Hard questions about the faith belong on Sunday morning, in the main service, in front of the whole congregation. Dr. Charles Goodman, senior pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church in Augusta, Georgia, makes that case from his own pulpit. His reasoning rests on a claim about what a pastor is. At home, the preacher is the church’s resident theologian, and what gets taught from that pulpit, or left untaught, shapes what a congregation thinks belief is for. A weeknight class can go deeper on details. It cannot set the culture of the church.
That answer cuts against a familiar habit. Many churches treat Sunday as the time for worship and send questions about the Bible’s reliability, evil, or heaven and hell to an elective that a small group attends. Goodman’s practice shows why that split is a choice. Nothing in the nature of worship requires it.
Where does the habit of sending hard questions to a side class come from?
Part of it comes from a story people tell about Black preaching. Lisa Fields names it directly: the idea that Black preaching is solely emotional and lacks theological depth. “I believe it’s a false narrative,” she says. She grew up a preacher’s kid in a Pentecostal church where her father always taught the Word. She grants that some churches are theologically thin, and she adds that this is also true in white spaces.
Goodman’s objection goes further than defending one style. He resists the way Black institutions get described as if they were all one thing. When it comes to anything Black and demographic, he says, “we’re always painted with a broad brush.” Other groups are judged church by church. Black churches get judged as a category. He grew up in the United Holy Church and calls himself bi-costal, at home in both Baptist and Pentecostal settings. He notes that his own pastor growing up was a Duke graduate with a medical degree. Lisa adds that the critique usually targets Black charismatic churches specifically, which already shows it describes one stream and not the whole river.
She also offers a useful counterexample. Friends of hers in Anglican, Episcopalian and Catholic settings sometimes lament the opposite problem: all reason and routine, too little emotion. Every tradition can tilt one way. The question is never whether a church feels or thinks. It is whether it lets one push the other out.
This matters for the side-class habit. If a church accepts the story that Sunday is for feeling, then thinking gets scheduled for another night. The schedule then quietly teaches that serious questions are optional extras for the curious, not part of what the whole church believes.
What does it mean to call the pastor a resident theologian?
Goodman draws a line between two roles he holds. He preaches widely as a traveling revivalist, and he pastors a local church. Those are different jobs, and he says so plainly: “I find myself as a resident theologian of my church. And I take that very seriously.”
He describes the difference in terms of aim. “So on the road, it’s to inspire, but I take my role and responsibility at home to inform, which means I try to give them a different kind of meal every chance, right?” An evangelist passes through. A pastor stands up every week before the same people, which means the pastor is responsible for the cumulative diet. Over years, that diet becomes the congregation’s sense of what Christianity contains.
Goodman credits his mentor, Dr. Brad Braxton, with counsel he received early in pastoring: some weeks the meal will be humble and some weeks it will be fine, but feed the people either way. Goodman draws a conclusion from that about variety. A congregation holds many kinds of listeners who do not all hear or understand the same way, so the pastor owes them different forms of teaching. His goal is stated in one sentence: “I never want my people to get caught up in a style, but I want them to hunger for substance.”
That sentence carries the institutional argument. A church attached to a style will resist anything that breaks the style, including a teaching series. A church that hungers for substance will accept a slower Sunday if it gets fed. The pastor, more than anyone else, trains which hunger a church develops.
Was the old pulpit ever really free of theology?
Goodman’s history complicates the idea that apologetics would be an import into Black worship. He argues that even preachers without formal education carried serious doctrine. As he puts it, “there was so much theology in the sermons they preached, and the songs we sang.” He points to a song about holding to God’s hand, which he heard as a lesson in God’s unchanging nature, long before anyone in the pew knew the word immutability. He mentions Ezekiel’s vision of the wheel, a staple of African American preaching. “They may not sound technical, but they were very theologically dense.”
What has changed, in his account, is the pulpit’s training. He believes a more educated pulpit now has room to explain things in more technical terms. That makes a Sunday apologetics series a continuation of an older practice in a newer vocabulary, not a break with tradition.
He applies the same logic to music. He has challenged his worship team “to also provide theology through our songs,” and he admits he would like “some more of our songs to be more theologically dense.” For Goodman, the cognitive and the emotional are not split between the sermon and the choir. Both the word and the worship are supposed to carry both.
Do spirit and truth really belong in the same service?
Goodman roots his approach in a saying of Jesus. What has been unique about Black church experience for him, he says, is that “we try to marry what Jesus says, we must worship him in spirit and in truth, right? So the spirit, the emotive, and then the truth being the cognitive.”
The text he has in mind is John 4:24: “God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.” Read in context, Jesus is speaking with a Samaritan woman who raises an old dispute about the right mountain for worship. Jesus moves the question away from location. True worship answers to who God is and to the truth now being revealed in Jesus himself. Many interpreters read “spirit” there as pointing to God’s own nature and the work of his Spirit, more than to human feeling.
So Goodman’s mapping of spirit to emotion and truth to thought is an application, not a strict definition of the words. The application still stands on firm ground at its center. Jesus joins spirit and truth with a single “and.” He does not assign them to different days of the week. A church that offers fervor on Sunday and doctrine on Wednesday has divided what the verse keeps together.
What did a Sunday apologetics series actually look like?
Goodman preaches about seven series a year, and his August and September slot is always doctrinal. Earlier years covered race, religion and Jesus during an election season, the letters to the seven churches, and church etiquette. Then came the Defender Series, which he describes as “simply a series where I just want to talk about stuff that I know people are asked.”
