Atheists Finding God -- The Research, Writings, and Conversations of Jana Harmon
Unlikely Stories of Conversions to Christianity in the Contemporary West
Atheists Finding God — An Important Topic for Christian Churches and Denominations
Atheists Finding God is PhD- based research, a book, a recent article on Christianity Today, and a podcast. Most important, it is an essential conversation which Christian churches, denominations, and networks must have as it has to do with the prime directive of sharing the Good News of Jesus and making disciples.
It is crucial information as many Christians have no idea how to have a helpful conversation about faith and spirituality with atheists. Christians typically only know how to have a faith and spirituality conversation with people from a churched-culture.
Throughout my life I hate it when people say things like what I am getting ready to say, but I am going to say it anyway — Anyone interested in being an authentic witness to people who are so far from God that they identify as an atheist ought to look into this material. Do it today!
To access the richness of this information, knowledge, and wisdom will take some effort on your part.
Click HERE to listen to Jana’s FREE podcast called Side B Stories: How Skeptics Flip the Record of their Lives. (This is likely a great place to start and hear the actual stories of atheists who have become Christians.)
Click HERE to see the Christianity Today article. (It may require you to be an online subscriber.) From the Christianity Today article — “Christians rejoice when atheists give their lives to Christ, but typically we only see the end result. Unless we know the skeptic personally, we rarely get a detailed picture of what brought about an openness to faith. In Atheists Finding God: Unlikely Stories of Conversions to Christianity in the Contemporary West, C. S. Lewis Institute teaching fellow and Side B Stories podcast host Jana S. Harmon presents findings from her conversations with 50 atheists who came to faith. Christopher Reese, editor of The Worldview Bulletin, spoke with Harmon about her research and its implications for sharing the gospel with skeptics.”
Click HERE to see the book on Amazon.com. (Be prepared for “sticker shock”. The print book costs $100 and the Kindle edition is $45.) From Amazon’s overview — “In a Western culture of increasing skepticism towards conservative Christianity, what motivates intellectually-driven atheists to believe in the reality of God and become passionate followers of Christ? Review of social science literature confirms a predominant functional approach to religious conversion, effectively reducing a complex, substantive phenomenon to a partial functional explanation. In response, the chief focus of this book is to take a broader look at religious conversion to determine the precursors and pathways from atheistic disbelief to belief in God and Christianity within an educated population.
Findings are drawn from PhD-based research evaluating a broad range of functional and substantive variables influencing religious conversion. Data was collected through both survey and interview of fifty educated, skeptical atheists in the contemporary West who once held belief God and Christianity as implausible, unattractive, and irrelevant. Yet, they became utterly convinced that the Christian faith was true and good, worth personal life commitment.
These former atheists not only experienced a change of their worldview, but also a dramatic transformation of their ‘whole world.’ In-depth narrative analysis revealed the integrated, transformative nature of religious conversion in areas of sense-making, identity, experience, meaning and purpose, community, language, and spirituality. Overall, this book advances the case for using an inclusive, transformational perspective in future description, conception, and modeling for religious conversion of atheists to conservative forms of Christianity.”