RC Talk - The Official Blogs of Ratio Christi Chapters

Apologist Interview: Blake Anderson of Ratio Christi

(via Apologetics 315)

Today's interview is with Blake Anderson of Ratio Christi. Ratio Christi (a Student Apologetics Alliance) seeks to encourage and strengthen the faith of Christian students at secular and liberal institutions across the country, while also sharing Christ's message and love to those that have yet to receive it, through the use of intellectual investigation and apologetics. Blake is the head of Chapter Growth & Support for the many Ratio Christi campus chapters. He talks about the need for apologetics on campus and in the university setting, the vision and work of Ratio Christi, how apologists can get involved part-time and full-time, and more.

Full Interview MP3 Audio here (35 min)

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On February 2, 2011, Ratio Christi officially became an independent organization. Born from an idea for a student apologetics club by Randy Hardman and Brendan Helms back in 2008, it was soon after taken under the wing of Southern Evangelical Seminary (SES) and flourished. But Ratio Christi was growing beyond anything that SES could manage and they needed someone with fundraising experience and financial expertise to step in and take over.

In May of 2010, Rick Schenker ran into the Ratio Christi website. He immediately felt a pull towards this organization and its mission. “At the end of 2009 and early 2010, I started getting the impression that the body of Christ was heading into a new age, the Age of the Apologist,” Schenker said. “When I saw Ratio Christi online, I immediately knew it was a mass movement waiting to happen.”

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In 2012 we posted some articles about how everything we do at Ratio Christi is related to evangelism.  Below is the list of articles that are posted on our web site.  

Thank you for helping us to win the world to Christ by training ordinary students to be incredibly confident evangelists.

• Ratio Christi: Creating Confident Witnesses for Christ
• Apologetics Misunderstood: It Is All About Evangelism (Part One)
• RC Misunderstood: It Is All About Evangelism (Part Two)
• Evangelism—the Way Jesus Did It (Gimme Five!)

In addition, we have copied a short article written for the new Apologetics & Ethics M.A. program at Denver Seminary. It’s a nice short summary of how apologetics is related to evangelism.

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Ratio Christi is more than a movement to address the skepticism at university campuses. We believe we can contribute to creating one of the greatest evangelistic movements in this century. Our plan is to simply turn ordinary students into incredible evangelists, and to encourage them to teach other believers what they have learned. Students that commit to this effort may be awarded a Legatus Christi certificate by a Ratio Christi apologist.  Legatus Christi is Latin for Ambassador of Christ. Try to imagine the exponential effect as students graduate and go on to teach what they have learned to other believers who can teach others also.

How many people will trust in Christ over the next 10 years due to our efforts? We have no idea. This plan does not focus on the number of people that make a commitment to trust in Christ. That is a hard number to count, and may not accurately reflect the impact of an organization. Instead our plan focuses on the number of people that become capable of having culturally relevant one-on-one conversations with people about the reasons to trust in Christ.

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By Rick Schenker

Ratio Christi was launched in 2008. Taking an idea that started at Appalachian State University, seminary students at Southern Evangelical Seminary quickly expanded the concept to the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Within a year they had expanded to other universities: Ohio State, NC State, and Texas A&M. By the end of 2010 they had ten chapters at universities--including one in South Africa.

On February 2, 2011, Ratio Christi became an independent organization. Today we are now one of the fastest growing apologetics ministries in the country with nearly 100 university chapters headed by a resident apologist. Each chapter is a student led apologetics club that is or is seeking to be an official student club.

In addition, this effort is creating opportunities for the entire apologetics enterprise as we:

• Recruit students and alumni of seminaries that train apologists to help them become leaders in the campus apologetics movement.
• Engage the services of many apologetics ministries by holding one or two events at each university every year.

In August 2011, we became the first organization to start hiring apologists to become full time missionaries at universities. Since then, we have vetted and are putting in the field over 20 missionaries across the nation who are beginning to raise their funds to become a full time apologist at a university.

Today we are in the process of launching Ratio Christi International to take this vision to universities around the world. We have so much interest from around the globe, that we are bringing on a full time director just to handle the complexities of our international efforts.

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by Farris Johnson, Clemson University

Although I was raised in the conservative Bible belt, by middle school I had left any "faith" I might have had behind. I gravitated from a very early age towards liberal politics and humanism. As a young high schooler I made the intellectual leap from agnosticism to atheism and continued on in my humanist pursuits by working for many political campaigns and non-profit organizations.

As an atheist, I realized my claims about God, immortality, & morality was rendering a certain meaninglessness over life - however this is certainly not how I lived. I lived for political and social projects, I used language like "progress" and "injustice" while simultaneously knowing that if I were pressed to provide a definition to such things, I couldn't give an honest answer for why I believed they existed or even what they meant. Life was lived in two realms: 1) I knew there was a meaninglessness, non-absolute, subjective, and as far as I knew, possibly incoherent habitat for my 'existence,' but 2) I put this knowledge in a box in order to proceed with my own personal meaning. I realized that essentially, I was using some Grand Lie which ascribed unintelligible significance to my relationships and passions and work. As unstoppable meaning-makers, I think a secular person's difficulty is in eventually accepting that any meaning they create is nothing more than a very serious game of make-believe.

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Q: How did you become a director of Ratio Christi at Ohio State University? What led you to make that decision?

Eric: As a missionary, I was already doing a lot of evangelism and discipleship at The Ohio State campus. I realized there were not any ministries that had any apologetic focus on the campus. I also had seen the first hand results of Christians leaving the faith on the campus. The skepticism is everywhere and is certainly not getting any better.

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Without the valuable partnerships Ratio Christi has, we could not function as well as we do. The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) is one such organization RC works with that has most certainly been a valuable and vital strategic partner and has been in part a key reason for RC’s success.

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Chapter director Stephen McAndrew of State University of New York University at Buffalo (UB) tells us about his new book and dives into its major themes in this insightful interview.

What is the book called? What is it about?

The book is called "Why It Doesn't Matter What You Believe If It's Not True."  The book examines the tension between international human rights and moral relativism, arguing that universal human rights don't make sense if moral truths are relative.  It then argues that God is the source of universal moral standards that undergird what I call in the book "the human rights urge.

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The following are testimonials are from students this past semester at various schools across the country. Students meet weekly to discuss the vital questions of life and also plan events to bring Christian thinking into the spotlight. Ratio Christi is about discipleship of the mind. Hear what the students are saying:

“The nights we had Ratio Christi were always my favorite of the week. Being a part of this group helped me understand how Christianity is not simply a blind faith, but a belief grounded in evidence. It [answered] some doubts I had in the past and created a doorway to bring my atheist friends to explore a reasonable faith. In a campus as spiritually opposed [to Christianity] as Rutgers, Ratio Christi is an oasis for the student seeking reasonable answers and evidences to his search for truth.  ~  Andrea (Rutgers)

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