Nearly 5,000 Attend Apologetics Conference at Prestonwood Baptist Church

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The Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, hosted a Christian apologetics conference last week, attracting nearly 5,000 attendees from over 20 states. 

"I believe we're on the vanguard of a new movement of Christian thinkers that the church has never seen before, and it has me so optimistic,” Johnston, who serves as Prestonwood's Associate Pastor of Apologetics and Cultural Engagement, told The Christian Post.

The conference, titled the Biblical Worldview Conference (BWC), is billed as the nation’s largest apologetics event and has been led by Johnston in the past 3 years. During that time, the conference went from just having students from Prestonwood Christian Academy (PCA) to drawing students from 17 other schools, as well as homeschool groups, co-ops, and others from across the nation.

"It began as something we just wanted to do to equip our own Christian students, where we actually closed down classes for two days," he told CP. "We talked to them about the trending questions they had."

Featured speakers at this year's conference included Prestonwood Senior Pastor Jack Graham, author J. Warner Wallace, YouTubers Melissa Dougherty and Ruslan KD, and Trinity Broadcasting Network host Erick Stakelbeck.

Johnston said he told speakers to deliver a concise message so that students would learn to deliver their own short-form presentations of the Gospel to others, to a generation that grew up on TikTok and Snapchat.

"I need them to give me their best message in 20 minutes or less," he said. "We've got to get better at sharing why we believe what we believe in shorter increments. We don't have time. … We have to be more effective in those organic moments when we're having coffee together and give a two-minute truth bomb that changes your life."

Overall, Johnston contended that effective communication does not have to come at the expense of biblical truth.

"How do we give quick, crisp answers — not sound bites, but substantiated — and say it quickly and effectively?" he said. "That's what I'm trying to do in this conference."

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Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer and content creator. He is a contributing writer for CrosswalkHeadlines and the host of the For Your Soul Podcast, a podcast devoted to sound doctrine and biblical truth. He holds a Masters of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary.