New Saturday-night service enjoys full house

Christ Community Church's new Saturday-night worship service blasted out of the gate yesterday with a full house, with legendary Christian author and apologeticist Lee Strobel as the main event.

Strobel, who is promoting a new book, "The Case for the Real Jesus," was interviewed by the Rev. Jim Nicodem in lieu of a sermon at the large Protestant congregation in St. Charles. He will talk again at services at 9 and 11 a.m. Today at Crane and Bolcum roads. The interview was taped and will be shown at services next weekend at the DeKalb church campus and its Blackberry Creek outpost near Aurora.

In a 50-minute interview, Strobel spoke mostly about how he stopped being an atheist and came to be a Christian. He also told why he wrote his latest book.

"We live in a culture where it is open season on Jesus right now,'" he said.

Strobel, an ex-newspaper reporter and editor, believes the Christian faith should be able to withstand the rigor of close intellectual, reason-based scrutiny, not just emotional responses. "I do have a natural curiousity. I'm a bit of a skeptic, a cynic ... I'm just a person who wants to know why," he told the crowd of 2,000-plus.

As an atheist, Strobel was shocked when his wife, an agnostic, announced she'd become a Christian. He began investigating Christianity much as he did his newspaper articles, to persuade her to drop it. "I'm going to go get her out of this cult she's in," is what he thought, he told the crowd. Two years of study later, he was convinced: There really was a God, he had a son called Jesus Christ, and that son had died for Strobel's sin and risen from the dead.

His intellectual doubts centered around his love of science -- could it prove or disprove God's existence -- and whether Jesus had really existed and done what the Bible says Jesus did.

Strobel's latest book delves into six challenges to Christianity that he thinks the church is facing more frequently these days:

1.That scholars are finding a radically different Jesus in ancient documents that are as credible as the four Gospels, such as the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas

2.That you can't trust the Bible because the Church tampered with the text, both accidentally and purposefully

3.New explanations refute the resurrection

4.Christianity's beliefs about Jesus were copied from pagan religions

5.That Jesus was an impostor who failed to fulfill the Messianic prophecy

6.People should be free to pick and choose what to believe about Jesus.

Rather than disparaging people who raise these points, Strobel believes they have to be addressed respectfully.

"They (the challenges) are worthy of consideration and we should try to respond to them," he said.

He also reassured the crowd that it is OK to have doubts about Christianity, if it spurs them to investigate further.

Alan Kosinski of Elgin, who has been attending Christ Community for about three years, said Strobel's message really connected with him, especially when Strobel talked about how things like abuse or parental alienation can shape a person's belief in God. And as for challenges from non-churchgoers, he says the reaction is mostly positive, not negative, when co-workers see him carrying his Bible.

Chris Campbell of Elgin pointed out that Strobel, of course, "obviously comes from a Christian standpoint. I happen to believe the same thing he does. I think the truth is evident" As for friends or relatives who don't believe? "They haven't looked into it," he said, shaking his head. Raised in a church-going family (his grandfather was a minister), he rebelled in his teens. But he came back.

"Because it is the truth, and I knew it (the rebellion) was wrong," he said.