Alisa Childers Speaks About her Journey

With Faith
By: Cameron Noble, November 6th, 2021

Alisa Childers, podcaster, YouTuber, blogger, and former member of ZOEgirl, spoke at the
Prince Avenue Baptist Church on November 6th, 2021.

The event, known as the Equip Conference, was hosted by the women’s ministry. The event
spanned several hours and featured an opening prayer accompanied by a live gospel band
performance. After the live performance, Childers began her first of three, hour-long, ministries.

Her first talk focused on her life and what led her to become an Apologist.

“My parents were good repenters. Church was an everyday thing. It wasn’t just something we
did on Sundays,” she said. “I grew up going to the mission in LA and working with prostitutes,
drug addicts, and the homeless. I don’t say that to brag about having this perfect Christian life
but to express that I had no reason to want to doubt it.”

As Childers grew up, she saw no reason to doubt what she had learned from her parents. Childers
describes a formative experience in her youth in which she asked her father, well-known
contemporary Christian gospel pioneer Chuck Girard, “How do I know God is real” and in
response, Girard said, “You can feel him.”
 Childers followed in her father’s
footsteps and joined her own band called
ZOEgirl where she met her husband and
had two kids. Around this same time
Childers struggled with what she
describes as a “dark night of the soul, that
is indescribable with words.” A time in
which her faith was, “Shaken at its core.”

Childers was struggling with a process

described in the Christian faith as
“deconstruction.”
“The best way to describe deconstruction
is when you buy a new sweater and you
see that thread hanging out and you pull that thread and you keep pulling and then by the end
you just have a ball of yarn and not a sweater anymore,” she said.

For Childers, her deconstruction came by means of a small Bible study group where she was able
to dive into the “illogical” side of her faith. Her pastor deconstructed the Bible in a scientific and
quantitative way. Childers was reluctant to take to her agnostic pastor’s new teachings, she
pushed back challenging his assertions yet her arguments were disarmed and dismantled every
time.
“It wasn’t until we left the church that these ideas really took hold and I couldn’t go back with
my own facts and argue,” she said. “It was just me and the darkness in the room and I don’t
know if there was anybody else in there with me.”

Her faith had been “utterly disproved” yet she found hope in the idea of how transformative her
experience was with her former pastor and is what led her to become an apologist.

Her story has inspired many people including Equip Conference attendee Cleat Harrington.

“As a counselor for special needs children, I see so many people struggling with disabilities, and
early on this really made me question my faith. That’s when I started watching her videos,”
Harrington says. “I don’t really know how I discovered them really. I guess they were just in my
recommendation but I felt like it was a message and it came at the right time.”

Childers continues to travel across the country and share her story of struggle and discovery with
those who might also be doubting their faith.
Sources:
● Cleat Harrington
○ rcleath@gmail.com
● Alisa Chambers
○ karla@alisachilders.com