Helping Students Engage Faith and Culture
In this episode, Mikel Del Rosario talks with Brett Kunkle about helping Christian students engage their faith and cultural issues, focusing on how they learn and apply apologetics training in conversations.
Timecodes
- 01:20
- Kunkle’s background
- 04:20
- How MAVEN equips students
- 06:06
- How immersive trips spark motivation
- 11:50
- How MAVEN uses curriculum and video training
- 14:40
- Top questions that puzzle Christian students
- 21:59
- What is the primary purpose of the New Testament church?
- 24:44
- Evaluating music and movies from a biblical worldview
Resources
Book by John Stonestreet and Brett Kunkle: Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today’s World
Book by John Stonestreet and Brett Kunkle, A Student’s Guide to Culture
The MAVEN Parent Podcast: Our Beautiful Messy Journey Into Parenting on Apple Podcasts
Book by J. P. Moreland: The Lost Virtue of Happiness: Discovering the Disciplines of the Good Life
Transcript
Mikel Del Rosario:
Welcome to The Table. Well, where we discuss issues of God and culture. I'm Mikel Del Rosario, Cultural Engagement Manager here at the Hendrick Center at Dallas Theological Seminary. And our topic on The Table podcast today is helping students engage faith and culture. And my guest on the show today, coming to us from sunshiny California, is that correct? Is Brett Kunkle.
Brett Kunkle:
Yes, it is very sunshiny right now. In fact, it should be a beach day, but I sacrificed for you Mikel.
Mikel Del Rosario:
Well, I appreciate that. You're in SoCal, right?
Brett Kunkle:
Yeah, we're in Orange County, the heart of Southern California.
Mikel Del Rosario:
All right. Yep. Our old stomping grounds to a ministry there in Orange County, a little Saigon area. Lots of time on Huntington beach, Disneyland. So I appreciate your sacrifice.
Brett Kunkle:
Anything for the Lord's kingdom, right?
Mikel Del Rosario:
That's right. Well, Brett is the founder of Maven, but Brett, I actually first learned about your ministry through your time at Stand to Reason, working with Greg Kokel. So tell us how you got into working with youth and apologetics and then eventually into launching MAVEN.
Brett Kunkle:
Yeah, well, I was able to be raised in the church. My dad was a marginal Lutheran, wasn't a believer growing up. My mom is Vietnamese, she was culturally Buddhist, they got married and didn't go to church, weren't believers and then when I was 10 months old, they got saved. So they were on fire for the Lord, raised me in the church, me and my brothers. And so, had just some really healthy experiences growing up in the church and had a youth pastor when I was in eighth grade, who I met, who was a very huge mentor in my life. And he really discipled me right into youth ministry. So as a junior in high school, I had made a decision to go into full-time vocational ministry. And so, I was doing stuff with youth, did a couple internships, but it was my freshman year in college that I went to a community college in Southern California, took a philosophy 101 class.
Brett Kunkle:
And that's where I met Dr. David Lane. And he proceeded over the course of that semester to dismantle my faith. And so, just sent me on this major episode of doubt and asking questions. And that's really when I discovered the life of the mind, discovered apologetics and it helped take that season of doubt and rebuild my faith into a much stronger faith. And I just thought as going into youth work, "Okay, the kids that I'm mentoring and discipling and leading as a junior high pastor at the time, these kids in four or five years are going to be in the same situation I was." And I had grown up for the first 18 years of my life in the church and had not got the training and the preparation I needed to encounter someone like David Lane. And so, I thought, "Gosh, our young people need this."
Brett Kunkle:
And so, I just started teaching apologetics to junior highers when I was a junior high pastor at my church. And just through about 11 years in local church ministry doing high school ministry, doing junior high ministry, doing college ministry just saw the vital need. And then eventually, joined up with my friends at Stand to Reason and spent 14 years there as a student impact director really pouring into youth, youth ministry, parents. And then eventually, three years ago launched MAVEN to even expand that work, so that's how I got into this.
Mikel Del Rosario:
Wow. So you understand the importance of translation where you're taking a William Lane Craig book and bringing it down to where it can help anyone in the church, especially we're talking about students, even down to junior high. Such an important ministry. So tell us about the different things that MAVEN does.
