2010 CHRISTIAN WRITING CONTEST

2010 Christian Writing Contest Promotes Evangelizing through Story

Athanatos Christian Ministry's 2010 Christian writing contest is taking applications through February 15th. This is the second of their annual contest and with the addition of a poetry category is set to disburse more than $2,000 in awards, plus publishing the winners in an anthology. Every entrant receives a copy of the anthology for the price of their entry as part of ACM's effort to spur writers on to excellence.

The website for entering and more information is www.christianwritingcontest.com.

Athanatos Christian Ministry is an apologetics organization with a unique emphasis. Rather than only defending the faith through conventional arguments about philosophy, theology, and evidence, ACM understands the role of 'soft' apologetics in touching the human heart.

"Many intellectual objections at bottom are emotional objections," Executive Director Anthony Horvath explains, "but that isn't to say that just because they are emotional they are meritless. For example, Christians are the first to feel sick to their stomachs about the idea that so many people will perish eternally. Like Job, it is easy to say that it is better to have never been born. There are intellectual responses to this but those of us who are parents have already confronted such realities: we have children, knowing for certain that grief and suffering awaits either us or our children on account of the reality of death. We do not conclude there is no point in having children. We see instead that the joy of having them outweighs someone's inevitable sorrow. So, in apologetics we can tap into these experiences that most of us have gone through to help overcome our intellectual objections."

To that end, ACM pursues other avenues to defend the Gospel, like for example through the arts, and literature in particular.

"It is a simple reality that we resonate with a good story and that we are willing to consider new ideas in the course of receiving that story. A Christian author doesn't even have to explicitly present the Gospel in order to advance aspects of the Christian world view or tackle objections," Horvath says.

ACM's 2010 Christian writing contest is accepting entries through February 15th and will announce this year's winners in April. There is a category for high school students, another for those 19 and up, and a newly added one for poetry.