Don Johnson

On Matt’s “Rules of Engagement” you need to realize you accepted skewed conditions and would be accepting even more skewed conditions. And accept the need to tailor the presentation of your message to those skewed conditions. This is (by far) NOT the best way to present a message, but sometimes it can be accepted as a way. Part of that acceptance is to accept a severely limited goal.
Here are some limited goals:
1. If you can just get people to THINKING about these verses, I think it would be worthwhile. One of the main (false) winning arguments that CBMW, etc. uses is that the verses are straightforward to understand. You want to dispute that claim.
2. This may be hard for you, but you need to learn to make bold assertions (given the 1.5 minute time limit) that do not sound totally crazy. For example, in explaining 1 Tim 2:12, go IMMEDIATELY to 1 Tim 2: 15 and claim that this verse makes best sense for an actual person living at the time (which is true). In explaining 1 Tim, claim that one needs to read the book in Biblical, literary (book) and cultural context and that missing even one of these contexts can mean one takes a verse out of context (which is true) and that a verse taken out of context can be a pretext for almost anything. Exaplin that as we are not Timothy, we are in effect looking over Timothy’s shoulder and trying our best to understand what would have been easy for Timothy to understand, in other words, that the verses might easily take some hard work to try to understand.