17 Study Guides
Apologetics
Think clearly about why we believe what we believe. These guides help groups work through the evidence for the Christian faith, answer honest objections, and talk about hard questions with confidence and kindness.
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering
by Timothy Keller
Timothy Keller's Walking with God through Pain and Suffering (2013) is one of the most thorough and pastorally sensitive Christian treatments of the problem of suffering written in a generation. Drawing on philosophy, theology, literature, and the lived stories of real people, Keller argues that neither secular optimism nor shallow religious comfort is adequate for the darkness of real suffering — but that the Christian vision of a God who entered suffering in the person of Jesus Christ offers resources no other worldview can match. The book is structured in three movements: first, an unflinching examination of how every worldview (secular and religious alike) must reckon with suffering; second, a theological account of why suffering exists and what God may be doing through it; and third, a deeply practical guide to walking through suffering with faith, community, prayer, and hope.
View Discussion GuideWhere Is God When It Hurts?
by Philip Yancey
Philip Yancey's Where Is God When It Hurts? is one of the most honest and searching books ever written about pain and suffering from a Christian perspective. First published in 1977, it does not offer easy answers or tidy formulas. Instead, Yancey walks alongside the reader through some of the hardest questions human beings ever ask: Why does a good God allow suffering? Is pain a punishment? Can faith survive the worst that life brings? Drawing on medical science, personal stories, theology, and Scripture, Yancey argues that pain is not God's enemy — it is, in a strange and difficult way, one of his most important gifts — and that the real question is not "Why do I hurt?" but "What do I do with this hurt, and where is God in the middle of it?"
View Discussion GuideSeeking Allah, Finding Jesus
by Nabeel Qureshi
Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus is Nabeel Qureshi's deeply personal memoir of growing up in a devout Ahmadi Muslim family and walking — slowly, painfully, and almost against his own will — toward faith in Jesus Christ. Nabeel was not a casual Muslim. He was raised to love Allah with his whole heart, trained to defend Islam against Christian arguments, and shaped by a family whose faith was the very fabric of their identity. The book's central argument is that the journey from Islam to Christianity is not primarily an intellectual one — it is a profoundly relational and spiritual one. Through his friendship with David Wood at Old Dominion University, his honest investigation of the historical evidence for the resurrection, and a series of extraordinary dreams and visions, Nabeel discovered that the cost of following truth might be everything he had ever loved. His story will unsettle comfortable assumptions on both sides: Muslims will encounter a careful, respectful engagement with Islamic scholarship, and Christians will be confronted with how high the price of conversion can be for those who come from the House of Islam.
View Discussion GuideThe Case for Christ
by Lee Strobel
Lee Strobel was not always a believer. As an award-winning legal journalist and self-described atheist, he set out to disprove Christianity after his wife Leslie's conversion to the faith. What he found instead, after nearly two years of rigorous investigation, was a cumulative case for Christ so compelling that he became a Christian himself. The Case for Christ (1998) reconstructs that investigation, presenting Strobel's interviews with thirteen leading scholars and experts across the fields of history, archaeology, medicine, psychiatry, and philosophy. The book's central thesis is straightforward: when you apply the same standards of evidence a journalist or lawyer would bring to any other historical claim, the evidence for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ is not only credible — it is overwhelming.
View Discussion GuideMama Bear Apologetics
by Hillary Morgan Ferrer
Mama Bear Apologetics by Hillary Morgan Ferrer is a call to arms for Christian mothers (and fathers) who want to do more than protect their children from bad ideas — they want to train their kids to recognize and refute those ideas themselves. Drawing on the metaphor of the fiercely protective mama bear, Ferrer and her team of contributing authors walk through the most common lies embedded in today's culture — from moral relativism and self-helpism to postmodernism and feminism — and show parents how to use a four-step "ROAR" method: Recognize the message, Offer discernment, Argue for a better way, and Reinforce what's true. The book's thesis is simple but urgent: the best defense is a well-trained offense, and the time to hand our children intellectual tools is before the world hands them counterfeits.
View Discussion GuideThe Case for a Creator
by Lee Strobel
Lee Strobel was a hard-nosed atheist and award-winning journalist who once used his legal training to argue against Christianity. Then he turned that same investigative instinct toward the biggest question of all: Does science point toward God — or away from Him? The Case for a Creator (Student Edition, co-written with Jane Vogel) records his journey through conversations with leading scientists in cosmology, physics, biology, and astronomy. The central thesis is bold and straightforward: when you follow the evidence wherever it leads, the most reasonable conclusion is that the universe was intentionally designed by an intelligent Creator. Far from being enemies, science and faith turn out to be pointing in the same direction.
