It encourages them in their walk with Jesus. It helps students know that what they believe is true and trustworthy. Faith is trusting in what we don't necessarily see (Hebrews 11:1). However, this doesn't mean that there aren't good logical reasons to believe in the Jesus of the Bible. In the marketplace of ideas, students need to be able to give good, solid reasons for why what they believe is true.
It helps remove barriers to believing in Jesus. Mack Stiles in Speaking of Jesus (IVP, 1995) says, "No one was ever argued into the Kingdom; but no one ever entered the Kingdom without a reason."
Students eat it up. We sometimes avoid diving into meaty issues like apologetics because we think the topic may be a bit over the heads of our students. Certainly there's a range of intellectual prowess in any group of teenagers, but in general, students love to grapple with this stuff, even when they don't understand all of it.
So how do we get started incorporating apologetics into our teaching/leading repertoire? The first step is to study it yourself. This doesn't mean that you have to have it all down, but you do need to be familiar with the topic and confident in what you're talking about. The second step is to incorporate it into your teaching in a way that matters to your students. It can be easy to detach this deep kind of teaching from any practical application, reducing it to an irrelevant academic exercise. While I do sometimes teach an entire lesson or series on apologetics, I find it much more effective to simply weave it throughout a lesson where appropriate. For instance, this Sunday I will teach our high school students on one of our church's four core values: "Biblical Foundation." I'll include a topic on why we can have confidence that what the Bible says is true.
Further Study:
Who Made God? And Answers to Over 100 Other Tough Questions of Faith (Zondervan, 2003), Ravi Zacharias and Norman Geisler, eds.
Without a Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions (Baker Books, 2004) by Kenneth Samples.
Bethinking.org - a great site with a lot of apologetics resources, organized topically.
Veritas Forum - Non-profit organization that hosts Christian speakers as well as debates on college and university campuses. All of their presentations, lectures, and debates are online, and can be great viewing for a youth group setting.