He announced the shift openly: “I’m gonna have Bible study on Sunday.” Across five services at two locations, wearing a headset, he worked through whether the Bible can be trusted, whether Jesus is who he says he is, evil, heaven and hell, why the church practices the Lord’s Supper and baptism, and finally the Holy Spirit. On Scripture he walked through manuscript evidence. On Jesus he pressed the old choice between Lord and lunatic. He treated the Bible and the Savior as the twin pillars of the faith. He found the session on evil the hardest.
The room changed. “This was so didactic. There wasn’t much response.” Instead, “most people were taking notes.” He says it was one of his most popular series. Older members told him they had not understood why the church takes communion. After the baptism sermon, Goodman reports, about 35 people came forward for a spontaneous baptism, saying they now saw what it meant as a sign and an outward expression of community.
Lisa Fields reads that reception as evidence of demand: “people are hungry for it.” She recalls teaching apologetics at a convention in her own denomination, where blank faces made her think she was failing, until people told her afterward how helpful it had been. Quiet in the room is not the same as disinterest. Sometimes it is concentration.
Why should a congregation hear its pastor’s own theology?
Goodman found another benefit he had not fully expected. The series let his people see what he actually believes. He thinks most churchgoers could not describe the convictions of the preachers they love to hear. “You don’t know what they believe.” He considers that a problem, because “most people aren’t that open about what they believe. They kind of tell you what they think you should believe.”
So he told them. In the session on the Holy Spirit, he said he believes in the sign gifts and the laying on of hands. In the session on heaven and hell, he argued that God does not send people to hell, and that heaven and hell exist as a real choice so that people can enter relationship with God freely. These are Goodman’s own convictions. Faithful Christians who love Scripture disagree about the operation of spiritual gifts and about many specifics of final judgment, where the long majority view in church history has been conscious eternal judgment. The point here is not that every reader must share his conclusions.
The point is institutional. A pastor who states his theology in public makes it available for examination. Members can test it against Scripture, ask questions, and know what they are being led by. A pastor who keeps his views vague avoids criticism but also avoids accountability. Apologetics asks believers to give reasons for their faith. A pastor who gives his own reasons from the pulpit shows the congregation what that looks like.
Isn’t this too much to ask of a Sunday crowd, or a busy pastor?
The strongest objection is practical. Sunday attendees include tired workers, children, elderly members, and visitors who came to worship, not to take notes. A teaching series could lose them. And not every pastor has the time or training to prepare it.
Goodman does not wave that away. He admits the format cost him. He draws energy from the call and response of preaching, and without it, “it was more draining than anything else.” He also accepts that a didactic Sunday may not produce the response some congregations expect: “Hey, you may not get a running and jumping down the aisle, and okay, but that’s not my aim.” His stated aim is different: “my aim at church is to inform, my aim is to help and to make things clear.” He also does not make every series a lecture. The Defender Series followed a summer of revival-style preaching on David. Variety is the plan.
On preparation, he is blunt. “You cannot explain stuff that you’re not clear about.” He tells pastors to read widely, settle their own convictions, and plan. He meets yearly with close friends to map his preaching calendar, then works it through with his staff. He already had a future series planned a year out, asking whether God is racist, sexist or homophobic, because people wrestle with those charges and he wants to be ready to make a major claim responsibly. His summary: “You can’t do apologetics on a Saturday night special.” He compares preparation to a grandmother chewing food for a small child: “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.” Every Saturday he prays in his sanctuary for one thing: “God, help me be clear.”
The other half of preparation is knowing which questions your own people are asking. Lisa Fields began her church’s apologetics courses with anonymous surveys, “Because oftentimes people don’t want to tell their pastor that they don’t understand something.” Goodman shows why local knowledge matters. Asked whether young adults in Augusta are leaving Christianity for Black religious movements, he says he has heard of it in other places, “I’ve heard that, but I haven’t seen it,” and attributes that partly to the Southern church culture of his region. Lisa draws the lesson: without that local awareness, “you end up fighting or trying to fight battles that aren’t there.” Goodman adds a warning about borrowed data. He is “a little leery of those who only go to and lean towards that one demographic and try to superimpose ’em,” meaning research built around other communities and applied wholesale to Black congregations. He points pastors instead to the depth of Black biblical scholarship available to them.
That answers the objection without denying it. The demand on the pastor is real. But it is the ordinary demand of the office, done with more planning. The demand on the congregation is real too, and Goodman’s experience suggests people will meet it when the questions are their own.
What changes when the pulpit takes the questions?
Goodman’s closing charge frames the stakes. He wants believers to be defenders of the faith, ready for the questions people ask in ordinary life, because Christianity can give reasons for what it holds about the Bible, Jesus, its practices and the Holy Spirit. He cites Jesus’ promise in John 8:32: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” His word to preachers is to keep growing and keep wrestling, because the work is lifelong.
The decision to keep hard questions in a side room is never neutral. It tells a church that its worship can go on without answers. Putting those questions in the Sunday service says the opposite: thinking is part of worship, and the pastor’s job includes being clear about why the church believes what it sings. Goodman’s congregation took notes, came to the water, and called it one of his best series. That suggests the split between a lively Sunday and a thoughtful one was never something the people demanded.
Quick answers
- Can apologetics work as a Sunday sermon? Goodman preached a five-part series on hard questions across all his Sunday services, and he describes it as one of his most popular.
- Doesn’t teaching drain the emotion from worship? Goodman says the room got quieter and more people took notes. He alternates teaching series with more celebratory ones and wants songs to carry theology too.
- Is Black preaching really less theological? Lisa Fields calls that a false narrative, and Goodman argues that sermons and songs, even from preachers without formal training, carried dense theology.
- How should a pastor prepare? Read widely, settle your own convictions, plan a year ahead with trusted friends and staff, and ask your congregation what they actually wonder about.
- Should a pastor share personal theological positions? Goodman thinks so, because a congregation should know what its leader believes and why, even on questions where faithful Christians differ.