One series a year, planned in late summer, built around a single hard question. That is the rhythm Dr. Charles Goodman, pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, described to a Jude 3 Project gathering of pastors and leaders. He preaches about seven series a year, and one of them is always devoted to defending the faith. This guide walks his five steps as a workshop for anyone who preaches or teaches regularly. Its question: how do you plan a series that answers the objections your people actually face without turning the pulpit into a battlefield?
Work through it alone with a notebook and a preaching calendar, or with a small team over two meetings. By the end you should hold a working draft: one named issue, a research list, an anchor text, a sermon-by-sermon outline, and a plan for what happens after the final sermon. Goodman was modest about what one session can give. He said, “I’m just gonna throw seeds.” The planting is yours.
Begin with what you have already preached
Pull up your sermon titles from the last twelve months. Mark each one that directly answered an objection to the faith, the kind a skeptical coworker, a college student or a doubting member might raise. Then mark each one that mainly encouraged people who already believe.
Goodman’s own survey of preaching found plenty of encouragement and motivational speaking and often no defense at all. Your count may differ. The exercise is not about guilt. Write one sentence describing what you found and keep it for the end.
Read the charter text slowly
Goodman roots apologetics in courtroom language. The Greek word behind it means an answer given in reply, a defense, not an apology in the modern sense. That word appears in 1 Peter 3:15: “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.”
Read the verse three times, looking for something different each time.
- What comes before the readiness? The verse opens with setting apart the Lord in the heart.
- Who prompts the answer? Someone asks. The defense responds to a real question.
- What manner does the answer take? “Meekness and fear” describes the tone of the reply, not only its content.
Write down what this means for a series. If the answer goes to someone who asks, where should your topic come from? If it is given with meekness, what kind of sermon would violate the verse even while getting every argument right?
The five steps
Step one: name the issue
Goodman’s first instruction is to “identify the issue that you want to address.” Past series grew from what he saw people struggling with: defining racism and sexism, questions about sexuality, the problem of God and evil, and basic beliefs such as baptism. This year he chose prayer, because he suspects many people think prayer is a waste of time. He names the real questions underneath: does prayer move God, and is prayer an attempt to manipulate God?
Your task: List three objections or confusions you have actually heard from your people this year, each written as the question a person would ask in their own words. Choose one. If you cannot tell which matters most, ask a few trusted members which they hear most often.
Step two: research every side
What are your people hearing about this issue when you are not in the room? Goodman’s second step exists to answer that: “get clarity on the issue by researching all arguments concerning the issue.” He updates the old maxim about preaching with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other to include social media feeds, recent books and podcasts. His reasoning comes from sports: “to enter into the sermonic moment, the sermonic preparation period and not knowing what you are up against is tantamount to you entering a game and not having a game plan.”
He also separates two jobs. Negative apologetics plays defense, removing obstacles by showing that arguments against the faith are weak. Positive apologetics plays offense. Of that second kind he said, “It is a rather different task to offer people reasons why they should believe.” Each sermon should know which job it is doing.
Your task: Build a list with two serious sources from people who disagree with you, two from Christian thinkers, and two from the places your people actually spend time online. Then write the strongest version of the objection in one paragraph. Would a thoughtful person who holds that view call it fair? If not, rewrite it.
Step three: find the text
Here is how Goodman did it for prayer. Looking for something the Bible is explicit about, he noticed that the disciples asked Jesus to teach them one thing. Luke 11:1 records the request: “Lord, teach us to pray.” Jesus answers with the model prayer, and that answer becomes the spine of the series. The sermons move from what the world says about prayer, to what people may have heard, to what Jesus said when his disciples asked.
Look at why the text fit. It was not only about prayer. It was a question met by an answer, the same movement 1 Peter 3:15 describes. That shape matters. A passage that answers a question lets the congregation hear its own question inside Scripture, rather than hearing the preacher bolt a topic onto a text.
Your task: Choose a candidate passage for your issue and read it in its full literary unit. Note its genre and what it meant for its first readers. Then check its shape. Does someone in or behind the passage ask, doubt or object, and does the text respond? If it does, build your opening sermon around that exchange. If it does not, you have three honest options: keep looking for a passage that does, pair your text with one that supplies the question, or let the passage stand as positive teaching and say plainly that your series is offering reasons rather than answering a stated objection. What you should not do is strain a text to make it answer something it never addresses.
Step four: craft the sermons
Goodman does not prescribe a style; expository, topical and narrative approaches all work. His fourth instruction is simply “Craft your sermons,” and what he describes is the labor of dividing the anchor text into portions. With the model prayer and about seven weeks on the calendar, the address to the Father becomes one sermon, the hallowing of the name another, the coming of the kingdom another. As you lay out your own series this way, give each week a line naming its portion of text, a line naming the question it answers, and a note on whether it plays defense or offense.
