Parents and pastors often put it in plain words: we raised them in church, so why didn’t it stick? Behind the question sits an assumption that the faith they received must have been thin. Dr. Howard-John Wesley questions that assumption. Speaking from his pastoral experience, he describes a faith that was real and often hard-won, handed to young people who were rarely taught the reasoning behind it. He names several pressures: constant exposure to other worldviews, researched objections that catch believers unprepared, suffering, and bad church experiences. Preaching built mainly for the shout belongs on that list because it leaves people without material to answer with. His remedy keeps the worship and adds the study.
That answer honors something before it admits a gap, and the order matters.
A faith that already defended itself
Wesley does not begin by scolding the Black church for being behind. He says it has always done apologetics, in a different form. He ties that form to history. In his view, people who came out of slavery and kept living with racism and injustice tended to carry a defining faith in the Lord. He adds that in his experience it is almost uncommon to hear of an African American atheist or agnostic. That is his observation, not a measured statistic, but it shows what he believes the church built.
He names the strength this way: “what I think we’ve done most in the black church is prepare people to live out that faith in the world.” The defense he describes is a life that keeps trusting God under pressure strong enough to break a weaker conviction. Its proof is endurance.
Scripture puts endurance and reasons side by side. First Peter was written to believers facing hostility, and it asks them to explain themselves: “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” (1 Peter 3:15). The letter assumes its readers are suffering, and it still asks for a reason, given gently. A church that taught people how to hope under oppression had already done much of what that verse describes. Wesley’s worry is the reason.
Where the why went missing
Wesley’s explanation starts with exposure. Young people now meet atheism, agnosticism and other faiths up close and often. A faith formed among people who mostly shared it now faces questions their elders seldom had to answer out loud.
He is careful about the response. He says it may not need the label of apologetics at all. It needs sound doctrine taught steadily, in sermons and Bible study, “so that people have a real rooting in their faith to be able to stand and proclaim that they are Christian and why.” He also rules out a hostile version. The aim is not to make people anti-Muslim or anti-Jewish or anti-Baha’i. In his words, “let’s make certain we are pro Christian and understand what that means and all the complexities of Christianity.”
He wants people to understand a faith with real depth and real internal disagreement, so the first complicated fact they meet does not feel like a betrayal. In Bible study, he says, he would rather acknowledge the diversity of doctrine and thought among Christians and jump into it than run from it.
The shout and the notebook
Here Wesley is at his sharpest. He warns against “the dumbing down of the gospel,” which he describes as crafting sermons and teaching moments that lead to shouts. He wants “sermon moments that lead to people whipping out their phones and Googling and whipping out their notebooks and taking notes.”
He is not dismissing emotional worship. In his closing thoughts he describes faith as more than “about the good feeling of worship and praising God, which are really critical components of discipleship.” Praise stays. The problem comes when a sermon is built to produce praise and nothing else.
His contrast is between two responses to a sermon. A shout happens in the room. Notes go home with the listener, and a phone search means the person is still chasing the question after the benediction. A sermon aimed only at the shout gives people an experience and nothing to return to when a coworker or a professor pushes back. That is the gap Wesley is pointing at.
He grounds the alternative in a verse he says he is borrowing from Paul: “Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth” (2 Timothy 2:15). The KJV word “study” carries the sense of effort or diligence, and other translations render it “be diligent” or “do your best.” Paul is writing to Timothy, a teacher, in a passage about false teachers whose claims were overthrowing some people’s faith. So the verse first speaks to those who teach: handle the word carefully, because people’s faith depends on it. Extending it to every believer’s study is a reasonable application, and Wesley makes both moves. He presses preachers to go deeper and hopes congregations will become people who study.
Questions nobody asked out loud
The way Wesley’s apologetics teaching for young adults began is revealing. He did not design a course. He asked the young adults in his congregation to send him the questions they were really wrestling with. The questions came in, and most of them turned out to be apologetic in nature.
His description of the people asking deserves a slow read: “These are young people without any formal definition or training of apologetics, want to understand what they believe and wanna be able to give an answer to their friends.” Interest was never the issue. A place to ask was.
He says it plainly: “people always have these questions, but never have an opportunity to ask them.” The typical service shows why: “When you go to church, you hear the sermon, you hear the song, but you don’t get to raise your hand.” A person can attend for years without once being invited to say what they do not understand. Unspoken questions do not disappear. They get asked somewhere else, often of someone with no interest in helping the person keep their faith.
That realization shaped how Wesley leads. He sometimes sets aside a prepared message and lets people come to the microphone with their questions. A line his church hears often sums up his goal: “my job is not to make you think what I think.” His job, he says, is to make sure they are thinking. He ties this to credibility: “I think only when you embrace the questions, do you gain respect from those who ask them.”
