"Suicide Tactic" (Class 4 recap)

On Monday June 8th we met for our fourth class to study the book Tactics, written by Greg Koukl.

Since we've been off for a month we spent a good amount of time just catching up. Terrence shared about his evangelism trip to Ocean City with Eric Dressel. He spent two days sharing the gospel with high school and college kids out there for senior week.Terrence developed a short 6-question survey to gather data and start the conversation. He found that it was helpful in getting more people engaged but a lower percentage of those who took the survey wanted to continue on in conversation.

The questions on his survey were on the topic of Christianity and consisted on things like "were you raised in a Christian home?", "is Christianity a good, bad, or neutral thing for society?", "Who is Jesus?", and "How does a person become a Christian?". The biggest "miss" was on that last question in which people often answered by saying "go to church to become a Christian." Though church is obviously important many unfortunately forgot the fundamental concepts of faith and repentance. Overall though, Terrence reported good things and had a great time being out there. 

Next we spent our remaining time watching the video lesson on the "Suicide Tactic". The Suicide Tactic is the action of identifying a self-destructing statement and watching it kill itself. An example of such a statement would be "I can't type a word in English" or Yogi Berra's advice, "Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours." The statements are internally contradictory in that they can't be both true and not true. It can't be that I "can't type a word in English" and that the statement itself entails that I've typed words in English!

We ended our time reviewing some discussion questions in the middle of the lesson on identifying the suicidal aspects of statements like "It's wrong for missionaries to try to change other people's religious reviews", "All religions are equally true and valid", and "Truth is only gained through science."