Product Review—Pilgrim’s Rock, LLC

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way.

One of the products available for review from the Review Crew recently was The Unbreakable Faith Course from Pilgrim’s Rock, LLC. After I looked at it a little bit, I printed out the information and showed it to Gayle, asking him if this was something he was interested in our family going through together. We ended up being put on this review, so for the past month our evening Bible time has been spent working through this course as a family.

The Unbreakable Faith Course consists of 6-8 video lectures per part (there are 6 parts), as well as reading two books, The Box and God the Reason. Both of these books were sent to us as PDFs, and I printed them to make it easier to read them together. We have gotten through the first three parts, and started the fourth tonight. Each part ends with a quiz, which we have also been doing together. We go around the room, each person answering a question. If there is any objection to the answer chosen, we discuss it. Even Little Miss wants her turn, so someone supplies her with the correct answer! When we began working through the course, we started by reading The Box. We found this book very good and easy to understand. As a discussion between two imaginary friends, a Christian and an atheist, some very good arguments and proof for the existence of God were displayed, in a very accessible way. Part 1 had a lot of good thoughts that we appreciated hearing; I believe everyone in the family was getting a lot out of the course at that point. Esther wrote this about it in her newsletter: “There’s a lot to be learned from this course, as it turns out, and I feel like the little that has stuck with me is only a scratch off the surface. But some things it talks about are things like He created the universe; therefore, He is outside the laws of the universe. It’s not a problem for Him to do the things the Bible says He’s done (raising people from the dead, Jonah in the whale, Noah in the ark, etc.). Who do we think He is when we think He isn’t (or can’t be) concerned with our little things here? Even Jesus gave us a definition of something that was “easy” to do in Luke 12:25-26—add a cubit to our height!” As we started reading God the Reason, however, and moving on into the videos for Parts 2 and 3, we started feeling like there was a lot of repetition. We read the book, and then heard the same thing in the videos. That kind of repetition can be very good, but in this case it was a bit much. All of us are feeling fairly similarly at this point, that the content of the course is going over our heads. Esther and I, and Mr. Intellectual, have quite good vocabularies; I would say well over high school level. Even so, we struggle to get a lot out of what we hear and read from Unbreakable Faith. Esther said she would consider this course to be difficult for a high schooler to grasp. Gayle feels that the average high schooler or even university student would struggle to make it all the way through the course, because of the way it is presented. He also mentioned this evening again how wordy it is; it would be better if it was a bit more concise. There are some very good illustrations, both pictorial and verbal, which we can understand. We appreciate the way God is glorified and His truth is upheld. One thing we are taking away from this course is that there is no excuse for someone not to believe in God. As Craig Biehl, the author and speaker, says over and over, the evidence for God is “clear, comprehensive and compelling.” He makes that point abundantly clear, with much evidence to back up his claim. We also appreciated a very simple way to counter an atheist’s claim that there is no God: To know that, you would have to know everything in the universe and beyond! God the Reason is a lengthy treatise about Who God is. The subtitle is the theme for the entire course: How Infinite Excellence Gives Unbreakable Faith. Each chapter talks about a different facet of God’s greatness, such as that He is eternal, He needs nothing, He cannot be known unless He chooses to reveal Himself…. Many arguments are given, in depth, in support of each of these statements. There is a lot of meat in here; this is not a book for “babes in Christ.” I think it would take me several readings to get everything out of this book that is in it. Who would this course be good for? Those who have a very scholarly bent and enjoy listening to solid Bible teaching. If you enjoy listening to sermons about apologetics, this may well be a great fit for you! Thirty-four families besides ours have been using this course over the past month. Click on the image below to hear what they have to say about it—I’m going to be reading some of those reviews after I finish my own! It’s always good to hear multiple points of view about something like this.