A video circulating online claims the story of Jesus was copied from the Egyptian god Horus. A teenager in the youth group watches it and has nothing to say back. She hasn’t lost her faith. She has simply never been shown how to test a claim like that, and this week her question will go somewhere: to someone in her church, or back to the person who made the video.
Is it the local church’s job to make sure she has somewhere good to take it? Yes. The New Testament letters Christians cite when they talk about defending the faith were written to whole congregations, and the people who lead those congregations are given to equip everyone else. Dr. Phillip Pointer, who pastors St. Mark Baptist Church in Little Rock, Arkansas, starts from exactly those texts. He argues that churches have treated this training as optional for generations, and that their members are paying for it now.
Who were Jude and Peter writing to?
When Lisa Fields asked Pointer why he began leading his congregation through a study on knowing and defending what they believe, he began with Scripture. He pointed to Jude’s call to contend for the faith, then added that “Peter says, we’re to always be ready to give an answer.” Those two passages carry his argument, so they are worth reading closely.
Jude 1:3 reads: “Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.” Jude opens the letter by addressing those who are called, sanctified and preserved in Jesus Christ (Jude 1:1). His “you” is plural, and the salvation is “common,” meaning shared. In the next verse he explains the urgency: certain people have slipped into the community unnoticed and are twisting grace (Jude 1:4). The threat reached ordinary believers inside their own fellowship, so the call to contend landed on them as well.
1 Peter 3:15 says the same thing from another angle: “But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.” Peter wrote to scattered Christians facing suspicion and suffering (1 Peter 1:1; 3:14). He speaks to elders separately, later in the letter (1 Peter 5:1-4), so this instruction belongs to every believer. The word “answer” means a reasoned reply, and some modern translations render it “defense.” The setting is ordinary: someone asks, and you respond. Meekness and fear govern the manner, which rules out the reply that wins the exchange and wounds the person.
Why does that make it the church’s job?
Here is the step that needs arguing. If every believer is called to be ready, why not leave each one to get ready alone? The letters themselves suggest why. Jude and Peter did not write to individuals one by one. They wrote to communities, and they expected those communities to receive, read and act on the letters together. Readiness was something a congregation built in its members, the way it built every other part of their discipleship.
Ephesians 4 makes that pattern explicit. Christ gave pastors and teachers to the church “For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12). The teachers equip, and the saints carry out the ministry. Put that next to 1 Peter 3:15 and the logic closes. If every member owes a reason for their hope, and leaders exist to prepare members for their work, then a church that teaches people what to believe and never why has handed them a responsibility without the means to carry it.
Isn’t sincere faith enough?
Plenty of churchgoers would push back. If a person loves Jesus and trusts the Bible, why does she need arguments? Pointer’s answer is that the church stopped explaining itself, and sincere believers inherited the silence.
He describes the people spreading bad history and bad theology as aggressive, constant and public. “They’re loud and wrong,” he says. Their reach grows because many believers have never been taught the reasons behind what they hold. Pointer is careful to say this is not universal, since some churches have consistently taught the reasonableness of the faith. He also does not single out the Black church. He thinks believers across the West made the same mistake: the Bible was assumed to be an authority for so long that churches neglected to keep training people in why it can be trusted.
That distinction sits at the center of the whole question. Believing the Bible and being able to show why it is trustworthy are two different abilities. The first can last a long time in a culture that shares your assumptions. The second becomes necessary once those assumptions are gone. Pointer tells his congregation, “I can’t just say the Bible is the Bible for the Bible tells me.” His reasoning runs from the Bible’s own claim about itself. If it is God’s word, the book people should govern their lives by and come to know God through, then “if that’s what the Bible is, then it should be able to stand under scrutiny, under questions.”
Many Christians were raised with the opposite instinct, and Pointer admits some were taught not to question Scripture at all. He believes the Bible can withstand scientific, historical and archaeological questions because it is true. He mentions a city skeptics doubted that he says turned up in the ground, though the Bible was the only ancient literature naming it. He does not identify the site, so it stands as his illustration rather than a documented case. His larger point holds without it. Trust in Scripture should rest on concrete reasons, so that it is grounded and not merely inherited.
For the teenager with the Horus video, this changes the diagnosis. Her faith is intact. What she lacks is a church culture that expected her to need reasons and supplied them.
What should a congregation actually do?
Pointer’s approach is a handful of habits any congregation can keep. They come down to three moves.