View Discussion GuideTactics
by Gregory Koukl
Gregory Koukl's Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions is a practical apologetics handbook built on a simple but liberating premise: your job in a conversation is not to win an argument or convert anyone on the spot — it is simply to "put a stone in someone's shoe," leaving them with a thought they can't quite shake. Koukl teaches readers to engage skeptics, seekers, and critics graciously and intelligently by asking good questions rather than delivering monologues. The book's central strategies — the Columbo tactic, the Suicide tactic, the Rhodes Scholar tactic, and others — are drawn from everyday conversational moves that anyone can learn, regardless of their theological training. By the end, readers are equipped not just with techniques but with a confident, humble posture toward faith conversations.
View Discussion GuideBasic Christianity
by John Stott
John Stott's Basic Christianity is one of the most enduring introductions to the Christian faith ever written — voted by Christianity Today as one of the fifty books that have most shaped evangelical Christians. Its central argument is deceptively simple: Christianity is not primarily a philosophy, an ethical system, or a religious feeling, but a set of historical claims about a historical person. If Jesus of Nazareth is who he claimed to be — God in human flesh — then everything changes. If he is not, then, as Stott puts it, "Christianity is exploded." The book moves in a carefully ordered arc: first establishing who Jesus is, then diagnosing the human problem he came to solve, then explaining what he did about it, and finally calling the reader to a personal response. It is a book designed not merely to inform, but to confront — warmly, honestly, and with great intellectual care.
View Discussion GuideThe Case for Faith
by Lee Strobel
Lee Strobel's The Case for Faith (2000) picks up where The Case for Christ left off — not with skeptics who dismiss Jesus, but with sincere believers (and honest doubters) who wrestle with the hardest objections to Christian faith. Strobel, a former legal editor and atheist, frames the book as a journalist's investigation: he identifies eight "rocks of doubt" — the toughest intellectual and moral obstacles that cause people to abandon or resist faith — and then interviews leading Christian scholars and thinkers to see whether those obstacles can be answered. The result is not a whitewash but a genuine intellectual journey, and the book's thesis is bold: honest doubt, seriously examined, need not destroy faith — it can deepen it.
View Discussion GuideCold-Case Christianity
by J. Warner Wallace
Cold-Case Christianity by J. Warner Wallace invites readers to approach the claims of the New Testament the same way a seasoned homicide detective approaches an unsolved murder: with rigorous logic, careful evaluation of evidence, and a willingness to follow the facts wherever they lead. Wallace, a former atheist and Los Angeles County cold-case detective, argues that Christianity is not a matter of blind faith but of well-reasoned inference to the best explanation. Using the specialized tools of criminal investigation — how to evaluate eyewitness testimony, how to detect the marks of an eyewitness account, how to weigh circumstantial evidence, and how to identify when a "coincidence" becomes a pattern — Wallace makes the case that the Gospel accounts are historically reliable and that the Resurrection is the most reasonable explanation of the available evidence.
View Discussion GuideAnother Gospel?
by Alisa Childers
In Another Gospel?, worship leader and apologist Alisa Childers recounts the unsettling journey that began when she started attending a "think tank" class led by a pastor who described himself as a "hopeful agnostic." Week by week, the doctrines she had held since childhood — the authority of Scripture, the reality of hell, the exclusivity of salvation through Christ — were picked apart and reframed. Rather than walking away from faith, Childers committed to investigating the claims of progressive Christianity with rigorous honesty, and she emerged with a faith that was not just preserved but rebuilt on firmer ground. The book is both a personal memoir and a careful theological examination of the key ways progressive Christianity diverges from historic, orthodox Christianity — covering the nature of Scripture, the meaning of the gospel, the character of God, the reality of sin, hell, and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ.
View Discussion GuideMore Than a Carpenter
by Josh McDowell
More Than a Carpenter by Josh McDowell is one of the most widely read apologetics books ever written, with more than eight million copies in print worldwide. Originally written for skeptics and seekers, the book grew out of McDowell's own journey from hostile critic of Christianity to convinced believer. His central thesis is straightforward and urgent: Jesus of Nazareth cannot be dismissed as merely a great moral teacher or an inspiring historical figure. The evidence — from his own claims, from history, from the testimony of transformed lives — demands a verdict. Either Jesus is exactly who he said he was, Lord and God in human flesh, or he is something far darker. This book exists to help readers think clearly and honestly about that choice.
