socially and relationally to important groups. For example, I wouldn’t want to let my dad down. I don’t want to let my wife down. I don’t want my kids to find out that. So we control our behaviors because we are strongly connected to families and communities and we have adopted their values and we do not want the scorn of our family or community.
It’s when people are so disconnected or so loosely affiliated because of broken relationships or whatever the case may be, that they’re far more likely to not care about reigning in behaviors that might bring shame on a group because they don’t have a group to bring shame on.
(22:47):
And so it turns out that our deep connections to groups often reigns in bad behaviors. This is true also for students. When they have deep connections, your dad’s a cop and you love him. Well, you don’t want to do stupid things that your dad’s going to find out about because of all the people. Your dad’s a cop. So I mean, I think that’s part of it. And if you have a strong connection, it’s not the punishment they’re afraid of, it’s the disappointment they don’t want to experience with me.
And I think that’s part of it. Do I still have influence? Am I still the kind of person they love enough not to want to disappoint? I didn’t have to say certain things to my kids because I knew they weren’t going to do that because they had a strong connection still to me. And now look, that’s something that is not just, people think, well, it’s about quality time you spend with your kids. It’s about quality time and quantity time.
Gabriel Pagel (23:43):
Yeah.
J. Warner Wallace (23:44):
I don’t think there’s a way to get around that. I think we would love to think that we could. I’ve learned as an old guy that it’s not possible to spin every plate. You’ll do some better than others. And whatever you give the most time and effort to, that’s what you’re going to do the best. And I think we sometimes think as men that our ministry opportunities are somewhere outside the home and we missed the hard truth, which was that your ministry opportunity first and foremost was your kids. And even now as a grandfather, I find that that really hasn’t reduced much. I mean, it’s not as though I have less to contribute.
(24:19):
Even though they’re not living in my house because now I have grandchildren and there’s a whole nother way that I need to contribute to guide the next generation. And a lot of that, by the way, we can take for granted because we think, well, the things that God is keeping track of is how much impact am I having in my community or on the global stage in terms of apologetics.
Now my first responsibility is to my kids. It’s funny how Paul says it this way. Look, I would prefer that you don’t get married at all and just join me in the mission field. But for those of you who are going to be challenged by that, then you should get married. But once you do, don’t think you can go to the mission field. You now have a new mission.
Gabriel Pagel (24:57):
You have other priorities.
J. Warner Wallace (24:59):
It’s in your marriage. And that’s a worthy ministry to spend because we need people, we need communities, and we need parents who see their children as their first priority. And boy, I’ll tell you, if you work juvenile crime long enough, you’ll see the difference when people don’t take that approach.
(25:18):
And you’ll see it all the time, especially with young men who have not had the love of a father or the guidance of a father. I’m going to tell you, I worked gangs for two years. I was shocked at the demographics. They were always the same. We had three different kinds of four different kinds of racial groups in our community that were involved in gang activity. Four different races. It was not about race. Some of them were quite wealthy. It was not about money or socioeconomic status, it was lack of dad always.
And lack of dad looked different depending on the group. Sometimes lack of dad because they never knew their dad. The mom doesn’t even know whose dad it was, seriously. Or lack of dad because they’ve been arrested or they’re in custody or lack of dad because he’s drunk and unavailable or lack of dad because he’s a workaholic who never comes home. It turns out lack of dad takes a number of different shapes. You can have an intact marriage with the father who lives at that address yet still experience lack of dad. And it turns out that makes a difference.
Gabriel Pagel (26:22):
That’s really good. Something that I wanted to ask you as I was thinking through this conversation, we both worked with youth for a lot of different years and I noticed in my years more specifically working with youth that we’ve all talked about apologetics is needed and deep theology is needed to keep people in the church and all of that. But I noticed a lot of kids never really were part of a church, and so they didn’t really know how to be members of churches and to be part of the larger body.
And parents are saying, hey, youth group, you disciple my kids. Hey youth pastor, you disciple my kids. And we love what I call church adjacent groups. I mean we’re on a podcast for a church adjacent type group right now, but how important is it for kids to be members of the church and to see what the old men are doing and the old women are doing instead of just the young youth pastor? And what does that partnership between parents and the church look like?
