This book had me at ‘hello’ - Mama Bear Apologetics! What a title! And what an appealing premise: how can we be like a mumma bear and defend our little ones by encouraging them to challenge cultural lies, to do apologetics - aka defend the faith with reasons and evidence (p37). For a mum, dad, aunt, Sunday School teacher - who doesn’t want to be able to do that!

Section 1 of this book sets up the framework of how to be a ‘mama bear’ and it has lots of helpful things to say, saying them as it does in a distinctly American twang. Some personal highlights for me: 

• The importance of not just taking a ‘whack-a-mole’ approach to apologetics by running through answers to difficult questions about the Christian faith. Rather it’s better to examine the world views sitting behind questions and equip our kids to identify and engage with them with discernment. 

• The responsibility of parents to disciple our kids not just ‘outsource’ it to church, camps etc - haven’t we felt that this year!  

• The encouragement to start early in asking kids for the reasons behind what they believe so that we are equipping them to not just have ‘blind’ faith but a thought out approach. 

• The role of humility, honesty and humour (this was something new for me to think about!) in defending what we believe. 

Chapter 3 was my favourite chapter in this section. I really appreciated its warning against being what we might call ‘Christian-helicopter parents’. Ferrer encourages us to resist labelling media or other influences as ‘safe/dangerous’ or ‘Christian/non-Christian’ and blocking influences in a black and white fashion (p49). Rather than fearing false messages let’s equip ourselves and others to be discerning, to ‘chew and spit’ as she puts it. That is, training the little people in our lives to discern the message behind what they’re hearing, to latch onto the good and ‘spit out’ the bad.

But here’s my confession. I actually signed up to review this book in March but I couldn’t pull it off. Something about reading this book just when our new Covid-reality was really ramping up was more than I could handle. I had to put it down. And not just because it was ‘one thing too many’. I’ve been trying to put my finger on my difficulty to engage with the book ever since and I think it’s this: I think part 1 of this book under-emphasises some key truths and that ended up heightening a feeling I had of being under siege. Did you feel like that in March? Like the world was closing in on you a bit?

I think this book, in it’s eagerness to empower us in apologetics, could have done more to strike the right balance between our role and God’s sovereignty in salvation. In particular I’d have loved to have seen more discussion on:

The centrality of God’s role (rather than ours) in preserving our kids’ faith 

The centrality of the gospel (rather than apologetics) in preserving our kids’ faith

The centrality of God’s role (rather than ours) in preserving our kids’ faith. 

The preservation of believers and perseverance of believers are two sides of the one coin. The apostle Paul pressed on, strained on, towards the goal of the new creation ‘to take hold of that for which Christ took hold of [him]’ (Philippians 3:12-14). And when he considered the future of the Philippian Christians, he prayed with joy because he had confidence that God ‘who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion under the day of Christ’ (Philippians 1:6). People keep being Christian by God enabling them, by his Spirit, to keep deciding to follow Jesus. 

At times, I think this book would benefit from explaining God’s role in salvation in more depth. The strong images which compare teaching a child apologetics to pulling them out from in front of a bulldozer (p16) or from white-water rapids (p36), the statistics of youth leaving the church for ‘totally preventable’ reasons (p22) made me feel a burden being placed on me to spiritually save my kids. The authors do serve us well in reminding us of our responsibility to love and disciple the little people in our lives. But it is worth being clear that the burden of their salvation is not on our shoulders. They are responsible to God for their decisions and we pray that he would be gracious to them, just as he is to us.

The centrality of the gospel (rather than apologetics) in preserving our kids’ faith. 

The authors are very passionate about apologetics and their efficacy to protect us and our little ones as we follow Jesus. At times it seems that this comes at the cost of how central the gospel is in this task. The opening illustration, for example, tells of a situation of a mum finding out ‘her baby’s eternal destiny was in the balance! What else could a Mama Bear do?’ She taught herself apologetics to share with her teenager (p16). At several point in this section, I wonder if the implicit argument was that the best thing we can do to ‘keep our kids in the church’ is to teach them apologetics. But this can’t be right can it? The best thing to do is to keep teaching them the gospel, in all it’s richness and dimensions, and so leading them to Jesus. 

Apologetics do have a role in removing obstacles, perhaps bolstering our confidence or our evangelism. Our faith is not blind. It is based on evidence and arguments that are cohesive and correspond to how the world really is. In God’s kindness, there are endless arguments and evidences we can give that show the integrity and robustness of Christianity as a belief system. But it is not such arguments and evidences which ultimately save or ‘keep saved’. It is Jesus. Jesus invites us to ‘remain in me, as I also remain in you’ (John 15:4). We remain with Jesus by remaining in the love he showed us at the cross (John 15:9). 

I don’t doubt that the authors would shout a hearty “amen” to all this. For instance, they do flag that we need to build on Christ as our foundation (p25)  and that truth will lead us to the cross (41). I just wish they had walked through this more explicitly. But there is no denying that these authors have skin in the game and runs on the board in seeking to defend the faith. I have lots to learn from them.

Flicking through section 2, it looks like there is some great diagnosis of different cultural lies, which I’m really keen to get stuck into so I’m looking forward to sharing that with you in the upcoming blogs.  

This book had me at ‘hello’. I think there’s a good chance it’ll have me at ‘goodbye’, but I have to confess there were some topics I’d wished we’d talked about more in the middle. Often its the things that ‘go without saying’ that are the ones really worth being said. 

Meet Annabel Nixey

Annabel was born and bred in Sydney, but now lives in Canberra. Her husband Simon is a minster at Crossroads Church. Annabel is a regular speaker at EQUIP women and conferences around Australia, and an occasional blogger at our EQUIP Book Club and the Australian Church Record.