🎓 Costly Conversations

From 14 to 18 July 2026, my brother-in-law Sung and I spent five days in Oxford attending the annual summer school of the Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics. All booked by Sung’s wife, my sister-in-law. I’ve always loved apologetics and followed John Lennox for years, so I gladly took annual leave at work to attend.

A Challenge from Oxford

I first came across Professor John Lennox — emeritus mathematics professor at Oxford, world-renowned Christian apologist, author of dozens of books — back in 2015, while I was finishing my PhD at Yale. After his famous Veritas Forum debate, Professor Lennox came to my church and challenged us to our faces:

Your expertise is world-class, but your Bible knowledge is at Sunday school level. Fix it.

He challenged us to commit to reading all 66 books of the Bible every year and engaging in systematic study. My wife and I took that challenge seriously — following a McCheyne Bible reading plan and building spiritual discipline. We have not looked back since.

St Ebbe’s and “Costly Conversations”

The summer school was held at St Ebbe’s, one of the two leading evangelical churches in central Oxford. Each day ran from morning through afternoon — lectures, seminars, and Q&A sessions packed with rigorous thinking and warm fellowship. The evenings brought us together with participants from every continent for shared meals and conversation. Every morning’s first session and every afternoon’s last were framed by prayer and worship — a well-balanced itinerary that reminded me: apologetics without worship is just clever talking. Prayer is spiritual connection — and disconnection makes even the best arguments empty.

This year’s theme was “Costly Conversations.” We explored in depth the many conversations Jesus had across the four Gospels — especially in John — asking how we might more effectively share Jesus and defend the Christian faith in today’s fractured society.

What I Learned

Three lessons came home to me.

First: listen before you answer. When an unbeliever or someone of another faith asks you a question, do not rush to answer it. First listen. Discern the whole person behind the question. Ask further questions to understand them better. Identify the longing or the fear hidden beneath their first question. And lead them to Jesus.

Second: the Bible is food for your soul before it is a tool for apologetics. The sanctification of our faith happens in the church, not in the debate hall. We defend the faith best when we are saturated with it.

Third: I resolved, right there, to change my quiet time. During my Bible reading and prayer, I will not move straight from Scripture into prayer. I will set aside at least five minutes to meditate on the passage — to sit still and listen for the voice of the Holy Spirit. For the fear of the Lᴏʀᴅ is the beginning of wisdom, and wisdom begins with listening.

The Lennox Realization

On Friday, Sung and I nearly had lunch with Professor Lennox. But we had to cancel due to his frail health — he is 82 years old now. That “almost had lunch with John Lennox” episode taught me things I did not expect.

From the morning I could feel my heart racing. Butterflies. Anticipation. And then it struck me, like a quiet hammer:

If meeting one “celebrity” — in the world of Christian apologetics — thrills me this much, where is that same thrill at meeting the Creator God every day through His Word and in prayer?

I had much to repent of.

There Are No Ordinary People

The second realization cut deeper. I realised I needed to treat every other participant with the same regard and esteem as I was lavishing on Professor Lennox. I was reminded of C.S. Lewis, preaching The Weight of Glory just up the road at St Mary’s in 1941, who said:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses.

His point: no one we meet is a mere mortal. The dullest, most unremarkable person we talk to is on a trajectory toward one of two eternal destinations — a creature who, if we could see them as they will one day be, we would be tempted either to worship or to recoil from.

The real weight of glory in that room was not concentrated at the lectern. It was distributed across a hundred chairs around 20 round tables — the Singaporean couple with five grown-up children, the South African businessman attending for the second time with his grown-up daughter, the American on a decade-long self-taught journey of apologetics.

The Real Highlight

The highlight of the week, I now see, was exactly that: conversations with brothers and sisters from every continent. Contact details exchanged. Co-labourers found who will hold one another up as partners in the gospel until Jesus returns.

There are no ordinary people. And there were none in that room. I look forward to seeing how God will work through these connections.

Oxford Itself

The other highlight was Oxford itself — the city and the university. My sister-in-law had thoughtfully booked us affordable rooms in the Lincoln College dormitories, so every morning and evening we could savour the quiet Oxford streets. On Tuesday, the first day, we joined a tour of Oxford’s Christian history and had a formal hall dinner in a college hall. On Thursday, under glorious weather, we went punting at Magdalen College.

Thanks be to God.