What is an apologist?
apologist noun
apol·o·gist | ə-ˈpä-lə-jist
someone who speaks or writes in defense of someone or something that is typically controversial, unpopular, or subject to criticism
In your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.
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Our Vision
The Apologist Project exists to further the gospel of Jesus Christ by engaging the minds of non-believers and believers alike. We work to break down barriers to belief through intellectually stimulating discourse and conversational AI trained on a range of topics under the banner of apologetics. These include — but are not limited to — theology and philosophy, earth and biological sciences, and comparative religious and cultural studies.
We aim to be the premier conversational AI platform for Christian evangelism and apologetics. We believe that by staying true to our purpose in the service of our ministry partners, we will move mountains for the Kingdom. We will reach the unreached. We will answer the skeptic. We will reassure the doubter. We will shine the light of Christ in a dark world.
Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Meet Our Team
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Jake Carlson
Founder
CPTO | Entrepreneur | MK | Colson Fellow
Jake is a digital product development leader with 20+ years startup and Big Tech experience (Oracle & Apple) in software engineering, UX, and product management. He was a missionary kid and is now a Colson Fellow. Since founding The Apologist Project, he has grown the part-time volunteer team to over a dozen regular contributors.
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Christine Abernathy
Head of Developer Relations
Engineer | Technology Wizard | FaithTech Leader
Christine has worked in many reputable tech companies, including 10+ years at Facebook/Meta, and has a huge passion for technology for the kingdom. She served as Senior Director – Open Source, Director of Global Labs at FaithTech, and contributes actively to global tech movements such as Indigitous and Gloo.
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Hernando Betita III (Nano)
Head of Marketing
Marketing Leader | Church Planter | Consultant
Nano has over 16 years of experience working in Asia Pacific as a marketing professional for various multinationals (Kraft Foods, Kimberly-Clark, SEEK) and as a discipler and satellite church-planter with Christ’s Commission Fellowship. He has a passion for teaching and interfaith dialogue and volunteers in various ministries in Malaysia and the Philippines.
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Troy Michels
Head of Solutions
Product Developer | Engineer | Business Leader
Troy has over 17 years of experience leading product teams in start-ups and growth-stage companies from Seed to Series-C. He has successfully scaled multiple companies, while building B2B SaaS products for the healthcare, EdTech and life science industries.
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Derek Rine
Head of Strategy
Growth Strategist | Author | Entrepreneur
Derek is a nationally recognized advisor, author and entrepreneur in the healthcare benefits arena. His passion for evangelism led him to create Yearning for Truth in 2022, an apologetics ministry page for truth-seekers and skeptics. In 2024, Derek felt God calling him to devote significantly more time to kingdom efforts, leading him to pursue pastoral ministry.
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Steve Verleye
Head of Business Development
Operations Leader | Strategic Advisor
Steve has extensive C-suite experience in avariety of industries with a focus on bridging technology and non-profit leadership. Among his many roles, Steve was the COO at the Colson Center for Christian Worldview where he directed the efforts to integrate faith into public discourse and action.
Understand
Our Mission
The Apologist Project is on a mission to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ through the thoughtful, Spirit-led application of bleeding edge technology to help fulfill the Great Comission. We believe it is our God-given mandate to use the tools at our disposal to glorify God and further His Kingdom. We are working toward a world in which all have heard the Good News and do not lack solid, biblically based answers to their questions about God, Jesus, or the Bible. We endeavor to contribute to the vast body of cumulative evidence for the Christian explanatory model of reality by providing greater access to sound reasons for the hope that is within us (1 Peter 3:15-16).
“Access” has many facets in this context. Our conversational AIs are available everywhere in the world that the Internet reaches, and perhaps one day soon beyond even that limitation as we explore embeddable offline models. Our resources can be accessed any time, removing the limitation of the availability of conversation partners. Answers are synthesized in seconds rather than forcing the user to wade through thousands of search results, often with conflicting biases antagonistic to the Christian worldview. Our conversational AIs support hundreds of languages, removing language as a barrier for the vast majority of the world’s people. Finally, our solution has been found to be an effective way to remove the inhibitions of seekers as they do not fear judgement from an AI.
Christianity dominated intellectual thought from the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century to the Enlightenment in the 18th century. Christian scholars produced a vast body of literature on theology, philosophy, science, and history, and their work helped to shape the intellectual landscape of Europe for centuries. This age of Christ-centered reason gave rise to many of the institutions seen as bastions of free thought and scientific inquiry, such as universities and hospitals.
