Institute of Theology and Christian Ministry

ITCM is that focus of our mission which provides continuing education to church leaders through 8 week on line courses nation wide with respected church scholars. Students of ITCM in St Petersburg recently had the opportunity to host "debates" with members of the Sceptic Society of St Petersburg. Members think of themselves as people who believe only in evidences. According to them, to rephrase a famous statement by Feodor Dostoevsky, the words “sceptic” and “atheist” are synonyms. They "love" debates.  On October 16, twelve of them came prepared, with their “sharpened swords”. We shared our opinions, arguments, and answered each other’s questions. To my opinion we demonstrate to them that we did have evidences to believe in what we believe. To our mutual surprise, everything went very well. All of us became friends. We now plan the second debates. We learned  their impressions of the meeting from their comments on social networks:
"Christians are not that scary. They can reason. They say 'I don’t know', when they don’t know.They respect you, even if you have a different opinion."
We were glad to discover this in ourselves. Thanks to all ITCM professors who taught in St.Petersburg, who gave us not only knowledge and arguments to talk to the sceptics, but conviction and understanding that God loves all, even those who don’t love Him in return.