J. Warner Wallace (27:33):
Okay, so you could say some controversial things here. I’ve done it in every different kind of category. I was part of a mega church and huge church with a huge, robust, very ambitious youth group. I was part of a middle-sized church of about 300 with a youth group that was probably 50 or so. Great youth group, really loved it. And these were all affinity groups in which they were really kind of segregated out from the general population of the church. We had youth church at the same time you had adult church. I think as I get older, I realize that it’s much harder to keep everyone in the same room.
So the last church I did was about 50 people and there were no affinity groups. So is it crazy? It really looked much more like the church in the book of Acts, right? That first century church in which there were crying babies and there were toddlers and there’s no group for this. There’s no special facilities for this. You’re all meeting in one large room and you have to be creative. But I’ll tell you what, I did experience a sense of family and the lack of anonymity in churches of that size in which there are no affinity groups that are parsed out in the separate rooms. Everyone’s in the same room, everyone knows whose kids are who. Everyone knows what those kids are like.
(28:59):
Everyone’s accountable to everybody else in the group. It was the richest form of church I had ever been involved in because it was the extended family of God. And it meant that if you weren’t teaching that week, if you weren’t the one leading the group that week, you were probably sitting with someone’s child in your lap who then later on 20 years later, you see those kids, they’re like your own kids.
They think of you as a member of extended family and there’s great accountability and you get to see, and you may not have a close relationship with your biological parents who are in their sixties, but now there are biological parents in their sixties who are in their room who become like yours because they end up hanging out with you so much. I do think there is a strong sense, a strong argument to be made for smaller groups where everyone, let’s put it this way, I think being known is the key to Christian community.
(29:56):
So if you’re in a church where you manage to get in and out of that a hundred member church, but you slip it and slip out so no one really knows you, you’re missing the opportunity because the opportunity to be known and held accountable and to be cared for and to care for others is really bringing the teaching of Jesus to life. And what it means though is that we probably are going to have to rethink, but this is what we do in large churches.
When we have a large church and we tell our members, we want you to be involved in midweek programs and small group settings, what are we doing? Well, we know that that’s missing in that large group. I look at the history of the church as it grew, and there isn’t much evidence in the first 200 years for a church larger than just the modest house, the oldest church we have that’s an extended room put onto a house is like mid two hundreds.
(30:53):
But before that, we’re talking about the life of the church as it was known and described in the book of Acts was nothing like the life of the church. It was borrowed from what our first century Jewish synagogue experiences were. Was there a room with seating around the edge? Usually it was a bench. If it was a big synagogue, it might have a second layer of bench, but they weren’t sitting in pews. They were often standing in that room while somebody at the end of the room might be addressing the group.
I mean this idea that you are stuck in one room together, I think is a powerful notion. Now what does that mean for us as leaders? Oh, you kidding me? So what I’m now teaching our group of 50 and half of them are teenagers and the other half are not. So I had to develop an approach that I could reach both groups.
(31:43):
Now I’m living in 2025. What would that look like today? Well, it probably was going to look like something that is visual, that is narrative, that if I throw it so that a high schooler’s interested in it, I know the high schooler’s actually capable of a lot more than we typically think high schoolers are capable of. I know if I can make it visual, I can speak at a college level and everyone’s going to pull up to that level because I’ve made it visual.
So for me, a lot of it was, and I had an art background, so for me it was about how do I make these things so visual that people will look at it and go, oh, I see, I get it. And also being the kind of, here’s the other thing is that if you’re in a small group like that and you make a statement, at some point someone’s going to raise their hand and say, Hey, I got a question that doesn’t happen in a church of 400 on a Sunday.
(32:31):
And now you’ve got to be ready to dialogue and be able to defend what it is you’re saying. Theologically, the interaction, look, we just had a terrible shooting involving Charlie Kirk who was in dialogue often with other people. I think we’ve forgotten what that even looks like in a world where we have anonymity and we’re just screaming at each other. But when you know someone personally and you’re engaging them in dialogue, I don’t want to lose that art. And that art is far more likely to occur in a small church setting like this than it is in a big church setting.
Another strength, I think of smaller congregations, I know it’s kind of controversial to say maybe, but I do think for young people that if you are in one big room where you have the ability to ask questions, and when I prepare a message for you, it’s not 45 minutes while you sit and listen to me, but it’s instead 15 minutes in which now if we’re an open dialogue about this issue, we’re going to develop a culture that is going to be far more prepared to defend itself in a hostile world.