He also changes his form for these series. Instead of the structure he usually uses from his Black Baptist tradition, an introduction, three points and a celebration, he has moved toward a more conversational, topical approach with more supporting Scripture. His reason: “oftentimes people miss what we’re saying because they gotten used to how we say it.” His standard is short: “You don’t wanna be clever, be clear.” Read your finished outline and circle any line that is there because it sounds impressive rather than because it makes something plainer.
Step five: preach them, and expect quiet
The fifth step is to “preach the sermons,” and Goodman’s warning is personal. These sermons often draw little visible response, and early on that bruised his ego. Then a member told him one quiet sermon was among the best they had ever heard. When he pointed out how silent the room had been, the reply was that they had been listening and thinking. His lesson: “not only is the word of God a mirror, but it should also be a window.”
Your task: Decide in advance how you will judge whether the series worked. Write down two signs other than volume in the room, such as the questions people bring afterward or a change in how they talk about the issue.
Test the plan before you preach it
A careful outline can still go wrong in its posture. Goodman pushes back on metaphors that picture faith as a war to be won and neighbors as enemies to be conquered, and points to Jesus, who repeatedly declined to use his power for his own benefit and chose humility. His aim: “I don’t wanna win arguments, I wanna win souls.”
He turns the same scrutiny on the preacher: “one must identify the implicit biases in our own theology so that we do not legalistically preach our pet theologies and perspectives.” He connects this to Saul, recorded in Acts 9:18: “And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he received sight forthwith, and arose, and was baptized.” The narrative’s main point is Saul’s conversion. Goodman uses it as an application, a reminder that preachers can see with scales on their eyes even on their best days.
Two honest limits deserve weight. First, one series a year can look thin against the volume of opinion people absorb every week; Goodman himself contrasts a preacher’s thirty-five or forty minutes with the hours people spend hearing other voices. His partial answer is that the other series still take on apologetic aspects whenever a text is studied faithfully, and that the series should continue past Sunday. Second, a pastor may not have the training to state an academic objection fairly, on textual criticism or philosophy of religion, for example. Goodman notes that preachers are increasingly comfortable admitting they are still figuring things out, and earlier in the same gathering Lisa Fields put it simply: “It’s okay to say, I don’t know.” That honesty should lead somewhere. Read a scholar who holds the objection in their own words, ask a trained Christian scholar to check your summary, or invite a qualified guest for the follow-up conversation. Name the limit to your congregation rather than hiding it behind confidence.
A practice: the empty chair. Set an empty chair across from you, or ask a colleague to sit in it. Read your strongest outline aloud as though a thoughtful person holding the opposing view were listening. After each section, ask: would they recognize their view as I described it? Did any sentence treat them as an opponent to defeat rather than a person to persuade? Mark and revise those places. With a partner, restate each other’s main argument before either of you responds.
After the last sermon
Goodman fits the invitation to the subject. After a sermon on baptism he opened the way for people to be baptized, and a line formed; some had been baptized before without knowing what it meant. He compares this to the Ethiopian official reading Isaiah, who answered Philip’s question in Acts 8:31: “How can I, except some man should guide me?” Once Philip explained the passage, the official asked to be baptized (Acts 8:36). Clarity made a response possible. A series on discipleship might instead invite people to trust God more deeply.
He also plans to pair his series with podcasts, after-church conversations and submitted questions, including places where his sermons were less clear than he wanted. “Allow the sermon to be an ongoing conversation,” he said, and he closed with his conviction that “preaching really is a dialogue and not a monologue.”
Your task: Write the invitation that fits your series. Then choose one way people can bring questions after each sermon, and set a date when you will answer them.
Questions for discussion
- What does your sentence about last year’s preaching suggest about questions your people carry that you have not addressed?
- How would your preparation change if you took the voices your people hear online as seriously as academic sources?
- 1 Peter 3:15 ties the defense to someone who asks. How do you tell a question your congregation is asking from one you simply find interesting?
- Where is the line between clear and simplistic? When has a sermon crossed it in either direction?
- Which of your own theological habits might work like scales on the eyes for the issue you chose, and how would you find out?
- Is there an objection in your series you are not equipped to state fairly? Who could help you, and what would it cost you to ask?
- Goodman treats a quiet room as possibly a thinking room. When is that true, and when might quiet mean something else?
If you are leading a group
In the first meeting, do the inventory, read 1 Peter 3:15 together, and help each person choose an issue; the research list and text choice happen between meetings. In the second, compare outlines, check each anchor text for its question-and-answer shape, and run the empty chair exercise in pairs. Keep the inventory private unless someone chooses to share it. When reviewing outlines, ask questions about clarity and fairness rather than handing down verdicts.
Close where you began
Set your first sentence beside your draft series and write one more in reply: what has changed in how you think about defending the faith from the pulpit, and what has not? Then put the first step on your calendar, a date by which the issue is named and the research list is started.