CCK Life blog

Rich Spear is the editor of the CCK Reason Blog, a new online resource that seeks to provide theologically sound answers to the questions people need answered. His passion for apologetics and Manchester Utd. were just some of things he talks about with Yohaan Philip…

YP: So tell me, how did you become a Christian?
RS: I had the privilege of being brought up by two great parents who both loved Jesus themselves, and so they brought me up teaching me about him. When I was 6 years old I realised my desire for a personal relationship with God, and so I asked Jesus to enter my life as my saviour. The next few years were steady in my growth and understanding of Jesus, but my world was turned upside down in 1994 when at the age of 11 my dad was suddenly diagnosed with cancer, was given around 2 months to live, and in April he passed away. By July 1995, my Mum had re-married and we had moved from Eastbourne to Brighton. My whole life had changed and I was just turning into a moody teenager too! I had lost something of my passion or even belief in God. This led to me telling my Mum that I didn’t believe in God anymore and didn’t feel church was for me. To her credit she just said she was ok with it and didn’t really force the issue, and this was probably quite important (I now know she was praying big time behind the scenes though).

Intellectually Christianity seemed very much at odds with what everyone at school believed, especially what we were taught in Science lessons. Because of this and a desire to be accepted and to ‘fit in’, I lied my butt off to my friends. I told them that my step-dad wasn’t a vicar (Clearly I wasn’t Einstein when it came to lying, because when your Step-Dad is a minister in the Church of England you live next door to church!) and when they found out he was, I then insisted that ‘It was his thing’ and had nothing to do with me. For me I tried to find my satisfaction in wanting to play county cricket for Sussex, and so I continued to pursue that dream above anything else. It was what I thought about all the time, it was what excited me, it was what I gave my time and money to. Although I still really enjoy cricket, it had taken the place of God in my heart. That said, I lacked integrity as an atheist (!) and carried on going to church anyway, largely because there were some attractive girls there! I started to realise I had become a total hypocrite as it had no effect on how I lived my life. I was just a social church go-er, then I would go and get drunk and smoke and try and join in with the worldly life my friends were living.

Eventually, at the age of 16 I went on an Alpha course, confronted my doubts and actually realised that there were answers to a lot of the questions that I had been storing up in my head. This led me to re-discover my love for Jesus, and I remember being both captivated and surprised that God actually wanted us to live life to the full (John 10:10), and that Christianity wasn’t just something for people old enough to have blue rinse hair, and on death’s door to be involved in. My story has been one of God’s continued faithfulness to me, and I guess in a sense I feel a bit like Peter who denied Jesus three times; by all accounts he looked to have disqualified himself from ever being used for God’s purposes. He had been unfaithful, and likewise I was totally unfaithful to God too, but he was used powerfully and fruitfully by God to bring many people to faith. That’s what you call grace. That is my prayer and hope for my own life.

YP: Wow! That’s quite a story! And how do you see yourself balancing your love for Jesus and your future career plans?
RS: I’m just about to begin my postgraduate studies to become a Secondary school Maths teacher, having worked for American Express for the last 3 years. It will be great going back to University for the next 2 years. When I went to Sussex University in late 2002 I was challenged a lot by different tough questions about my faith, and it really helped me to grow as a Christian as a result. I’ve been living with Isaiah 26:8 in my heart for the last few years about making Jesus name famous in this city, and I hope to live out as a good ambassador for Jesus when I eventually become a Maths teacher. There are challenges to being a good representative for Christ in 21st Century Brighton. It is very misunderstood. Most people think that becoming a Christian is like committing intellectual suicide, which makes Christian apologetics very important to whatever sphere of life you find yourself in.

YP: Ah apologetics! What’s that all about?
RS: It comes from the greek word apologia and in essence means providing a defence of the faith. It probably sounds very negative and as David Robertson pointed out in his recent interview, C.H. Spurgeon once said when asked about defending the bible, ‘I’d sooner defend a lion’. Really though it’s about trying to answer people’s objections to faith in Christ. 1 Peter 3:15 says ‘Always be prepared to give an answer for the hope that you have’. It’s about being obedient to that call. In fact it’s actually something all Christians are called to pursue; it’s not for a select few.