Brett Kunkle:
Well, we have three specific things that we do. One is our virtual training. So there are different things that we do along those lines, like livestream events on our YouTube channel or our Facebook page. One of the central pieces is our MAVEN Parent podcast, because what we are finding is that so many parents just feel ill equipped to parent in such a secular culture. And there are just so many challenges that are coming at them so fast and so furious. So my wife and I do this MAVEN Parent podcast weekly where we're trying to help really give parents maybe a worldview approach to parenting, you could call it. Where it's not just the here are the three practical steps to discipline your kid or here are the three practical things to help your kid navigate doubt or something like that.
Brett Kunkle:
The practical stuff is good. But what we try to do is wed the ideas or the world view with the practical. And so, we want to think carefully about these challenges, about the nature of parenting, about the nature of humanity and let our theology, our Christian worldview, our scripture really inform how we parent, how we even view the whole enterprise of parenting. So the podcast is a huge part of our virtual training. Then we do some live events. We have an annual MAVEN Conference for adults in Southern California every year. We have a student conference as well that we've partnered with some churches on. And so, those are our live events. Of course, my wife and I speak as well, so there's that.
Brett Kunkle:
And then the third thing that we do is what we call immersive experiences. And we have three immersive experiences that we do through Maven for high school and college students.
Brett Kunkle:
And we have an apologetics trip, a biblical trip, and then a worldview trip. And we take each of those categories and we create this live experience for students where it's no longer just sitting in a classroom or reading a book. It's now taking this content, this truth, and seeing how it works out in real life. So when we go to, let's say, Berkeley, for instance, when we do our Apologetics Immersive Experience. We will bring out atheists to challenge kids' faith, so they learn how to deal with those challenges. We will go on to UC Berkeley's campus and they'll talk to skeptical Berkeley students about moral issues, religious issues, spiritual issues. And we just put them in all kinds of situations where they get challenged and they get motivated to really know what they believe, why they believe it and why it matters. And so, that's a huge part of what we do at Maven.
Mikel Del Rosario:
That's awesome. Yeah, we can talk a little bit more about those trips in a minute. But the people listening to this podcast are just the people that you had mentioned. So not only pastors, youth pastors who are training students, helping them to be equipped to talk about their faith with people who see Christianity differently, but also parents, grandparents, anybody really who has an influence on a child, a young person in their life, which arguably, is almost everybody who knows a teenager, knows a young person, and can really benefit from the ministry that you do and from what we're going to talk about.
Mikel Del Rosario:
So we've heard about these trips quite a lot on thetable, actually. We've heard Sean McDowell talk about them. We've heard J. Warner Wallace, Jim, talk about them. And each of them was like, "If you haven't had Brett on the show yet, you need to have Brett on the show." And I've been trying to get Brett on the show, so I'm glad you're here today. But you mentioned how just what a motivating thing this is for the students. Is that the key you think to get students motivated to learn, to dive into these tough questions is actually to put them in those real life, everyday conversations with skeptics?
Brett Kunkle:
Yeah, I think that's part of the key, especially when they are high school students. As I think about just the nature of education and I think one thing that's informed my view and my wife's view about education is the classical approach. Where you have this three part process of training the mind and you've got the grammar stage, which is the elementary age, you've got the logic stage where you're teaching kids really then how to think. But then that fourth stage, which is typically high school is the rhetoric stage and that's where he in education, you're helping them articulate. You're helping them to take the facts and the truth, put it together with good, reasonable thinking and then articulate arguments and articulate the truth.
Brett Kunkle:
And I think that's a real missing piece in a lot of our discipleship with young people. And it is one of the key ways that you can motivate a young person. Now, when you take, I've seen it time and time again, when we take a young person on these trips and so, our biblical trip, we focus on theology and scripture, and we take students to Salt Lake City, Utah, and we just put them in situations where they have to talk to Mormons. And I have seen students go out and maybe talk to a Mormon who seems to know their Bible way better than the students. And really, in one sense, just owns the kid, if you will, right? In student language, they get owned. And they come back, and of course, sometimes they might get discouraged by that. And so, we encourage them, but what we try to help them do is help them see, "Well, what does that reveal?"
Brett Kunkle:
It reveals that you don't know the scriptures, you don't know Christian truth, maybe not as well as you thought you did. And for almost all the students, this becomes motivation because they know we're going to go out and talk to more Mormons the next day. So I don't have to tell them what to do. They go find their books, they go find the training books that we've used, they go get the Book of Mormon out or whatever, the Mormon scriptures, and then they do their homework and they research and they prep, and then they ask questions. And they're so teachable at that point because they know that they're going back out. And so, I think sometimes with a very, maybe apathetic, comfortable American church and youth groups that just fit that mold as well, one of the best ways to motivate them is put them in those challenging situations.