View Discussion GuideI Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist
by Norman L. Geisler & Frank Turek
I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek makes a bold and counterintuitive claim: it takes more faith to reject God than to believe in Him. Beginning with the broadest philosophical questions — Does truth exist? Does God exist? — and narrowing all the way to the specific claims of Christianity, Geisler and Turek build a cumulative case for the rationality of the Christian faith. They argue that the evidence from science, philosophy, history, and archaeology points unmistakably toward a Creator God who has spoken through the Bible and entered human history in the person of Jesus Christ. Far from being a leap in the dark, Christian faith is, in their view, the most reasonable conclusion a thinking person can reach.
View Discussion GuideThe Reason for God
by Timothy Keller
Timothy Keller's The Reason for God is both a dismantling of the most common objections to Christian faith and a positive case for why belief in the God of the Bible is not only intellectually respectable but compelling. Keller, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, spent years listening to the doubts of educated, thoughtful skeptics in one of the most secular cities in America. The result is a book structured in two halves: the first six chapters engage the strongest objections to Christianity head-on — suffering, exclusivity, hell, the reliability of the Bible, the problem of a "repressive" church, and the apparent incompatibility of science and faith. The second half then builds a constructive case for the Christian faith, arguing that the human hunger for meaning, morality, justice, and beauty all point toward a God who is really there.
View Discussion GuideThe Problem of Pain
by C.S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis wrote The Problem of Pain in 1940 at the request of Ashley Sampson, who wanted a layman's defense of Christian faith in the face of suffering. Lewis — who had once been an atheist and cited pain as his chief argument against God — brings remarkable intellectual honesty to his task. The book's central thesis is that a world without pain would not be a world of unchallenged comfort, but a world incapable of producing genuine virtue, love, or knowledge of God. Far from being evidence against God's goodness, suffering is reframed as the instrument through which an omnipotent and loving God pursues our deepest good — our surrender, our humility, and ultimately our joy in Him. Lewis does not offer cheap comfort; he offers a rigorous and compassionate argument that invites the reader to reconsider what "good" and "love" really mean when predicated of God.
View Discussion GuideOrthodoxy
by G.K. Chesterton
G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy (1908) is one of the most unusual and delightful works of Christian apologetics ever written. Rather than arguing for Christianity from the outside, Chesterton traces the personal, almost accidental journey by which he came to discover that the philosophy he had been slowly constructing for himself — out of fairy tales, a sense of wonder, disgust at modern pessimism, and a love for paradox — turned out to be nothing other than orthodox Christianity. As he puts it with characteristic wit, "I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before." The book is not a systematic theology; it is a kind of intellectual autobiography, a series of vivid mental pictures that together make a cumulative case that Christian orthodoxy is the one creed large enough, strange enough, and paradoxical enough to fit the actual shape of human life.
View Discussion GuideMere Christianity
by C.S. Lewis
Mere Christianity began as a series of BBC radio talks delivered by C. S. Lewis during World War II, when the nation desperately needed a clear, confident articulation of the Christian faith. Lewis — a former atheist and Oxford don — was uniquely suited for the task. His goal was not to argue for any particular denomination, but to lay out the common hall of Christian belief that all major traditions share: the "mere Christianity" of his title. The book moves in four parts, from the universal moral law as evidence for God, to the nature of God and humanity's problem, to the person and work of Christ, and finally to the practical challenge of becoming the kind of person God designed you to be.
View Discussion GuideApologetics Studies — Questions Leaders Ask
- How many Apologetics study guides are there?
- 17 guides right now, listed above, out of 202 in the library. Each one is written for a specific published book: a reading, discussion questions, and a closing prayer for every week of it. Browse the whole library →
- How long does a study take?
- Apologetics guides run 9 to 29 weeks, one meeting a week, and each week has its own reading, discussion questions, and closing prayer. Groups that meet every other week or take a break for the holidays simply spread the same weeks further apart. Put your meetings on real dates →
- Can we read part of a guide before we pay?
- Yes. Week 1 of every guide is free — no card and no account. Three of its discussion questions sit right on the guide's page for anyone to read, and the rest of Week 1 opens as soon as you tell us where to send it. Browse the guides →
- What does a guide cost?
- Two ways to pay. This Guide Only is $29 once for the book you pick, and never renews. Leader's Year is $79 a year for every guide in the library — $59 for your first year with code FALL2026, then it renews at $79 a year unless you cancel. There is a 30-day money-back guarantee on the year (with 2 or fewer guides downloaded) and 30 days on a single guide. See both options →
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- We write it. Tell us the title and the author, and the guide is usually ready within about five minutes — we email you the link the moment it is done. Leader's Year includes 3 on-request books a year and $9 for each one after that; This Guide Only covers the single book you name. Ask for a book →
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- Yes. Download the guide as a PDF to print for the table, or send your group a read-only link. One membership covers everyone who shows up — there is no per-person fee and no seat limit.