EQUIP conference challenges 200 youth to speak and live the truth

JACKSON, Tenn. — Today’s culture is a modern Babylon where Christians can feel like exiles, but they are still called to be faithful, Erik Reed told a group of 200 high school students Sept. 12.

“The church of God, the household of God, the people of God, are called to be a pillar and a buttress of the truth,” said Reed, lead pastor of Journey Church in Lebanon, Tennessee. “We support the truth. We uphold the truth. We fight for and contend for the truth.”

Reed was the keynote speaker for the fifth annual EQUIP Youth Apologetics Conference at Union University, sponsored by Union’s School of Theology and Missions and the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board. The conference teaches high school students apologetics to help them navigate cultural challenges with biblical knowledge.

Ted Kluck, associate professor of communication arts at Union, also led a session.

Joel Harvey, pastor to students and families at First Baptist Church in Jackson, Tennessee, attended the conference with his youth group.

“We as Christians need to understand the times and then know how to live within them,” Harvey said. “I love the focus on teaching our students what culture looks like, how we as Christians are to defend what the Bible says.”

Reed stressed the importance of speaking truth if Christians are to be faithful and effective in today’s culture.

“People will not turn from sin and turn from destruction if they do not hear,” he said. “And how will they hear somebody who doesn’t share? We have to speak truth. We have to raise our voices and be willing to declare not just that Jesus died for sinners and rose again on the third day. We also need to declare all that is true from God’s word.”

Reed also stressed that Christians must live out what they believe.

“Let me tell you what’s the most damaging thing we can do: claim one thing out of our mouth, and live something different,” Reed said.

Reed argued that Christians need not just to know the truth but to embody it. A life focused on Christ and what the Bible encourages will look countercultural.

But most importantly, Reed said, Christians need to be a refuge. They must look different, but that doesn’t mean they have to be combative.

“Christians and churches need to recognize that as time passes, as more and more people embrace the laws of our culture, over time, many are going to seek and flee the emptiness and the destruction of those laws and that culture,” he said. “When they come looking for help and hope out of that world, the church has to be prepared for that.”

Reed ended by echoing the purpose of the EQUIP conference.

“We want to reach the next generation, because whoever wants them most is going to get them,” he said. “And the world around us is discipling. There’s no neutral. So, if we’re not counter-discipling, we will lose the next generation. If we’re not combating the ideas that are being sold on social media and in the music that they hear, and in the movies and the TV shows that they watch … they will conform to the laws of the culture.”