A pastor prepares to preach apologetics on Sunday morning by working in a fixed order. First, get clear on what you believe and why. Second, find out which questions your congregation is actually carrying. Third, plan the series far enough ahead that the first two steps have time to happen. Each step depends on the one before it. A survey of your people helps little if you cannot answer what it turns up, and a preaching calendar helps little if it is built on questions nobody is asking.
This guide follows that sequence through a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields, the founder of Jude 3 Project, and Dr. Charles Goodman, senior pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, who preached a Sunday series he called the Defender Series on whether the Bible can be trusted, whether Jesus is who he says he is, evil, heaven and hell, the Lord’s Supper and baptism, and the Holy Spirit. Anyone who teaches can use it alone over a week or with fellow teachers across two or three meetings, and each task builds on the one before it.
Why the order matters
A preacher who skips personal clarity tends to cover the gap with volume or borrowed lines. One who skips listening answers questions from a book or a national study that may not match the room. One who skips planning does the first two steps in a hurry, which means doing neither well.
Goodman’s summary is blunt: “You can’t do apologetics on a Saturday night special.” Apologetics is not more sacred than other preaching. The material simply takes longer to digest. Questions about manuscripts, evil or the identity of Jesus involve evidence and argument, and a pastor needs time to understand them before he can explain them.
Step one: get clear yourself
Paul writes in 2 Timothy 2:15: “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”
A common misreading sits inside that verse. In older English, “study” here means to be diligent. Other translations render it “do your best.” Paul is not telling Timothy to enroll in a course. He is telling him to work hard at handling God’s word correctly, which is what “rightly dividing” means. Reading more books is part of that, but the goal is a handling of the truth that holds up when someone examines it.
Goodman puts the principle plainly: “You cannot explain stuff that you’re not clear about.” His counsel is to “be well-read, be concrete in your thoughts and your belief system.” Reading widely gives you material. Settling your convictions gives you something to say. A preacher can be well-read and still vague, and a vague sermon on whether the Bible can be trusted leaves a listener more anxious than before. Goodman also admits what the preparation cost him: “I had to really do some serious work and digging and it was strenuous.”
Task: the clarity test
Choose one question you expect to preach on, such as whether the Bible can be trusted or why God allows evil. Write a single paragraph answering it, as if a church member asked you after service. Then mark each sentence in one of three ways:
- I can show where this comes from in Scripture or in evidence I have actually examined.
- I believe this, but I am repeating something I heard and have not checked.
- I am not sure this is true.
The second and third kinds of sentence are your reading list. In a group, trade paragraphs and mark each other’s. Others spot a borrowed phrase more easily than its author does.
Step two: find the questions your people are actually asking
Read 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.” Where the KJV has answer, many translations have defense, the word behind “apologetics.” Peter is writing to scattered believers under pressure, and the readiness he describes is responsive. The answer goes to someone who asks.
That shapes how a pastor chooses topics. Goodman describes the Defender Series this way: “And this was simply a series where I just want to talk about stuff that I know people are asked.” The topics came from what his people faced, not from what interested him.
Knowing what people face requires listening. Lisa Fields describes how she began teaching apologetics courses at her father’s church: “the one thing I did first was I surveyed the church with anonymous surveys.” Her reason: “Because oftentimes people don’t want to tell their pastor that they don’t understand something.” A pastor who only hears the questions people will ask him face to face hears the safe ones.
She also warns against a shortcut. Fields observes that “oftentimes pastors, I think are getting like surveys from broader research groups that may focus and target white demographic and then try to use that for their own.” National research tells you what is happening somewhere. It cannot tell you what is happening in your pews.
Goodman gives an example. Asked whether young adults in Augusta are leaving Christianity for Black religious movements, he answers, “I’ve heard that, but I haven’t seen it.” He does not deny it happens elsewhere. He declines to preach to a problem he has not observed among his own people. Fields draws the lesson: without that local knowledge, “you end up fighting or trying to fight battles that aren’t there.” Step two turns on the difference between a question you have heard about and a question you have seen.
Task: design a listening tool
Write an anonymous survey of no more than five open questions. You might ask what question about God, the Bible or Jesus a person has wanted to ask but has not, or what question a friend has asked them that they could not answer. Avoid wording that hints at the answer you want.
Before sending it, make two columns. In the first, list the hard questions you have heard are common in your generation or region. In the second, list the ones you have actually met among the people you serve. When responses come back, see which column they confirm, and note any question that appears in neither.
If you lead a group of teachers through this, give the debrief its own meeting. Read the responses aloud with names and identifying details removed, and sort them together into rough clusters before anyone proposes a sermon. Ask the group which responses surprised them and why, since the surprises show where assumptions were wrong. Agree in advance that anything painful a respondent disclosed stays out of illustrations and goes, where possible, to a pastoral follow-up instead.
Step three: plan far enough ahead
“I’m big on sermon planning,” Goodman says. He meets each year with close friends to map his preaching calendar, then takes the plan to his staff. He preaches about seven series a year and reserves a late-summer slot for doctrinal teaching. At the time of the conversation he already knew the series he would preach a year later, asking whether God is racist, sexist or homophobic, and he wanted the long runway “because I’m up there making a major claim.”
Planning creates the time the first two steps need. Goodman recalls his grandmother chewing food before giving it to him as a small child, and applies the picture to preaching: “I’ve gotta chew it to make it palatable and ready for you to consume it, but I can’t give you what hadn’t been chewed on first.” The image teaches one thing well: the preacher must digest hard material before the congregation can receive it. It breaks if pushed further. A congregation is not made of infants, and the chewing is about making the material understandable, not softer. Goodman’s series still took on manuscript evidence and the question of evil.
Nehemiah 8:8 records what happened when Ezra read the law to the assembly: “So they read in the book in the law of God distinctly, and gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.” That passage describes one gathering rather than commanding a sermon method, but it shows readers of Scripture working so that hearers understood. Goodman’s weekly prayer in his sanctuary before Sunday aims at the same result: “God, help me be clear.”
Task: sketch the calendar
Take the questions your listening confirmed and choose three to five for one series. For each, write the text that will carry the sermon and the date your own clarity test must be finished. Count backward from the preaching date and decide what you will read and when. Then bring the draft to one or two trusted people and ask which question they would add or remove.
The strongest objection: wrong venue, too little time
Many pastors will push back on the whole idea. Hard questions, they say, belong in a Bible study or an elective, and Sunday is for worship. Fields raised exactly this when she asked Goodman what he would tell preachers who think the material is for Bible study and not Sunday morning. Goodman had already answered it in practice by telling his congregation, “I’m gonna have Bible study on Sunday,” and by reporting that the series was one of his most popular. His advice to hesitant pastors was simple: “don’t be afraid. Just try it.”
The time objection is harder, and the conversation does not fully answer it. Goodman works with a staff and a planning circle of friends, and preaches across multiple services. Nothing in the conversation addresses a bivocational pastor with no staff and a forty-hour job. What the sequence does offer that pastor is a way to scale down: one question, one clarity test, one sermon, prepared over a month instead of a series prepared over a year. The order holds even when the calendar shrinks.
A misconception to correct
The most predictable mistake is expecting a successful apologetics sermon to feel like any other successful sermon. Goodman’s room was quiet, many people took notes, and he found the format draining because he usually draws energy from call and response. Fields recalls teaching apologetics at a convention to blank faces, then hearing afterward how helpful it had been. She reads Goodman’s experience the same way: “people are hungry for it.”
So judge the series by its aim. Goodman names his: “my aim at church is to inform, my aim is to help and to make things clear.” He also rotates formats, having preached the Defender Series after a summer of revival-style preaching on David, because “Not everyone hears the same, not everyone understands the same.”
A quieter error is treating personal clarity as permission to preach opinions. Goodman did share his convictions, including on spiritual gifts, but he frames the pastor’s task as sharing “Not my opinion, but God’s word.” Where faithful Christians disagree, clarity means stating your view honestly, saying the question is debated, and showing how others read the same texts.
Discussion questions
- When you did the clarity test, which kind of sentence did you write most often? What does that suggest about where your preparation should start?
- What makes it hard for people in your setting to admit they do not understand something? What would change if they felt free to say so?
- Think of a hard question you have heard is common but have not encountered among your people. What might be lost, and what might be gained, if you preached on it anyway?
- Peter asks for answers given “with meekness and fear” in 1 Peter 3:15. Pick one sermon topic from your calendar sketch. What, specifically, would those two qualities change about how you open it or handle the strongest objection?
- How would you tell whether a quiet room meant concentration or disengagement? What could you ask afterward to find out?
- If your time is limited, which step in the sequence would you protect first, and why?
Before your next planning season
Run one full cycle on a small scale before attempting a series. Pick a single question from your survey, run the clarity test on it, fill in what you lack, and teach it once where you can talk with people afterward. Ask them what was clear and what was not. That one lesson will tell you more about your next series than any plan made without it.