Brett Kunkle:
In fact, one of my mentors, a mentor to many of us, JP Moreland, he said, I remember him saying, "If you want to grow, purposely put yourself in uncomfortable situations." And so, that's what we're doing. We're purposely putting these kids in uncomfortable situations that ends up motivating growth in them. And it's amazing at the end of these trips, they grow leaps and bounds more than any youth program I have ever seen in my over 25 years of working in youth ministry or with youth ministry. I haven't seen anything this effective.
Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. I used to work for JP, actually. I was an undergrad at Biola. That's part of how I discovered my interest in Christian apologetics was focusing on his Life of Mind class and photocopying things for that at Talbot. Well, you mentioned these trips being a motivating factor when you get people out in front of actual peers, actual other people, but you have some written materials as well that you have to fill out beforehand to generate the need as well. Tell us about the written portion.
Brett Kunkle:
The written portion of the immersive experiences, or?
Mikel Del Rosario:
Yeah.
Brett Kunkle:
Well, one thing that we have put together is what we call a student guidebook. And so, what the guidebook does is it guides them through the whole training process all the way through the trip so that students walk away with a notebook filled with resources. But one of the first things that we do is we have them take an evaluation survey that asks some questions about their biblical knowledge, about their apologetics knowledge. We also ask them questions about rating themselves in terms of their comfort level in sharing the gospel or engaging about a cultural issue. So they fill that out before they ever start the training or the trip. And then we also have them fill that out at the end of it as well after the trip's done, so they can really actually even see their own growth.
Brett Kunkle:
And we'll take students on the biblical immersive experience to Utah and I mean, we're talking solid groups, solid Christian kids, we would say, are committed. And it no longer surprises me how many of those committed Christian kids can't name a single Bible verse from memory that points to one of the great doctrines of Christianity, like the Trinity or salvation by grace through faith. They just don't know where in scripture these things are taught at all. And so, they'll leave those things blank, so that's motivating for them to do something like that, to be tested just on their knowledge. And then we do the training and in the training there's videos they watch, but we require them to read books. There's at least one book that we require per trip, but then they also have to take tests and we require that they score 70% or higher in these short answer tests.
Brett Kunkle:
And if they don't, they have to retake the test and pass with a 70% before they can go on these trips, so that's another way for us to motivate them, also raise that bar. And what we found is that when we raise that bar for young people, that's also motivating as well, because they feel dignified. They don't feel like we're treating them like kids, but they're young adults and we treat them as such. And so, we find that whole training process is very motivating for young people.
Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Now, it probably might differ if you're taking students to Berkeley or to Salt Lake City, but what would you say are the top three to five questions that students come back with? Like, "Well, I was not prepared for that one and I really need to get prepared."
Brett Kunkle:
That's a good question. Top three to five. Well, there's always the relativistic views about truth that young people are trying to navigate. And of course, most people who hold relativistic views will contradict themselves in the very same sentence, the same conversation. So I think learning how to navigate that and get people to understand the nature of objective truth, that's certainly a big one. And that's just so foundational because then that undergirds moral issues and things like that. So I'd say that's a big one.
Brett Kunkle:
I think the problem of pain and suffering is another big one and often, in these conversations, so we go into Berkeley's campus, we've got these, what we call conversational surveys that we've developed. And they're not just simple yes, no questions, but they're open-ended questions.
Brett Kunkle:
So they allow for conversation to develop. And the goal is to get off the survey and to just let the conversation flow, and that's typically what happens. And so, we have students who will sit down and they'll end up talking to a Berkeley student that they just met, and they'll have an hour long conversation. Hour and a half long conversation about life's most important issues, about the gospel. But in those conversations, there's often a personal turn where the person will open up about maybe some pain that they've experienced, and this ended up being an obstacle for them to the gospel or to believe in God. So navigating that as well, I think is a big one.
Brett Kunkle:
And then you'll get your default science-and-faith-are-incompatible kind of questions, but we direct some of that with the questions in terms of topics. We direct it with the questions that we ask, but I'd say maybe those three would be some big ones.
Brett Kunkle:
But you just get so many different ones, because you're just talking to all these different individuals who have different backgrounds and different experiences and different ideas. So one of the things that we really try to help young people do is learn how to think not just give them answers, pat answers to get out there. And when they learn how to think, that really helps them to navigate even challenges that they, maybe, haven't prepared explicitly for.
Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative). Now working with gen Z, this was a generation, it had some of the highest rates of anxiety and depression even pre-COVID. And there can be a lot of despair before they're even willing to go out and talk to other people, to despair about the way the world is right now.