That sentence speaks directly to the opening question. Young people who sense their questions are unwelcome may conclude the faith cannot handle them. A church that welcomes the question shows them otherwise.
Blindsided
Wesley’s word for the unprepared believer is blindsided, and his clearest example is the Bible itself. He wants church members to understand how the canon came together, including the criteria behind the four Gospels and why texts like the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas were left out. Without that knowledge, he warns, “you’re gonna be blindsided by someone who has researched that.”
He explains why this subject sits beneath the others. If someone does not accept the Bible as authoritative, quoting it settles nothing. He uses a classroom image: “If you and I can’t agree that one plus one is two, then we can never have discussion about calculus.” Many arguments about Jesus, morality or salvation turn out to be arguments about whether Scripture deserves a hearing at all.
He lists other recurring questions: whether salvation is found only in Jesus when you know devout, morally serious neighbors of other faiths; whether the Bible is the final authority for knowing God’s will; and whether the local church is necessary for people who have been hurt by it. He does not think these questions are new. He thinks they recycle, which is good news for anyone who teaches. Recycled questions can be anticipated.
The make or break question
Of all the challenges, Wesley singles out evil and suffering. He calls it “the make or break issue” and says “that’s the issue that will push more people outside of faith in God.” He reads Job in that light, as a contest in which Satan claims suffering will make Job curse God, while God’s wager is that some people can go through the struggle without an answer and still hold on. That is his reading of the book’s opening, and it frames his concern: how do you prepare people to be that kind of person?
Lisa Fields adds a caution from her own experience. She describes the problem of evil as one of her major struggles in seminary, and she notes that a philosophical answer to someone in pain “might make sense in your head” while the person in front of you has a broken heart. Explanation and care have to stay connected.
Wesley’s approach is to lay the foundation before the crisis. He teaches people to think about how God’s providence relates to human choice, and how both relate to God’s knowledge and power. Faithful Christians answer those questions differently, and Wesley’s aim is that no one meets tragedy armed only with a slogan. He refuses one slogan in particular. Telling a family whose child died of cancer that it was simply the Lord’s will is something he cannot do: “That’s unpalatable for me, that’s difficult to put all evil and tragedy at the hand of God.”
Here thin preaching does its quietest damage. Wesley notes that people often hold a core belief about God from early childhood, and “when these tragedies come, they’re ill prepared.” Their trust in God was sound. It had never been given the structure it needed to carry that weight.
But won’t the questions do damage?
Some parents and pastors fear exactly that. Bring up the canon, other religions or the problem of evil, and you may plant doubts that were never there. It is a fair worry, and it deserves a straight answer.
Wesley’s experience suggests the doubts were already present. His young adults had their questions before he asked for them. Suffering arrives whether anyone has taught about it or not. The real choice is where people first meet these questions: in a room with teachers who love them, or alone with someone who wants them to leave. Wesley describes the setting he aims for as close to a seminary environment, a safe space where people can face deep theological and philosophical issues and have it “edify our mind, but not break our faith.”
His account also has limits worth stating. Wesley does not claim that emotional preaching alone explains why people leave. He names those who walk away after bad church experiences, convinced the church is a flawed human institution they can do without. Better teaching cannot repair a wound a leader caused. And information alone does not cure much. Wesley pairs real study with a posture: teachers who welcome the asking and refuse to demonize people who think differently.
Teaching the why on an ordinary week
Wesley wanted his Bible studies to reach beyond verse-by-verse reading to the questions that come up on the job, with a cousin or with unbelievers. Any church, small group or household can apply that test. Are the questions people actually face ever named out loud? Is there a regular time when someone can admit confusion without being corrected for asking?
He also offers a starting shelf. With his ministers he uses Millard Erickson’s Introducing Christian Doctrine, which he describes as more conservative and biblically authoritative. He recommends Michael Horton’s The Christian Faith for systematic theology, Lee Strobel’s books for their journalistic approach, and a book by Barton titled How the Bible Came to Be, because he believes the canon is where the biggest battles come.
Finally, it changes what a good Sunday looks like. If the measure is the volume of the room, the shout wins. If the measure is whether people went home and looked something up, the sermon has to give them something worth looking up. Wesley’s closing hope was for preachers to go beyond crafting sermons toward “actually teaching people what they need to live in their faith in the real world.”
The generations Wesley honors kept their faith through things no argument could have prepared them for. Teaching their children the reasons behind that faith hands the same inheritance on in a form the next generation can examine, defend and own.