Welcome back to the Word on Fire show. I'm Brandon Vot, the senior publishing director at Word on Fire.

Today we share a sample from yet another excellent course in our Word on Fire Institute.

Today's course is titled Evangelizing the Open Minded. It's an excellent six lesson course taught by our own Matt Nelson.

In this course, Matt explains how to engage people who are confident in their non-belief, but willing to seriously consider reasons for believing in Christianity.

Today we're going to share lesson three, which is titled God Problems. And in this particular lesson, Matt explores how to introduce open-minded non-believers to arguments for the existence of God.

So he covers common misunderstandings of God, proofs for the existence of God, and more resources for understanding classical theism.

So it's a great course if you have any family members or friends who are non-believers, but open-minded, this is the course you want to go through.

And again, you can find the whole course inside of our Word on Fire Institute at the website wordonfire.institute.

But for now, sit back and enjoy this sample from Matt Nelson's course titled Evangelizing the Open Minded. Enjoy.

Hi and welcome back to our course on Evangelizing Open Minded Non-Believers.

As you'll recall, in this course we're zeroing in on a majority demographic among the religiously unaffiliated.

Namely, those who still believe or are open to some sort of spiritual reality.

We're also referring regularly to popular podcasts, host and cultural influence, or Joe Rogan, as a primary example of the open-minded non-believer.

Rogan is a prime choice for our purposes because, as we said before, we have much access to his real-life discussions on social media, in which he converses with a wide variety of people about spiritual matters and other relevant topics.

He also fits nicely into the three criteria we've laid out to describe the open-minded non-believer.

One, a version to organized religion, two, a genuine curiosity, and three readiness to seek the truth.

In our last lesson, we looked at how people's discontent with organized religion is often rooted in their discontent with dogmatism, or what they deemed to be arrogant, closed-mindedness and intolerance.

Now, in this lesson, we're going to turn our attention to the open-minded non-believer's concept of God, which is often skewed and unhelpful.

A 2018 study by the Pew Research Center indicated that only 17% of the religiously unaffiliated believe in God as described in the Bible, while a whole 53% believe in a higher power or spiritual force, but not as described in the Bible.

So what does this tell us? Well, again, it confirms for us that the majority of nuns do indeed believe in God or something like God, but it also tells us that there's something about the God of the Bible as they understand Him that turns them off.

What could it be that turns them off?

No doubt, at least part of the problem is that some think of the God of the Bible as a murderer or a narcissist or whatever, but these beliefs tend to stem from caricatures of Bible stories, or a lack of understanding regarding how to read the Bible properly.

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