YP: And what got you so interested in this? And how do you plan to build on your passion?
RS: Ever since God gave me a passion for sharing the good news about Jesus I realised that people had questions that needed to be answered first. This was the case from the time I set foot inside sixth form college at BHASVIC, and was even more true of being at University. I guess my passion for this area came from a desire for my non-christian family and friends to come to have this amazing relationship with God that I have enjoyed for the last 10 years or so. Secondly, it also brings greater depth to your own relationship with God. CS Lewis famously said ‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.’ As you delve into how belief in Christ touches every area of human life from science to morality, from pain to joy, you end up worshipping a far bigger God than you thought there was.

Reading and listening to people like William Lane Craig, Alvin Plantinga, Tim Keller, CS Lewis, Michael Ramsden, Amy Orr-Ewing, Alister McGrath and Ravi Zacharias have had a particularly profound effect on me and have given me a passion for communicating the gospel to those around me in a way that they can relate to. Recently, I began the reason blog out of a desire to give our city, Brighton & Hove, answers to the kinds of questions that prevent people from coming to faith in Christ. It started as an overflow from my Q&A slot on the CCK Alpha Course, and then we just decided to go ahead with answering some of the kinds of questions I get asked often, be it from friends or family. It has been great to have so many people reading it, and I have had some excellent articles written by people within the church too. My aim is to provide a great resource for non-christians to get their questions about Christianity answered, and also to help Christians to find credible answers they can give to their friends about tough issues. Ephesians 4:12 says that Evangelists are called to encourage God’s people for works of service so that the body of Christ (The Church) may be built up. I’d really like to encourage Christians to dig deeper and find effective ways of explaining the gospel to their friends. We’ve been called as believers to actively be a part of society and not removed from it, which will often involve entering into reasoned discussion, as the apostle Paul did, with those who live around us. I’m particularly really looking forward to our first edition of Reason:Live on Sundays which kicks off on November 15th, so stay tuned for that. I’ll be part of a panel with Ruth Preston and Tim Jones, who are two excellent apologists as well. It will be a great event to invite people to.

YP: That gives us something to look forward to! Thanks for taking the time to talk Rich!
RS: My pleasure!

Graphic by Sam Liddiard

RS: Do you have a particular football team you follow. Dundee United perhaps?
DR: No, the opposite in fact, I was chaplain for Dundee, their city rivals and I’m not chaplain any more but I do support them and Barcelona are my other team… It’s like I drive a Mini and I have a sticker on the back that says “My other car’s a Porsche”. I support Dundee but my other team is Barcelona.

RS: How did you first come to be interested in Apologetics yourself?
DR: Well, (a) I hate the term Apologetics and yet I use it so I’m not blaming you for using it! I do what I call Apologetic Evangelism. (b) Since the day I became a Christian I’ve been interested in communicating the Gospel and that’s what I consider Apologetics to be: communicating the Gospel. So since I was about 17 years old.

RS: Yeah, the fact that you’ve just said you hate the term apologetics kind of leads me on to my next question really which is: In listening to you debating and reading your book “The Dawkins Letters” I notice that there is quite a difference in style between yourself and someone like Alistair McGrath and Tim Keller. Is that a conscious thing that you set out to do?

DR: Well, different people have different gifts. I know AM and I know TK, and admire both of them enormously especially Tim whom I regard as a personal friend. Actually, in some ways we probably have a fairly similar style on different things. I would say that my concern about apologetics in general is the impression for ordinary people in the church is that it’s undertaken by academics. That you’ve basically got to be from Oxford and read Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, and people like that and talk like that and so think ‘yeah it’s a good thing to do, and we’re glad we’ve got some clever people on our side, but it’s not for me’.

My intention deliberately is to say ‘actually Apologetic evangelism is just communicating the gospel, we should all be doing that, we should all be interested in it. It’s a lot more than just reading a Josh McDowell book or handing out Lee Strobel. It is thinking about your faith scripturally and then applying it to the culture you live in. So, there is no point in you telling people the gospel if you’re using a language they don’t understand and the best way for you to communicate with them is to think about your own faith and apply it to the people who are around you. So, there are many ways of doing Apologetics but part of what I do is what I call ‘Popular Apologetics’. I love going into pubs and doing talks in pubs and elsewhere, where you get your average joe yelling out a question to you and it’s just thrilling to see how God uses that. So you’re right it’s a different style, it’s less academic probably though I still have to do a lot of the academic work… I hope this doesn’t sound wrong but I also think it’s hugely entertaining! It’s interesting, the gospel should be interesting anyway and I don’t stand up to do stand up comedy and that, but when people are firing questions like last night here in Brighton at the Jubilee Library a guy came out afterwards and said ‘man, that was just a fantastic hour, that was just so entertaining’ and another guy came out saying ‘you are in enormous danger of making Christianity appear attractive’.