Gabriel Pagel (33:38):
Right? That’s interesting. That’s a beautiful vision. Yeah, I think that that doesn’t feel like the way churches want to be about getting butts in the seats, but at the same time, do we want authentic faith or not?
J. Warner Wallace (33:55):
Well, think about this. If you were, I always say it this way, if you were, I got saved at 35, so I had no experience in the church at all, no idea what that was going to be like. Dunno what the routine is. Don’t really know what the Christian calendar is going to be. Don’t know what a church service, how it’s organized or structured though there’s worship. I don’t even know the order of service. That was not something I had experienced.
So if you would’ve given me a book like I’m an alien flying in from across the universe and your adjective says, hey, we’re about to land on earth and they’ve got a lot of Christians there, would you like to know how they operate or how they interact? I have their book and I look at their book and I read it and I go, okay, so where’s the part about how they interact? Oh, it’s in the book of Acts. Okay, great. I read the book of Acts.
Do you think when I got to Planet Earth and then saw how Christians meet and how Christians interact on Sundays, do you think I would be surprised because all I had was the book of Acts. I think you’d be surprised. And that’s how I felt. I’m like, okay, I see this, but how does this relate to this? Why are we doing it this way?
(34:59):
And I think we have to ask ourselves that question. Really? What is it we’re doing in that church setting that is making it harder for us to raise our kids with a robust interactive faith? We put our kids in debate classes or in speaking classes or some type of oratory kind of a class. We do this because we think it’s missing in the school in every other class. Well, that’s my question here. We don’t have this kind of robust interactive faith because that’s not part of how we even do church. So are we doing church, if that’s the case?
Gabriel Pagel (35:37):
This has been really fun. A couple real practical questions for parents as we kind of close up. So when kids express doubt or skepticism, what might be the worst thing they can do and what might be the best thing that kids can do, or parents?
J. Warner Wallace (35:54):
Yeah. So here’s what I would say. I think the surveys and statistics on this have been very solid for a number of years. Students struggle with doubt when they feel, not that you can’t answer the question, but that you won’t allow the question. In other words, it’s not that we have to be prepared to answer every question, but if students are raised in an environment where they think it’s out of bounds to even have a question, it’s out of bounds to ask that I dare not ask it of my parents. Well, they’re going to get the answer somewhere else.
What I used to always tell my students is, and my own kids, is say, hey, I don’t have every answer, but I’m like you. I hate it when I don’t have an answer. So let’s go get it. Let’s go find out what the answer is. I am confident though, look, once I know a suspect is my guy and I can make a case for him in front of a jury, I’m not going to be shaken by anything that might seem sideways because I know he’s my guy. Well, I got 10 good reasons to know he is my guy. So this thing pops up and it seems odd. Why would he do that?
(36:52):
Well, I don’t know why I’ll figure that out because, but I do know that he did it because I got all this other evidence. I’m not afraid of that anomaly popping up because I know it’s going to have to fit into the larger evidential case. The same is true here. So I’m calm. Here’s what I see. Big dogs enter the dog yard and they’re calm because they don’t think they have to defend themselves. Great Danes walk into a dog yard, they don’t even bark. They barely move their heads. They know that the biggest dog in the yard. Meanwhile, the chihuahua can’t shut up. Why? Because he’s not sure that he’s going to make it out of there alive.
Are we going to be chihuahuas when it comes to our faith? Or do we have the confidence to know that any question is fine, we can handle it. And when students know that you can handle their questions, even if you don’t give them an answer because you don’t know, you can’t resolve it the way you wished you could have, but they know it’s okay to ask the question way more likely to stay in the faith.
Gabriel Pagel (37:48):
Awesome. If a parent like their kids are getting older and they feel like they’ve already missed the boat with a teen or they just haven’t, do you have any good pieces of advice for them?
J. Warner Wallace (38:03):
Okay, so it’s never too late to apologize when you know you’ve messed up. If you’ve messed up in a way that you think is really, oh, that was not just a neglect issue or I wish I would’ve done something better, issue. That’s an issue where I really broke something that needs to be fixed and I don’t know what to do now. Well, you can’t fix broken things without first apologizing for it. And that’s part of that repentant process. I need to change the way I’m treating you.
(38:28):
It starts with an apology and then a turn in the opposite direction. It may not be that that’s your situation. It might be that you just feel like, wow, I could have done better. Well, welcome to humanity. Welcome to parenting because that is every parent I’ve ever talked to and that’s me most every day. Could I have done something better? Yeah, of course.
