"Christian message is very personal"

I grew up in a Christian family, so I went to Sunday school, I heard all the cool stories from the Bible, I attended youth group. I think for a long time it was just a tradition to go to church on Sunday, so I didn’t connect personally with God. In fact, the services were usually pretty boring to me.

This changed at one point, however. When I was 15, we had a group for teenagers meeting during the sermons. I remember that we talked about Jesus’s death in one of those meetings around Easter. Then I really understood that the Christian message is very personal: Jesus died because of me, because I mess up, because I cannot live up to God’s standards. So then I accepted Christ and his forgiveness personally.

I learned a lot from people in the church, but of course there was never really a different option to have another religion. Back then my first priority was to know Christianity, the Bible, rather then to compare it with different beliefs. This only changed when I came to university. I am majoring in English and minoring in Theology, so I have met interesting people here at LCC with differing positions. I have also become interested in apologetics, which is the defense of the Christian faith, and I have realized that the more I work on that, the more I get into different worldviews and get to know how they explain reality and the world as we perceive it. The funny thing is that while I learn more about other perspectives, I also get more confident in the Christian message. Of course, there are good arguments for other beliefs as well, but I don’t see that they demolish Christianity.