Mikel Del Rosario:
And you wrote a book with John Stonestreet called, A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today's World and the student version as well, called, A Student's Guide to Culture. And I like the idea of, "Don't mistake the moment for the story in there." Unpack that for us, because I think youth pastors and pastors need to understand that concept to begin to engage gen Z at this time especially.
Brett Kunkle:
Yeah, well, often as Christians, we focus on the moment that we're in, right? We live in a particular cultural moment and there are unique cultural challenges. And I think there are a lot of Christians who feel like the cultural challenges right now are at such a degree and intensity and we have to address those of course, but that can be overwhelming when you start looking around the world, you start looking around your culture, you see what's going on and you can despair. And this is where it's so important for us as believers to step back. And I think this is where it's important for us as we disciple our young people. We need to step back and say, "Okay, wait a second. This one singular cultural moment is part of a larger story, right? That starts in Genesis chapter one"
Brett Kunkle:
And then to lay out that story and to give some appropriate context for my life, this particular culture, the challenges that we're facing and see that, "Oh, actually, when we look at the larger story, there's a couple of things that emerge." Number one, Christians have had it a lot worse than we have. We probably have it better off than probably 99% of the Christians who have ever walked this planet. And so, that's a helpful perspective, but also number two, it helps you to realize that God's story, God's truth is continuing to march on, we know how the story ends. And we know that 2,000 years ago that Jesus walked bodily out of a grave and no cultural moment, no cultural challenge will ever be able to put him back in. And so, of all people, we should be the ones who exude hope and this optimism, because we know how the story ends.
Brett Kunkle:
We know that Christ, our king, will come back and will conquer sin and death and will eventually make all things new. He will restore all things. So we live out of that story versus just the particular moment. And that allows us to live with hope because we know that there is a wonderful, amazing, beautiful ending to all this, but it also allows us to live out of hope because it gives us this larger cause to live for.
Brett Kunkle:
And that I think is one of the things that we just see a crisis in our culture is we've become so self absorbed, so nihilistic, so narcissistic and we don't live for anything bigger than ourselves and that is one of the keys to happiness. I mean, it reminds me of JP's book, right? The Lost Virtue of Happiness. And we have seen just such an epidemic of anxiety and depression and loneliness and sadness in our culture. And a lot of it's connected to the fact that people don't have any transcendent cause to live for. And of course, the kingdom of God is that cause.
Mikel Del Rosario:
Yeah, yeah. Even pre-COVID, right? And then COVID has just made it all come to the surface and so much more obvious in the lives of so many people. But to have that hope and really approach our conversations with the gospel is actually good news. And it's to be presented in a positive light and to share that hope, that's something that we can help teenagers be able to do.
Brett Kunkle:
Let me say one more thing about this, because I think this connects back to our trips and why the immersive experience is so powerful. Because if you sit back and you think about it, right? What is the primary purpose of the New Testament church? It's really to live on mission for Jesus. It's the great commission. So we have that cause there. Now let's go back and let's evaluate all of our church programs and church activity. How much is being given to that cause? And as I look at youth ministry, almost zero, oftentimes. And we spend so much time behind the four walls of the church and so, it's kind of like, for any athletes out there, think about spending your time as a benchwarmer the entire season, right? Benchwarmers just are not as committed. They're not as excited or passionate about the game, but when you become a starter and you get on that field, man, it lights you up.
Brett Kunkle:
And even if you get knocked around, then you go back to practice with more focus and attention, so that you can go back out into the game again and even be more effective. And in the same way, we have our young people sitting on the bench for the first 18 years of their life, if not longer. I would say most Christian adults are sitting on the bench. We've got to get in the game. When we get in the game and live our life for the cause of Christ, for the cause of the gospel and we start sharing the gospel with people, it lights us up.
Brett Kunkle:
And I think this is the message of the book of Philippians. The joy is a byproduct of this church and Paul and their partnership and the cause of the gospel. And I think that's why these trips light students up because for many of them, it's the very first time they've ever gone and shared the gospel. And then they're going out day after day, sharing the truth, sharing the gospel, engaging for the cause of Christ and they just get lit up.
Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah. I've seen that as well. I used to be a youth pastor in Alameda, in Northern California. And I was also was a debate coach for a JSA, Junior States of America, when I was at a Christian school. And we would go and debate people on conservative issues. And actually, there was a Catholic school and there was our school and we were the only ones who would debate the conservative side. So everyone hated us, but they were happy that we were there, or else there'd be no one to debate.
