As we recognized graduates this weekend, the transition from student life towards adult life is on our minds. While many from Christian homes walk away from the church and reject Christ during the college years, this doesn’t have to be the norm. Our goal is to develop students into life-long followers of Jesus.

That’s why Jonathan Morrow’s new book, Welcome to College: A Christ’s Followers Guide for the Journey, is a helpful resource for college students (and parents too). In 42 bite-sized chapters — with remarkable depth — Morrow explores essential intellectual arenas. More than giving pat conclusions, this book wisely walks through questions such as the veracity of the Bible (can we trust it?), thinking Christianly (worldview), dealing with doubt, and highly practical issues like managing money, God’s will, sex and dating, navigating media, and alcohol. Morrow offers clear-thinking yet gracious apologetics for the contemporary challenges college students face from peers and professors (metaphysics and epistemology anyone?). All of it is written in the context of a life lived in apprenticeship to Jesus.

The author is adept in both academic arguments and knowing the pressures facing students in the college stage. There’s a refusal to separate head and heart, for we know Christ is both intellectually pleasing and emotionally satisfying.

Welcome to College is a must-have resource for that student headed off to school this Fall.

A Resource for All

Tim Keller, a pastor in Manhattan, has written a stellar book for our day. The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism is an imminently helpful and accessible book, meant to help believers and skeptics alike as they investigate competing truth claims. This New York Times bestseller begins with a section on the leap of doubt (“doubting our

doubts”), unmasking the seven primary arguments against Christianity, the voiced doubts skeptics bring to his church. The second half of the book deals with the most important reasons for faith.

Some of the doubts and reasons considered include:

• How do doubt and faith relate?
• Why does God allow suffering in the world?
• How could a loving God send people to Hell?
• Why isn’t Christianity more inclusive?
• How can one religion be “right” and the others “wrong”?
• Why have so many wars been fought in the name of God?
• Religion and the Gospel

Keller uses literature, philosophy, real-life conversations, and reasoning to explain how faith in a Christian God is a soundly rational belief, held by thoughtful people of intellectual integrity with a deep compassion for those who truly want to know the truth. We highly recommend The Reason for God (see also book website with readers guide and discussion questions).

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Also see the apologetics resources page.

Date: Wednesday, February 24th
Time: 7:00-8:30pm
Location: Willamette Christian Church Lobby (front entry)

The High School group will meet from 7:00-9:00pm in Phase II, as we do weekly.

No need to RSVP (unless you want to) — just come and bring other parents too.

Date: Wednesday, November 18th
Time: 7:30 pm – 8:30 pm
Location: Willamette Christian Church Lobby

(posted to MS & HS websites)