Most Christians already know the right first question to ask when someone attacks their faith. The trouble is reaching for it in time, before the rebuttal or the exit gets there first. This guide works on that gap. When someone makes a claim against Christianity, you ask what they mean, then ask why they think it is true, and you wait for each answer before you say anything else. You will rehearse those two questions out loud until they come out before your comeback does, so you can stay in a hard conversation without turning it into a fight.
You can work through this alone in about an hour, or with a group over one or two meetings. The drills work best with a partner, but there is a solo version. Nothing here requires you to share a personal story. Where a prompt invites one, an invented example works just as well.
First, notice your reflex
Before any teaching, find out what you already do. Read the three sentences below slowly. After each one, write down the first thing you would want to say back. Do not polish it. Write the reflex.
- Belief in God is irrational.
- The Bible has been changed. We don’t have what was written two thousand years ago.
- You Christians are nice, but you’re judgmental.
Now sort each response into one of three piles. Was it a statement correcting the person? Was it a way out of the conversation, like a joke or a change of subject? Or was it a question? Most people find their responses land in the first two piles. Keep this page. You will come back to it at the end.
What Scripture trains before it argues
Start with a proverb. “He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him” (Proverbs 18:13). Proverbs are wise principles about how life usually works, not guarantees. This one names a pattern you can test in your own experience: answering before you have heard is how people end up refuting something nobody said.
James puts the same wisdom as an instruction to believers. “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath” (James 1:19). Hearing comes first, and slowness to anger follows from it. A person who has actually listened has fewer reasons to get angry at a claim they misread.
Paul gives the goal of all this listening. “Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man” (Colossians 4:6). “Alway” is an older form of always. Look at the purpose clause at the end: gracious speech exists so that you will know how to answer each particular person. You cannot fit an answer to someone you have not heard.
Then watch Jesus do it. In Luke 10:25, a lawyer stands up to test Jesus (the KJV says he “tempted him,” in the older sense of testing) and asks what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus replies, “What is written in the law? how readest thou?” (Luke 10:26). The lawyer answers, and only then does Jesus respond to what the man actually said. The man presses again: “But he, willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus, And who is my neighbour?” (Luke 10:29). Jesus answers with a story that ends in another question.
Take five minutes with Luke 10:25-37. Mark every question in the passage and note who asks it. Then ask yourself: what did the lawyer have to do each time Jesus asked a question? The passage describes how Jesus handled one encounter; it does not make questions the only thing a Christian may say. It does show that answering a question with a question can draw a person into thinking.
Lisa Fields, founder and president of Jude 3 Project, raised this side of Jesus’s ministry in her conversation with Greg Koukl: “I think of the humility it took for Jesus to be with people who constantly misinterpreted his words and not pick a fight every time.” That humility takes effort. It means letting a misunderstanding stand for a moment while you find out what the person really thinks.
Why this has to be rehearsed
Greg Koukl, founder and president of Stand to Reason, an organization that builds Christian ambassadors, teaches a short sequence: ask what a person means, ask for their reasons, then use questions to make your own point. This guide is about something he says almost in passing. The method only works if you practice it.
He is candid that knowing the steps is not the same as using them. In his words, “it takes a little practice to feel comfortable in the process if you’re used to a more aggressive approach.” His advice for beginners is to stay with the first two steps for a while: “Just be a student of other people’s views.” He compares it to learning a bicycle, where someone holds the handlebar while you go in circles. “You do the basic things first a bunch of times till they kind of become second nature before you start doing something more challenging.”
Pay attention to how Koukl himself trains people. When Christians ask him how to respond to a friend’s objection, he does not hand them a script. He tells them, “you be your friend and I’ll be me, and let’s role play it then.” Even while explaining the method on the podcast, he slips into acting out the conversation and stops to say, “See, I’m role playing at the moment.”
Koukl treats asking questions as a habit, built by doing the move many times when nothing is at stake so that it is there when something is. He puts it bluntly: “if you don’t do it, it don’t work.”
He also says the same two questions help two very different kinds of Christians. “So the first two questions go in both directions.” For the person who argues too fast, asking what someone means “slows me down,” as Koukl says of himself. For the person who stays silent, the questions are a safe way in, because while you are only asking, you have made no claim of your own to defend.
The drill
You need a partner and the three claims from the opening. In a group, split into pairs and add a third person to observe if numbers allow. Each round takes about five minutes.