Mikel Del Rosario:
But just to get the students talking one-on-one with these people and, and really putting into practice the things that we talk about in the classroom, that's really where it's at.
Mikel Del Rosario:
Well, we talked about helping people engage with faith. Let's talk about culture a little bit in terms of, let's start with entertainment as we engage with music and movies. How do you approach helping young people engage music and movies with a biblical worldview?
Brett Kunkle:
Yeah. Well, really any issue that we're going to take, I think it starts with the larger worldview issue. So sometimes we will approach issues, we'll take them in isolation. So entertainment or social media or gender identity or whatever the hot topic is. And we certainly need to deal with the issue, but first we need to step back and we need to really, I think, ground young people in the larger Christian worldview, and this is where that issue is framed by the larger Christian worldview. So answering questions like, "Where do we come from?" The origin question, or "What does it mean to be human?" The identity question or questions of meaning or morality, or "What happens when I die?" Those all big questions are absolutely vital to frame then dealing with a particular issue like entertainment.
Brett Kunkle:
Because really, unless you can answer the question, wait, who made us and what did he make us for? And what does it mean to be human? You're going to get lost in that issue of entertainment, because you've got to have these bigger worldview questions answered to frame that. How do I approach entertainment? What should I consume? What should I not consume? Well, it depends on how you answer the question, "What it means to be human?" And what's the meaning of life.
Brett Kunkle:
So I think that's the first step. So it's not actually addressing that specific issue. It's building out that framework in which we can answer that issue. So that's why worldview training is just absolutely so vital for our young people. So that's the starting point. And now then I've got this framework where I can start talking about the issue of entertainment and this is where I think we, as Christians need to expand our categories a little bit more.
Brett Kunkle:
We often talk about things in terms of their moral rightness or moral wrongness, which is a very important category. And that would be one of the categories we'd bring to the table and say, "Okay, just the content of the entertainment itself and looking at whether it's in the categories that I talked about with my own kids and that we talk about at MAVEN are those three transcendentals: truth, goodness and beauty, as a way to evaluate the content. Is what this piece of entertainment is, is the message: number one, you discern the message, but then number two, does that message say things that are true? Does it promote goodness? And also, is it a beautiful piece of art? Because Christians are infamous for creating things that are true and have a lot of goodness, but they're just ugly or they're cheesy, right?
Brett Kunkle:
And so, we want to bring all three of those things together in evaluating our entertainment. So there's the content aspect of it and the moral rightness and wrongness and filtering those things and helping young people always to remember that whether they're young or whether you're an adult, you are always shaped by the voices and the culture and the people around you. I mean, there's just no getting away from peer pressure, right? Even if you're an adult, so that's, I think, one way we help young people.
Brett Kunkle:
But then I think we also have to help them with expanding those categories to evaluate and asking whether or not something like entertainment and the modes by which we view entertainment are just neutral, right? So, watching a movie itself is not immoral or moral, we might say it's amoral, right?
Brett Kunkle:
But is the act of watching a movie and how we watch a movie neutral in terms of how it influences us? And so, I think that's one thing we want to talk to our young people about too, is the way that culture now shapes us is by just presenting things as normal. And so, the normal way to watch a piece of entertainment is to put your AirPods in, put your headphones on, plug it into that iPad or that laptop or your smartphone, and then to view something on Netflix, right? And to get young people to think about how different it is today than it once was. So go back 20, 30 years, how did we primarily watch a movie? Well, we maybe called up some friends or go with family members, we'd get in a car, we'd drive to a fixed location called a movie theater.
Brett Kunkle:
We'd go into that movie theater after purchasing our tickets and guess what? There would be other people from the community that would show up that we didn't even know. There'd be a large screen that everybody in the theater could view at the same time, so there's a shared experience. And then afterwards, you typically go to a movie with other people, so then afterwards you're interacting. You might even go out for a meal or go sit around and talk about the movie.
Brett Kunkle:
So very different. Think about the differences between those two different acts. One is very isolating. It actually cuts you off from other people, whereas the other one is more oriented around relationships. One is very private and actually even secretive.
Brett Kunkle:
It can be very secretive, where the other one is public. I might not sit and watch something knowing all these other people are around me. So there's this form of accountability. Versus if I know no one's around, no one can see, I can clear my history, no one will ever know. I might watch things without that kind of accountability that I wouldn't watch otherwise. And so, just the viewing of entertainment is not neutral. The way we watch it today can nudge us in directions, push us in directions that aren't healthy for us. That could really actually harm us. And so, I think that's part of the conversation with young people.
