2017 Conference
‘The toughest questions’
The third Equipped317 conference, on 24 June, was a great success, attended by over 200 people with all three three sessions from Pete Williams, Principal of Tyndale House in Cambridge. The children enjoyed activities during each session and musicians from Caterham Baptist Church supported the singing. The venue was again Eastgate which was superb with all its facilities and easy access. See below for some quotes from the day (from the feedback forms), details of the speaker, the talks and a photo gallery. Follow this link for a brief article about Equipped317 in August 2016 Evangelicals Now (but note the date of the conference is incorrectly stated as 10 July).
On the right, under ‘Download Talks’ the three talks can be downloaded or streamed as mp3 files for playing on your computer or mp3 player. Because of the different ways different browsers respond to audio files, the method to download or stream (playing through your browser or audio player) may be different for your system, but if you click on the link, it will hopefully play through the browser or audio player or if you right-click and choose ‘save linked file as’, it will hopefully download the mp3 file.
‘Brilliant Speaker, Relevant Topic and titles. PRAISE GOD!!’
‘Kindly keep the good work going.’
‘A lot of helpful material to digest & absorb.’
‘It all makes sense - very lucid speaker.’
‘An excellent day. Thanks very much.’
‘Very good venue, well run. Cheap! (i.e. very good value) THANK YOU VERY MUCH.’
‘The children's work was a real bonus. The whole day was excellent.’
‘Never a dull moment. The pace was fierce but kept one's mind alert because of it. Lunch good. Not enough seating.’
‘Very well structured, lovely biscuits thank you!’
Pete Williams
Attacks on God’s word have a long history: ‘Did God say?’ (Genesis 3:1). They remain a favourite way to intimidate Christians today and question God’s character. Some of the toughest questions arise from the moral teaching of Scripture and its historical claims. This year’s conference will equip you to respond to such attacks and provide reasons why you can trust what God has written, rightly understanding what the Scriptures claim to be.
Session 1: ‘It’s not fair.’
The first session will deal with the common objection that the Old Testament shows God promoting lots of violence including genocide and generally that he’s a mean character. We will also respond to the objection that the Bible is full of things we find unfair such as slavery and sexism.
Session 2: ‘It’s not true.’
People today think that there’s no evidence for Scripture being historically true. In this session we will show that in fact some of the biblical accounts have been amazingly confirmed by archaeology and that people’s doubts today about the historical credibility of Scripture are not because they lack evidence.
Session 3: ‘It’s not God’s word.’
In the final session we explore how Christians understand the Scriptures to be fully God’s word. Though our doctrine of the Scriptures has many different aspects, these cannot be separated from the Scriptures’ central claims about the person of Jesus, which have many lines of supporting evidence.
Peter J. Williams, did his MA, MPhil and PhD at Cambridge University on ancient languages to do with the Bible. He was a Senior Lecturer in New Testament in Aberdeen and is now Principal of Tyndale House in Cambridge, a world-leading research centre on the Bible with the UK’s best library of the Bible. He is also on the translation committee of the English Standard Version of the Bible and Chair of the International Greek New Testament Project. He’s been married to Kathryn for 20 years and they have a daughter and a son.
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