Rick Mattson

I grew up in a small town in southern Minnesota and toured the country for a couple of years as a teenage musician, playing in our family band. Life was pretty simple: golf by day, guitar by night. After our travels I became a Christian and soon joined the staff of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a collegiate ministry active on 680 campuses across the US.

These days I work as a traveling evangelist/apologist for InterVarsity, to about twenty campuses per year. Typically I roll into Michigan State or Arizona State or West Virginia University (or wherever) and stay for a few days of outreach events and training. A common venue is "Stump the Chump," where students can ask me any question they wish about Christianity. My job, as the Chump, is to offer a thoughtful reply.

Lately I've been doing public dialogues/debates with atheists, which has been both challenging and enriching for me, thanks to some quality atheist partners.

When I'm home in St. Paul, MN, I work for InterVarsity at Hamline University, a good school with sharp students. One of our weekly events is called GQ (Great Questions), which is an open discussion of the big questions in life, such as science, evil, human nature, politics. Students from a variety of worldviews attend regularly, contributing to the lively discussions.

My first book, "Faith is Like Skydiving" (IVP, 2014), grew out of my travels as an apologist the past several years. I realized early in that period that providing abstract, philosophical responses to students' questions was mostly putting them to sleep. So I began creating concrete images and illustrations that helped students better understand and remember my points (and stay awake). Then I simply put the images in a book. I wrote "Faith is Like Skydiving" mainly to equip Christians with images for their conversations with seekers and skeptics.

A sampling of images includes elephant traps, a hammer, a hole in one, the telephone game, a royal flush and a novelist.

These images are all related to issues in apologetics and are designed to be “put into play” by Christians quickly and easily in conversation without having to think about it too hard—and without any formal theological training.

I live in St. Paul with my wife Sharon. I'm a graduate of Bethel Seminary (Philosophy of Religion). We have two kids and three grandkids! And I'm still a pretty serious golfer.