- Round one: meaning only. Partner A states one of the claims and plays someone who believes it. Partner B may ask only questions that find out what A means: What do you mean by irrational? Changed in what way? What would being judgmental look like? B may not correct, explain, or defend anything. When B has a clear picture, B says back what A believes in one sentence, and A confirms or fixes it.
- Round two: reasons. Same claim. Now B asks why A holds the view: What convinced you of that? How did you come to that conclusion? Then B waits. If A goes quiet, B lets the silence sit for a few seconds instead of rescuing it. The other person may be thinking, or may never have thought about it before. Silence is no victory.
- Switch roles and use a different claim. Playing the skeptic is half the learning. Notice how it feels to be asked instead of argued with.
- Round three, once the first two feel easy. Use the judgment claim. If A’s answer includes a flaw, B tries to point to it with a single question. Koukl’s guidance is to “try to use a question to expose the problem rather than make a statement.” He admits a direct correction can be fair, but says of it, “It’s accurate, but it’s not elegant.” Write your question down before you ask it if that helps. Most people find a good question harder to write than a good rebuttal.
After each round, the observer (or both partners) answers two things: How many statements slipped in where a question was supposed to go? Did B actually wait for the answer, or start forming a reply while A was still talking?
If you are practicing alone
Write the conversation as a short script. Give the skeptic the claim, then write only your questions and the answers you imagine. Read it aloud, both voices, so you hear yourself ask. For an online version, picture a comment that lists ten complaints at once. Koukl suggests narrowing it rather than answering everything: “Let’s just talk about this one thing.” Practice a reply that picks one charge and asks what the person means by it.
Testing the practice honestly
Two fair objections deserve a hearing before you use this outside the room.
The first is that questions can become a trick, a way to corner someone while pretending to be curious. That risk is real. The test is whether you actually want the answer. In the drill, the rule that B must restate A’s view and let A correct it guards against this. If you cannot summarize a person’s view in a way they accept, you have not been listening, whatever your questions sounded like.
The second is that you might use questions to avoid ever saying what you believe. Koukl’s sequence does not stop at asking. His third step is where, as he puts it, “you make your own point, advance the gospel, exploit a weakness or a flaw by using questions.” In his conversation with a young man named Gil, who said it is wrong to judge, Koukl did make a point: he asked, “Gil, if it’s wrong to judge, then why are you judging me right now?” Gil had to face the problem in his own claim, and Koukl had still put his view of it on the table. When you go on to say what you believe, you take on the same duty you asked of the other person: to give your reasons.
Rehearsal also includes rehearsing how to stop. Koukl says you do not have to wade in over your head: “No problem with just saying, yeah, I can’t deal with that.” With someone who keeps interrupting and rolling over every attempt to talk, he says it can be time to end in a friendly way, telling them, “I’ll give you the last word.” Add one round where A plays that kind of person and B practices a calm, kind exit.
Questions for discussion
- Look back at your reflex responses from the start. What do they suggest you believe your job is in a faith conversation?
- In Luke 10, the lawyer asks to test Jesus, and Jesus answers with questions. What did those questions make possible that a direct answer would not have?
- During the drill, where was it hardest to hold back a statement? What were you afraid would happen if you did not correct the claim right away?
- What was it like to play the skeptic and be asked questions instead of argued with? Did anything about it surprise you?
- Koukl says beginners discover “people are not as scary as they thought.” Does that match your experience, or does it depend on the person and setting? What else might make a conversation feel unsafe?
- Koukl describes his aim with beginners as “We’re gardening. We’re not harvesting.” What changes in a conversation when you stop trying to finish it in one sitting? What, if anything, could be lost?
- Is there a conversation you have been avoiding because you thought you needed every answer first? What would asking one honest question look like there?
For whoever is leading
Keep the drill light. Do not let pairs turn round one into a real debate; if you hear a rebuttal, call time and restart. Let people pick which claims to play, and let anyone sit out a role if a claim touches something painful in their own life. Nobody should be pressed to name a real friend or family member. With two meetings, use the first for the Scripture work and rounds one and two, and the second for round three, the exit round, and the discussion questions.
Carrying it out this week
Koukl’s advice is to begin in the shallow end, so start where nothing is at stake. In an ordinary disagreement about a movie, a sports team, or a weekend plan, ask What do you mean by that? and wait for the whole answer before you respond. Do it three or four times before the week is out. You are training the question to arrive before the comeback.
At the end of the week, pull out the page where you wrote your first reflexes. Read those three claims again and write a new first response to each. Then lay the two pages side by side and compare what you reached for then with what you reach for now.