Dan Paterson

Notable apologist and founder of Questioning Christianity

Dan is the current founder of Questioning Christianity.  He served as an ordained Baptist pastor for 7 years and worked at Malyon College leading the Traverse Centre and lecturing in apologetics. Dan has spoken regularly to audiences across the belief spectrum on how the gospel connects to life’s biggest questions, and on the popular objections to the Christian Faith. He is married to Erin, and with three young sons, Dan loves reading, coffee, movies, the outdoors, and Australian Rules Football.

Elective: Commending Christ

Saturday 21 August 4.00 pm

Given that many Aussies see Christianity as intellectually vacuous and morally suspicious, commending Christ in our post-secular age requires some careful thinking as to faithful and fruitful methods. Taking into account the example of Jesus in Scripture, and what we know from the social science research as to how seculars make decisions, this session is designed to give Christians some practical help in commending Christ.

Resurrecting Humanity

Sunday 22 August 9.00 am

Our final destiny speaks volumes into the purpose of our existence in saeculum (the here and now). Either death is a period or a comma in the sentence of reality. The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, if true, stands as a death knell to a closed materialistic universe. If Jesus did rise from the dead, then our actions in this life carry eternal significance. From the first followers of Jesus the claim has been that Jesus was eschatologically raised from the dead, and the question for our time is whether we have good grounds on which to believe in this resurrection miracle, which would, in turn, be responsible for resurrecting a Christian vision of what it means to be human.