When someone you love doubts God, or when your own faith has gone quiet, a better argument often changes nothing. York Moore’s conversion, as he tells it on the Jude 3 Project podcast, points to what does help. Believers help when they have real reasons for their faith and an honest life to match, and when they trust God to do what no believer can. They get in the way in two ways. Some offer a faith with nothing underneath it. Others act as though everything depends on them.
You can work through what follows alone in one sitting or with a group over one or two meetings. It includes Scripture to read closely, a practice to try this week, and questions for discussion. Moore’s story includes a suicide attempt, so a note on that comes before the questions. Groups should read it together before they begin.
Start with the Christians Moore went to
Moore was raised by atheist parents and spent three years at the University of Michigan asking whether life could have meaning without God. He explained his reason for asking: “if there is no God, there’s no transcendence, there’s no ultimate meaning to the universe. Why live?” By the end, his answer was that it could not. Then, walking to his car after turning in his thesis, he says he heard a question he could not answer: why strive at all?
That question sent him looking, and he looked at Christians first. Hebrews 9:27 was the reason: “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” If any faith could put him in real trouble, it was this one. So he sat down with believers and asked them why they believed.
What he found is the part of the story to sit with. “I found that the vast majority of Christians have absolutely no reason to believe in the God that they say they believe in,” he says, and he sums them up in four words: “most are cultural Christians.” A pastor friend told him that no one could really know whether the Bible was God’s word or whether Jesus was born of a virgin. Moore’s response was blunt: “he’s thrown out the entire foundation of his belief system. He has nothing to say to me.”
Weigh that verdict for what it is. It is one man’s report of the Christians he happened to interview, during one season of searching. It is a sharp warning, and it is not a survey of the church. Your own experience may match it or may not, and the questions below ask you to compare.
Still, notice what drove him away. He was asking whether anything was true, and the answers he got were about belonging, habit and culture. To a man who had already concluded that nothing mattered, a faith that made no claim to truth looked like his own emptiness in church clothes. “To me, that seemed like a colossal waste of time and energy,” he says.
That is the first way believers block the path. A faith that has never been examined cannot answer the person who examines it.
A short observation exercise
Before reading further, write down in two or three plain sentences why you believe Christianity is true. Leave out why you like it, why it helps you, or who taught it to you. Write why you think it is true. Keep the paper. You will come back to it.
Read 1 Peter 3:15 slowly
Many Christians quote this verse when they talk about having reasons, 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 it again and notice the order. The first instruction is to set apart the Lord in your heart, and the readiness to answer grows out of that. The answer also goes to someone who asks. Peter pictures a believer whose hope is visible enough that people want to know where it comes from. The manner matters as much as the content. The KJV word meekness means gentleness, and fear here points to reverence, a sense that you answer before God as well as before your listener.
Hold that verse next to Moore’s interviews. The Christians he met failed the middle of the verse: they had no reason to give. Many Christians who do have reasons fail the end of it and answer as if they are winning a debate. Peter asks for both: a real reason, given gently, by someone whose own heart belongs to Christ.
For groups: some people will feel exposed here, especially if they wrote little in the exercise above. That gap is exactly what the exercise was meant to reveal, so treat it as a starting point. Keep the tone curious and avoid correcting anyone.
The opposite mistake: thinking it all depends on you
If the first lesson were the whole lesson, this would be a call to study harder. But in Moore’s story no Christian argument persuaded him, and the Christians he interviewed mostly disappointed him. What turned him, as he tells it, was a voice he had first heard as a six-year-old, then an encounter in his car, and then a small book the same pastor had handed him. He read the gospel in it and gave his life to Jesus Christ that night. On Moore’s telling, the book may have mattered more than the conversation that came with it.
Lisa Fields drew out what this means for anyone who cares about evangelism. She said it shows “God works even beyond our human capacity.” Then she put it more sharply: “God really doesn’t need us. He uses us.” Her conclusion was that “salvation is his job.” She did not treat this as permission to stay silent. “We’re called to tell and share,” she said. The telling still matters, and the outcome belongs to God.
Paul makes a similar point about his work in Corinth: “I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase” (1 Corinthians 3:6). Jesus, speaking to Nicodemus, compares the Spirit’s work to the wind: “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). “Listeth” is older English for wishes or pleases. The Spirit moves where he pleases, on his schedule.
A Christian who thinks a friend’s faith depends on finding the right words will tend to push, pressure, or treat every conversation as a last chance. A Christian who trusts that God can speak for himself can afford to listen. Before he believed anything, Moore had wondered whether “maybe God can speak for him or her or itself.” On his telling, God did.