RS: Haha, well we wouldn’t want that!

DR: Oh no!

RS: So David, how do you and the church in Dundee go about motivating or having a congregation full of people who are well reasoned (as it were), in explaining the gospel to people?
DR: Let me use the football analogy. My team made it once to the Scottish Cup Final. What we did was – I remember I was heading off to the game and I had all my gear on and everything as well -  I was so enthusiastic I was talking to complete strangers. In other words I was full of enthusiasm about this particular game, it was really hard to stop me talking about it. I use that analogy in terms of Jesus Christ. Because what I want is – I want people to be so enthusiastic about Jesus Christ that you actually have to shut them up. So my first thing is, in the congregation I want people, whether they’re at a service or whatever it is, to be bursting to tell people. Once they’ve got that enthusiasm then it’s a question of channelling it.

RS: Indeed. In the public eye, obviously people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris get an awful lot of coverage. Perhaps more than many Christians. Do you think that as Christians we should be very fearful of people such as that having a very strong say in the public limelight?
DR: No. I would be more fearful of the default position which was secular humanism. There was a program “Beyond Belief” – I actually listened to it yesterday after we did the talk here on my IPod – and they were arguing that we now live in a post-secular society. The gentleman who was presenting the program said in the 1980’s and 90’s a program such as “Beyond Belief” on the BBC would have been unthinkable. You mentioned religion and everyone was like “For goodness sake, no one’s interested in religion”. Now he says it would be unthinkable not to have programs like that. So there are now some sociologists who are talking about Britain being a post-Secular society. Which is fascinating! So the Church needs to come up to scale with that. We’ve hardly got into the notion of it being a secular society but I think that analysis is large and correct. And that’s why Dawkins and so on are so vehement and public; because they’ve been seeing that happening.

Now the danger here for Christians is that we think “Oh that’s good, Religion’s on its way back”. No, the primary sin in the Bible is idolatry not atheism. And when you’ve got New Age and all the cults and all the different religions and all the weird variations of Christianity, we shouldn’t be rejoicing that people are religious. In some senses it’s easier to preach the gospel to secular people then religious people. We should be very wary of that. Yet none the less we should still recognise that this is still drawing in people…that they’ve got a spiritual interest at the very least.

RS: Ok. Thank you very much for that. To close, just a couple of questions really. Firstly, who would you say your greatest influences have been since you became a Christian? Maybe writers…
DR: John Calvin’s book “The Institutes of the Christian Religion“. Calvin is an apologist that no one thinks of but he planted over a thousand churches. That’s phenomenal. I mean over two million French people were Christians – Evangelical protestant Christians. So he’s been an enormous influence. Tim Keller has been a strong influence. I’ve always enjoyed the writings of C.S.Lewis. But a lot of non Christian writings as well. I just don’t divorce that. I think the gospel should be every part of my life.

RS: Ok. And finally. Perhaps along similar lines. What would be the – this is quite a hard question to answer really – top three books that you would recommend to people looking to give a reasoned explanation of the gospel?
DR: Well, again it’s fairly straightforward. If you’re thinking of people who are, I don’t know, Times readers and the Guardian readers I’d say Tim Keller’s “The Reason for God“. Anyone under forty in a community like Brighton, who’s relatively intelligent that is going to be a phenomenal book for them. People who were brought up religious, Tim Keller’s “The Prodigal God“. C.S.Lewis’ “Mere Christianity“. The thing that drives me more then anything else is just in reading the Bible when I see that God is all about mission – mission and evangelism is not an optional extra or something just that we talk about or something just that we do overseas. But it’s our very life. So that would be it.

RS: That’s brilliant. That pretty much rounds up everything that I had to ask. So thanks very much for your time David.