Answer the claims people are actually hearing
Generic apologetics will not help much if it answers questions nobody in the room is asking. Pointer grounds this in how Scripture handles error. Paul addresses heresy directly in his letters, and in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus states a familiar reading of the law before correcting it: ye have heard that it was said, but I say unto you (Matthew 5:21-22, 27-28). A church can follow that pattern by naming what its members meet, which for Pointer’s people includes Hebrew Israelite claims and the message that you can pray to the ancestors and don’t need Jesus.
Naming a claim works best when the teaching goes past “that’s not biblical.” Pointer’s handling of karma shows how. Many Christians treat karma as a synonym for sowing and reaping and cite Galatians 6:7. Read in context, the passage concerns giving, including support for those who teach you the word (Galatians 6:6). Pointer then walked his study through where karma comes from; as he explains it, the idea belongs to a system requiring reincarnation, with payback arriving in another life. Last, he asked why people wish karma on others, and concluded the desire is usually vengeance, which Scripture reserves for God. History, text and motive together gave people more than a correction. They gave them a way of thinking. His summary: “Let’s not be pastored by social media.”
Let people handle the evidence
One popular claim says Constantine invented Christian doctrine at the Council of Nicaea in 325. Pointer counters that Christians have roughly three hundred years of writings about Christ, doctrine and practice from before that council. He brought young adults into his library to see his set of early church writers from before Nicaea, and he recalls their surprise that the documents were really there. Hearing that evidence exists is different from holding it.
That is the skill the teenager most needs. Memorizing a rebuttal to the Horus claim matters less than learning to ask what the earliest sources say and knowing those sources can be found and read.
Pointer also stresses giving people good books, especially ones written for what African American believers face, such as the charge that Christianity is a white man’s religion. He leans on ancient writers, particularly African church fathers like Augustine and Tertullian. If someone claims Christianity is hostile to Black people, he says, “let’s go back to the African persons who shaped Christian thought and let’s see what they had to say about Christ.” The aim is to read the people who were there.
Make room for the questions
Much of the real equipping happens after the formal teaching ends. Pointer describes young adults who stay after every Bible study asking for explanations and book recommendations, and he counts those conversations as part of how people gain what they need to defend the faith. He adds that older members are benefiting too, because the pull of social media religion is not limited by age.
Why can’t each believer just look it up?
The information is online, so why not let each person research alone? Pointer’s account of the church’s deeper problem answers that. He sees individualism as the greatest issue in the church today. As he tells it, the church began as the community described in Acts 2, drifted over the centuries into an institution, and has now moved from institution to individual. The result is a believer who says, in his words, “I am my own individual personal and private theologian.” Pointer calls that posture the height of idolatry.
A private theologian meets the viral video alone, armed with whatever the algorithm serves next. A member of a teaching community meets it alongside people who have already worked through similar claims and can point to sources. Pointer wants the church to skip the institutional detour and return to community, and equipping members is one of the plainest ways a congregation does that. Knowledge passes from person to person.
Won’t this turn church into a lecture hall?
The strongest objection deserves a real answer. Gifts differ. Some believers are teachers and many are not, and not everyone will enjoy reading early Christian writers. Doesn’t asking every member to be an apologist ignore how the body of Christ works?
The objection is right that gifts differ, and it still leaves readiness intact. The Ephesians pattern already assumes uneven gifts: some study deeply so that others are prepared. Pointer reads the ancient sources so his members don’t each have to, then puts the results within reach. Peter asks for readiness to give a reason for your hope to the person in front of you. Scholarship is a gift to the church, and readiness is the duty of every member in it.
A related worry in Black church culture holds that expressive worship and serious thinking pull against each other. Pointer rejects it firmly. He notes that Black worship is not monolithic and isn’t always marked by shouting, and that where it is, emotion has often been mistaken for anti-intellectualism. “Emotion does not negate intelligence,” he says. A person can be biblically astute, doctrinally sound and shout in the same service.
One limit should be stated plainly. Pointer offers a pastor’s experience, not a study of which methods work best, and his historical claims, like the three centuries of writings before Nicaea, are his assertions here. They are worth checking against the sources he recommends, which is exactly the habit he wants his people to form.
A church that takes Jude 3 and 1 Peter 3:15 seriously becomes the first place a believer thinks to bring a hard question, because she has already watched the adults around her check a confident claim against the text and the history, and come out with their faith steadier for it.