Can a story like this persuade anyone else?
A skeptic could fairly push back here. Moore’s turning points are private experiences, described years later and interpreted through the faith he now holds. Nobody else heard the voice or felt the presence in the car. A listener can believe Moore is sincere and still think he misread what happened to him. And asking for a clear sign is hardly unreasonable: it is what most of us would want before reorganizing a life.
That objection is right about what the story can do. Moore’s account establishes that a rigorous former atheist sincerely reports these experiences and that they changed him. It cannot hand a reader his certainty, and it cannot show from the outside that God was the one speaking. Two things in it can be examined by anyone. One is his reasoning about whether a world with no meaning beyond the physical can explain why truth and effort are worth anything. The other is the content of the slim book: the claim that Jesus died for sin and rose again, which stands or falls on its own evidence.
Moore also turns a point against his younger self. During his search, he spent days daring whatever god might exist to prove itself in some unmistakable public way. Looking back, he believes God was speaking, but “I didn’t have the spiritual eyes to see or the ears to hear.” The problem, he says, was that “I was trying to define God in a very specific way on my timetable, on my terms.” Wanting evidence was never his mistake. His mistake, as he sees it, was dictating its exact form. If God is a person, the way you seek him has to fit a person.
Mark 9:24 records a father who brings his son to Jesus and cries out, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.” Jesus does not send him away for the second half of that sentence. Mixed faith, honestly spoken, is still spoken to God.
Before you discuss: the hardest part of the story
Moore says that on Christmas Eve 1989 he decided to end his life and aimed his car at a viaduct. He describes the presence of Jesus filling the car and steering him to safety. He is careful about what that night did: “that experience wasn’t enough to convert me to Christianity. It was enough to get me home that night.”
His story shows how far a conclusion like “nothing matters” can push a person. It is no pattern to wait for. If you are thinking about ending your life, please tell someone today, and call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the US, at any hour. Thoughts like these are a reason to get help, and they prove nothing about what is true.
For groups: someone in the room may be closer to this than anyone knows. Do not ask people to share their own experiences of despair. If someone does, thank them, and follow up privately afterward so the meeting does not turn into a response to them. Make sure everyone knows the 988 number before you move on.
A practice for the week: test your answer, then live in the window
- Test your reasons. Take out the sentences you wrote earlier. Ask a friend or group partner to read them back to you and ask one question after each sentence: How do you know that? Answer as plainly as you can. Where you run out of answers, write down the question you could not answer. Choose one and spend time this week studying it, in the relevant passage of Scripture or a careful Christian resource. You are aiming to become someone with something true to say.
- Tell an ordinary story. Moore says a testimony “provides a window for the outside world to look in and see what it looks like to be at home with God.” He insists your story need not resemble his: “it doesn’t have to be this big dramatic near-death experience like mine.” He even says of his own past, “I got the bad story,” and wanted his children to grow up with faith lived and taught at home. This week, think of one ordinary, true moment when trusting God changed what you did. When a natural opening comes with someone who doubts, tell it briefly, without a sales pitch, and then ask about their life instead of pressing for a response.
Moore gives the reason for the second part: “I think the majority of people come to faith in Christ because they have a relationship with a person who is just an authentic, transparent person who’s walking the walk.” Reasons answer the question a skeptic asks. A transparent life answers the one underneath it: whether any of this is real enough to live by.
Questions for discussion
- Look at what you wrote about why you believe Christianity is true. Which parts are reasons, and which are really about comfort, habit or family? What surprised you?
- Moore says most Christians he interviewed had no reason for their faith. Does your experience of Christians match his, or does it differ? What might explain the difference?
- First Peter 3:15 asks for a reason given with meekness and fear. In your experience, which is harder for Christians to supply: the reason, or the gentleness? Why?
- Lisa Fields says salvation is God’s job and our job is to tell and share. How would believing that change the way you talk with a friend who doubts? Could it ever become an excuse to say nothing?
- If a skeptic told you Moore’s experiences prove nothing to anyone but Moore, how would you respond? What in his story could that skeptic actually examine?
- Moore says he missed what God was saying because he set the terms. If you have doubts of your own, what terms have you set for God, and are they fair to the kind of being Christians claim God is?
- Think of someone who helped your faith without ever winning an argument with you. What did they do?
One question to carry
Moore went looking for Christians with reasons and, by his account, mostly found people who had never asked. If an honest skeptic sat down with you next week and asked how you know God exists, would you have something true to say, and would you trust God enough to say it gently and leave the rest to him?