Mikel Del Rosario:
So there's the moral aspect of it and then there's also the cries from the public square portion of it, where you hear what people are saying, what they're thinking, where they're at. And it's a way for us to connect with the culture as well, whether it's you need to calm down or a Marvel movie or the latest Star Wars show or whatever it is, that we can actually take a look at these things and see where people have those universal human longings that are actually being answered by the gospel.
Brett Kunkle:
Oh, absolutely. That's a whole other aspect of it is how do these messages point back to these universal longings that human beings have for truth, goodness, and beauty that ultimately must be grounded in God?
Mikel Del Rosario:
Could you give us an example of maybe one time where you brought a movie in, or a clip into a youth group setting and how to discussion about it?
Brett Kunkle:
Yeah, let's see. What are some of the movie clips I've done before? Well, I like to hold up examples that are not just the bad examples, because I think we as Christians and especially those of us who think about worldview and apologetics, we can sometimes be overly critical. And so, I think we need to teach "the no's", what are the things that we say "no" to, but I also think we need to hold up those things that we can say "yes" to as well.
Brett Kunkle:
And so, one of the examples I love to hold up are Pixar films as examples of things that we can say yes to. If you look at Pixar films, so many of those films have these incredible virtues that get played out on the screen. And so you look at something like Toy Story. Toy Story paints a beautiful picture of friendship and loyalty and sacrifice. What does it mean to be a friend? And I think that's one thing we can hold up.
Brett Kunkle:
I love showing a clip from Up, the first few minutes of Up and how it tells that story of this committed couple, Carl and Ellie, right? And living in just this faithful marriage through the ups and the downs and it just being such a rich picture of God's design for marital love. So I think those are some of the examples I like to hold up for students. Most students have seen Pixar movies, so they resonate with that and it gives a beautiful picture and it's done very well by Pixar studios.
Mikel Del Rosario:
Yes. Well, we are coming to the end of our time together, but before we land the plane, I'd like you tell us what MAVEN actually means, and then how people can connect with you.
Brett Kunkle:
Yeah, well, it's actually a Yiddish word and maven refers to somebody who's knowledgeable or an expert in some field and then seeks to pass that along to other people. And that really describes what our vision is at MAVEN. We want to help not only equip young people to be mavens of truth, so to speak, but we also want to equip parents and grandparents and youth pastors and pastors and Christian educators to be the same and to do the same with their young people. And so, that's why we came up with the name MAVEN, because we want to know what we believe, why we believe it, why it then matters and then pass that on to the next generation.
Mikel Del Rosario:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So how can people connect with you if they're interested, maybe in learning about the trips that you do and getting involved with your ministry?
Brett Kunkle:
Yeah, they can go to our website, which is maventruth.com and find all the information they need about our immersive experiences. They can connect to our online resources there as well, get information about our live conferences and our speaking.
Mikel Del Rosario:
All right. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to be with us, Brett. We really appreciate it.
Brett Kunkle:
Absolutely. Anytime.
Mikel Del Rosario:
And we thank you so much for joining us on thetable today as well. Please do follow us on Apple Podcasts and leave us a review. It really does help people find out more about the podcast and listen and it certainly helps us get this information out to more people. And hey, let's be friends on social. If you want to connect with me, you can add me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. I'm at ApologeticsGuy on all of my socials. I'm Mikel Del Rosario, and I hope that you'll join us next time on The Table where we discuss issues of God and culture.
About the Contributors
Brett Kunkle
Brett Kunkle is the founder and president of MAVEN. He has more than 25 years of experience working with junior high, high school, and college students, as a youth pastor and as the Student Impact Director at Stand to Reason. Brett was an associate editor for the Apologetics Study Bible for Students, wrote the Ambassadors Guide to Mormonism and co-authored A Practical Guide to Culture: Helping the Next Generation Navigate Today’s World. He received his bachelor’s degree in Christian education from Biola University and his master’s degree in philosophy of religion and ethics from Talbot School of Theology.
Mikel Del Rosario
Mikel Del Rosario (ThM, 2016; PhD, 2022) is a Professor of Bible and Theology at Moody Bible Institute. While at DTS, he served as project manager for cultural engagement at the Hendricks Center, producing and hosting The Table podcast. You can find him online at ApologeticsGuy.com, the Apologetics Guy YouTube channel, and The Apologetics Guy Show podcast.