From CNS News.
Excerpt:
A study released by the Rasmussen Reports polling firm on Good Friday found that 64% of Americans believe that Jesus Christ rose from the dead.
While Americans who believe in the resurrection remain in the majority, that number is down significantly when compared to a Rasmussen Poll that asked the same question, released a year ago.
On April 7th, 2012 Rasmussen released a poll finding that 77% of Americans believed the resurrection of Christ to be historical fact.
The difference between the two polls shows a 13 percentage point drop in the number of Americans who believe that Christ rose from the dead, since last Easter.
Additionally, this year’s poll found that 19% of Americans reject the central tenant of the Christian faith and do not believe that Christ was resurrected. That’s compared to only 7% who said they didn’t believe that Christ rose from the dead a year ago. A staggering 12 percentage point jump.
I’ve been posting some resurrection-related material lately, trying to get people to focus more on the evidence for the resurrection. But I can’t change what pastors teach their flocks on Sundays. If I had my way, pastors would be using materials like J. Warner Wallace’s “Cold-Case Christianity” to train people to make the case for the historical resurrection of Jesus. But it seems to me that most pastors are more interested in providing their flocks with praise hymns, worship and subjective experiences. None of that can demonstrate that the resurrection really happened. We need pastors who emphasize teaching real knowledge of objective truths linked to the real world.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
So sad
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Well, we need to just work harder at knowing how to be build a case.
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Your understanding of what pastors ought to be teaching their flocks on Sunday is that they should be teaching apologetics? Odd. I always thought that preachers were supposed to, oh, I don’t know, preach the Word. I mean, I’d be in favor of classes on that and all, but pastors aren’t called to make apologists, are they? They’re called to make disciples.
I know. We’ve done this before. But it really seems as if you’re quite convinced that the proper form of logical discourse and acceptable evidence will be making converts … and that’s just not what the Bible says.
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Well, wait. Your alternative is good as a middle ground. I just get discouraged when pastors preach sermon after sermon with no connection to anything verifiable in the world outside of church.
Peter in Acts 2 appeals to evidence. That’s all I’m asking for.
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See, I thought sunday school was the appropriate venue for this. After all, making a disciple is different from discipling a disciple. And at what point does the church do that?
Through an absurd, wasted hour of 2nd sermon-dom that teaches nothing more in depth than the Sunday Morning sermon?
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Sproul has that style of preaching WK. I’ve listened to his sermons through the letters of Peter, some on Acts, and some on Romans. Sproul peppers his sermons with apologetics. He is an expositor preacher so he preaches verse by verse though a book of the bible. There was a verse, I forget now (fail), that mentioned the glory of God or something like that. Anyway, he could have took that moment to preach a sermon on subjective experience, but instead he taught on divine aseity, reasons for it, etc. and how that should cause a Christian to worship God. It was an awesome sermon.
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I was listening to R.C.Sproul on Sunday night while on a long drive. I used to listen to Renewing Your Mind all the time. I like him and have 4 of his books.
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I like his renewing your mind show too. At first I didn’t know if I would like his sermons because I’m not a “sermon guy,” but surprisingly I did. :D
When I do listen to sermons on drives or runs, I listen to his and Bill Craig’s Defenders class (it’s a sunday school class so it’s a sermon right haha). On rare occasions I will listen to Tim Keller, but he is kind of subjective, self-help in his sermons. Sometimes, I think he squeezes self-help stuff out of passages that I just don’t see.
Anyone have any suggestions on sermons in the style of Sproul or Bill Craig?
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Yes! Wayne Grudem!
http://www.christianessentialssbc.com/messages/
Look at those topics! ^_^
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Cool! Thanks WK. I’ll check those out for sure.
Hey, I linked to this poll post along with 13 arguments against the hallucination theory.
http://reformedseth.blogspot.com/2013/04/new-rasmussen-poll-fewer-people-believe.html
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Thank you for the link!
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