The hallmark of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century was a questioning of the religious authority of the Catholic Church, and an emphasis on the individual’s interpretation of Scripture and personal relationship with God. While an escape from religious dogmatism is to be lauded, this renewed emphasis on the individual eventually led to a questioning of the spiritual altogether by the great thinkers of the Enlightenment.
The Industrial Revolution deepened society’s reliance on empiricism as man became increasingly convinced that a God of the universe was an unnecessary superstition. The exponential rate of technological advancement eventually gave rise to the Information Age and the World Wide Web. Personal computers and mobile devices have given us access to the world’s body of knowledge at our fingertips, on demand anytime anywhere.
It would be a stretch to say that Christendom was at the forefront of using this new medium to good effect in reaching the masses for the glory of God. Instead, intellectual discourse on the early Web was dominated by secular philosophies. To many non-believers, every new major scientific achievement is another proof that man does not need a Creator.
But as always, God uses each technological advancement for His glory through His people. Today there are numerous great biblically-based apologetics ministries available covering all manner of disciplines. However, finding answers to specific questions isn’t always easy, and wading through sometimes conflicting search results can be daunting.
Relatively recent advancements in processing power and ways of utilizing interconnected data have given rise to Artificial Intelligence, computer systems that can reason, learn, and act autonomously. We want to be on the forefront of using this new technology to advance the Kingdom of God by ministering to people in the medium they use.
How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.
Learn
Our History
The Apologist Project was founded in 2003 as Abiding Grace and Peace Ministries. In 2023, Jake Carlson was appointed as Executive Director with the mandate of using the latest in Artificial Intelligence to spread the gospel. Jake grew up as a missionary kid in China, where he studied at a private Christian international school. In his high school and college years, he became fascinated with worldview studies, comparative religions, and Christian apologetics.
Jake lamented that most of the early adopters of the Web in its nascent stages tended to espouse a secular worldview, and the discourse online was heavily weighted in that direction. And so he made a promise to himself and God that he would one day raise up an apologetics platform that would use the latest technologies to help fulfill the Great Commission. And here we are, only 20 years later!
The potential of LLMs for spreading the gospel became too obvious to ignore, and Jake set about to create a conversational AI that used a curated corpus of public domain Christian theological content. He formed a team of volunteers through FaithTech to create the original prototype of our flagship conversational AI (apologist.ai), which was unveiled at the Gloo hackathon in October 2023.
Following the initial launch of Apologist Agent, we realized how vital expanding the corpus through ministry partners would be for the success of our Agent. We therefore turned our focus to Apologist Ignite, the team-based corpus management system which allows ministries and independent apologists to submit their own content to our crowdsourced corpus for use by all of Christendom. Apologist Social (an apologetics directory) was a logical extension to this idea, where ministries can list their content as a resource for believers.
Leading up to the 2024 Gloo hackathon, we were challenged by feedback from a missionary serving in south Asia to better contextualize our Agent for specific demographics. In other words, instead of a single Agent that could hypothetically respond well to anyone, we were challenged to create multiple, worldview-specific Agents that are trained to engage with those of a particular worldview. Just as Paul contextualized the gospel for his famous sermon on Mars Hill (Acts 17), we are called to meet non-believers where they are.
We decided to create an Agent with the expressed purpose of assisting in bringing Muslims to faith in Jesus Christ: Alim. We partnered with ministries and authors to create a corpus specific to Muslim ministry. We also enlisted the assistance of experienced evangelists working in Muslim-serving ministry. The result was well-received, winning 2nd place in challenge at that year’s Gloo hackathon. We then went on to enter the same project in the Indigitous 2024 #HACK global hackathon event, were we won 1st place overall.
We knew then that we were on to something: instead of building one chatbot to rule them all, we turned our attention to becoming the definitive platform for building conversational AIs for Christian evangelism. Ministries know best how to serve the people they minister to; we simply bring the platform and technical expertise to help them augment their digital strategies. We’ve now built dozens of conversational AIs in partnership with evangelism and apologetics ministries, and we continue to expand our corpus and capabilities.
For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all, that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings.