Let’s put it this way. Every one of your kids, if you have more than one kid, there’ll be a spectrum of belief. I have four. They’re all going to fall somewhere on that spectrum from totally sold out to disinterested. They’re all somewhere on that spectrum. And we have a tendency to focus on the ones that aren’t doing well. And we go, yeah, what did I do wrong there? Well, you got kids who are doing better than that. It’s not necessarily something you did. It’s just the nature of free agency. So the first thing I would say is exhale. It’s okay. You didn’t do bad. You did the best you could.
Now the problem of course, is you get old man wisdom when you’re an old man and you need it when you are a young person. Now, if you’re already the old person wishing you had that wisdom when you were younger, well now you can go to your kids and you can say, lemme tell you, I wish I’d known, then I would’ve told you this. And then what you have to do is live differently in front of your kids because you can say, I wish I would’ve something different. But if you’re still the same knucklehead you were all those years, you were raising your kids, they know it.
(39:51):
So all you can do at this point is model Jesus today. Do the best you can going forward, and you have to trust God for this. So I used to always say, I’ve got a dad, for example, who does not believe the way you affect people who are unreachable because they just don’t want to hear anything. You can make the case over and over and over again, just continue to irritate my dad. It will irritate him if I make that case again. Or you can do the things that really matter, which is number one, pray because it turns out that God has to turn that button. You can’t flip that switch.
(40:23):
That’s a switch that God flips. Two, model Jesus. So I just try to do that with my dad. But if you’re a parent who feels like you missed an opportunity with your kids, that’s what you can do going forward. You can model the thoughtful Christian you wish you would’ve been then by becoming a thoughtful Christian today, model. And two, pray about it. And that’s all you really can do at this point because your kids have the same free agency that you had when you were growing up.
Gabriel Pagel (40:54):
Right. Awesome. As we close out, just we are a podcast that really wants parents to be able to have hope. What gives you hope about this current generation of young Christians, even in the midst of their cultural challenges?
J. Warner Wallace (41:11):
What gives me hope is that it turns out that every time an idea, a societal idea reaches its final form and it fails us. People respond by searching for something ancient. And I do think in the last several years in America, a lot of full-bodied ideas about how humans are and how we interact and what we could be and can’t be, have kind of come to their logical conclusion.
(41:39):
And have kind of train wrecked in ways that people are now looking at it and going, yeah, it doesn’t really work. And whenever that happens, you see a swing back toward things that are kind of more time tested. And what we have to hope in this generation is that we make it possible for young people to get married, to see marriage as a beautiful thing, to be able to have a home of their own.
These are going to be important things going forward because we’re asking young people to consider something true from the ancient past since what’s being offered culturally today is kind of a train wreck. And I do believe the more we move away from biblical teaching, the more it’ll train wreck right in front of them. History has demonstrated this, it’ll demonstrate it again. So I have great hope for this Gen Z.
(42:30):
I think we’ve seen something that’s changed even in the last year. So I have great hope for Gen Z much more than I had for the generation before them because we were charting that steady decline and wondering was it ever going to bottom? And it does feel like it’s flattened and like we are heading in a new direction. And a lot of that is because the culture had to flatten bottom out a little bit. And I do think that’s starting to happen.
And also I think we saw these transformational figures like Charlie Kirk, who regardless of what you might think of Charlie Kirk, if you’re listening to this, if you’ve ever listened to his dialogues, his on-campus dialogues, young people have been listening to those for four or five years, and I think they’re seeking whatever it was that he had. And I don’t think we don’t need to emulate Charlie. We need to emulate the savior that Charlie was emulating. So what we need to do is go back to the source of all of it. I think you’re going to see that starting to happen.
Gabriel Pagel (43:34):
Awesome. Thank you so much, Jim, for joining us on the Upside Down Parenting podcast today. We truly appreciate the work that you’ve done at Summit and through all your books and resources and the stuff you’ve done with your wife and your sons and different things. To find out more about Jim, visit his website at coldcasechristianity.com.
And if today’s conversation resonated with you, we’d be so grateful if you’d subscribe and leave us a review. It helps other parents find our podcast and join the conversation. We look forward to continuing this journey together in the next episode. Until then, remember, you’re not alone. Keep going, stay faithful, and keep pointing your kids to the truth. Thanks again, Jim.
J. Warner Wallace (44:19):
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.