Is there a God?

At the 125th Annual Meeting of the Evangelical Covenant Church this summer in St. Paul, MN, Peter Cha, an associate professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, gave a message about the questions college students are asking as pertains faith issues.

Forty years ago, Paul Little of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) recorded that the four most prevalent questions asked by college students in the modern era were these:
1. Is there a God?
2. Is Christ God?
3. Is the Bible reliable?
4. Is it full of errors?

Today Rick Richardson, an IVCF evangelism associate, has studied the recurring questions college students are asking in a post-modern era. They are these:
1. How can I trust the Church that has done such terrible things in the name of Jesus?
2. Does your religion help society, especially those who suffer and are marginalized?
3. Aren't you just another self-serving group?
4. Doesn't the Church justify and maintain racial and gender hierarchical structures in the society?

The questions are harder, and reveal much.

If I were to assemble a list of questions I hear, I don't know that it would be identical to this. But there is one question that does seem to recur. It is less about Christianity specifically and more about religion in general. Here is the question: Why is there so much violence in the name of religion?

Clearly, the evidence is all around us that we live in a broken world. And people are uncertain where to turn for answers.