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Our Statement of Faith
- Nature of God: We believe in one God, eternally existent in three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. (Deuteronomy 6:4, Matthew 28:19, 2 Corinthians 13:14)
- Authority of Scripture: We believe the Bible is the inspired, infallible, and authoritative Word of God, the final rule for faith and practice. (2 Timothy 3:16, John 17:17, Isaiah 40:8)
- Creation: We believe God created the universe out of nothing (ex nihilo), and that all living things were specially created by Him. Humanity is made in the image of God, distinct from all other creatures. (Genesis 1:1, Genesis 1:27, Colossians 1:16)
- The Fall and Sin: We believe all people have sinned and fall short of God’s glory, and that sin separates us from God. (Romans 3:23, Romans 5:12, 1 John 1:8)
- Salvation by Grace: We believe salvation is a gift of God’s grace, received through faith in Jesus Christ alone, not by works. (Ephesians 2:8–9, John 14:6, John 1:12)
- Jesus Christ: We believe Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God, who became flesh, lived a sinless life, died for our sins, rose bodily from the dead, and will return in glory. (John 1:14, Colossians 2:9, Romans 4:25)
- The Holy Spirit: We believe the Holy Spirit indwells and empowers all believers, enabling them to live godly lives and witness to the truth of Christ. (Acts 1:8, 1 Corinthians 3:16, John 14:26)
- The Church: We believe the Church is the body of Christ, composed of all true believers, called to worship God, grow in faith, and proclaim the gospel. (1 Corinthians 12:27, Hebrews 10:24–25, Matthew 28:19)
- Return of Christ and Final Judgment: We believe Jesus Christ will return personally and visibly to judge the living and the dead. Those who trust in Him will enjoy eternal life; those who reject Him will face eternal separation from God. (1 Thessalonians 4:16, Hebrews 9:27, Matthew 25:46)
- Christian Living: We believe Christians are called to love God and neighbor, pursue holiness, and defend the faith with gentleness and respect. (Matthew 22:37–39, 1 Peter 1:15, 1 Peter 3:15)
- Unity of Christ’s Body: We believe that all that sincerely confess the above are brothers and sisters in Christ. God wishes us to live in harmony, focusing on what binds us together in Christ rather than sowing division among believers. (John 17:23, 1 Corinthians 1:10, Colossians 3:13-14)
- Christian Witness and Apologetics: We affirm that the above statements are grounded in historical, testable truth. We defend the faith through evidence, reason, and Scripture, rejecting relativism and secular philosophies that oppose God’s Word. (1 Corinthians 15:14-19, Colossians 2:8, 1 Peter 3:15)
Frequently Asked Questions
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“In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, charity. In all things, Jesus Christ.”
There are a handful non-negotiable doctrines that form Christian orthodoxy. These are well articulated in the Nicene Creed, which all 3 major branches of Christendom have affirmed. Non-adherence to these core beliefs saps the identity of what it means to be Christian altogether and renders the term ultimately meaningless.
However, beyond these fundamental beliefs there are a good many secondary beliefs, and we tolerate and celebrate a diversity of thought on such topics. While intellectual discourse on these secondary beliefs are instructive, we must take care that such discussions are charitable and do not cause believers or non-believers to stumble.
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We will start with various Bible translations themselves, and then move our way forward in time to the writings of the Church Fathers as they combatted various heresies. We will hit on as many public domain apologetics works as we can find within the realm of Christian orthodox thought.
We will partner with major Christian publishers to add the apologetics writings of more contemporary authors, as well as independent apologists wishing to gain more exposure. We will then expand into short-form content and new media such as articles, videos, and podcasts. With each successive layer our AI will gain more context and relevance.
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The mission is more important than profits. We will augment donations with multiple, viable revenue streams — but the core consumer products will remain free forever.
The need for the consumer products is greatest, and most of our proposed B2B revenue streams are reliant on them. We don’t want to shift our focus to immediately providing ROI to investors at the expense of launching the consumer products.
We will fund the operation via donors who join us in this mission and/or investors who are willing to play the long game.
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The Apologist Project is made possible by volunteers and the generous donations of our financial supporters.
Donated funds will first be used for operational expenses to keep our products in the hands of those who need it most. We would also like to transition volunteers into full-time salaried employees to give this mission their full-time attention as soon as the funding allows for it.
The amount of funding we receive will determine how quickly we scale the operation and how much funding we can devote to outreach and marketing channels.
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We strive to promote intellectually honest, respectful discussion. While we celebrate diversity of thought within the bounds of orthodox Christianity, we cannot allow abusive or inappropriate posts that will harm the world’s perception of the body of Christ.
We will have several mechanisms in place to prevent inappropriate behavior that violates our member terms of service:
- Volunteer moderators will have the ability to remove posts and comments;
- Other community members will have the ability to flag posts and comments to be reviewed;
- Members that consistently violate our terms of service will be suspended and/or banned from the platform.
- Volunteer moderators will have the ability to remove posts and comments;