Conversion: Reconsidering Our Emphasis

Thought's on Our Continuing Conversion, Part 2

As members of the Churches of Christ, we are heirs of a nineteenth century attempt to recover the Christian faith as it was believed and practiced in the first century. We are the children of Thomas and Alexander Campbell, of James O’Kelly, Abner Jones, and Elias Smith. A part of that “restoration” was a great frontier revival tradition that has shaped our understanding of conversion.

Just think about Barton W. Stone, one of the key leaders of our tradition, at the Cane Ridge Revival. At the hearing of the preached word, the gospel, many people experienced what Stone and others called the “religious exercises.” “Some fell to the ground in a faint as if they were dead. Some jerked back and forth and made a sound like a bark. Others felt bodily agitation coming upon them and tried to run away. Some danced back and forth in place. A few laughed a hearty, solemn laugh” (Holloway and Foster, 33). Stone believed that at the preaching of the gospel these people had been powerfully convicted of sin and in a moment of conversion had received the Holy Spirit. Or consider Walter Scott and his famous five-finger exercise (“faith, repentance, baptism, forgiveness of sins, and the gift of the Holy Spirit”; which we later modified to “hear, believe, repent, confess, be baptized”). Scott convicted people on the frontier that they had a part to play in their conversion, and they responded. Or reflect on the great African-American preacher Marshall Keeble at the old month long gospel meetings, preaching powerfully and calling people to repentance and conversion through baptism.

Do you see a common thread running through the ways these leaders in our heritage understood conversion? As the heirs of the great revival tradition, we have typically understood conversion as something that happens in a moment, a sudden decision to change one’s life, to accept the gift of God, to be baptized. After that moment, we are the converted, those who have already, through the power of God, made the change.

But as people who want to reclaim and recover first century faith, we might do well to reconsider how the authors of the New Testament understood conversion. There is no denying that conversion in the New Testament is often depicted as something that happened in a moment. All we have to do is think back on those disciples who suddenly “left all” to follow Jesus, the crowds on the banks of the Jordan with John the Baptist (Lk. 3:10) or on the day of Pentecost who were “cut to the heart” (Acts 2:37), the conversion of the Philippian jailor (Acts 16:30), the conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus (Acts 9). There is something in Scripture that highlights what Kathleen Norris calls the “quick jolt of ‘born-again’ evangelism.”

But, to limit our understanding of conversion to the quick, once-and-for-all is to miss the rest of the story in Acts. When conversion is just something that happens in a moment, we sever the Christian life from the continuing work of God in the world and the Spirit of God in the lives of disciples. Consider Peter, although he walked with Jesus and was instrumental in the early church, the Spirit of God continued to convert him throughout his life, calling him to move and respond to the surprising actions of God. The most powerful example of this is found in the narrative of Cornelius (Acts 10). Imagine the incredible change or conversion that had to take place for Peter to accept the unimaginable: God was accepting uncircumcised gentiles into the people of God. That was not only unimaginable, but nearly unintelligible to the way he understood the world before. If Peter had not been open to the work of God, to his own continuing conversion, refusing to “turn around” in favor of marching forward with things as they had always been done, he would have never discovered what God was doing in the world.

Or consider Paul, while his conversion on the road to Damascus was momentary, he escaped to Arabia for 13 years to try to understand how God was breaking into creation through the resurrected Jesus. Then, if you read his letters, you can see how he continues to change and grow in his understanding of God over time as he sees what God is doing in his own life, in the church, and in the world. This is a process of conversion. It only comes when we turn back to see the ways that God will surprise us and continue to convert us as he calls us to join the Spirit on his mission in the world.

Throughout this week, consider how God might be calling the church and you personally to a renewed and ongoing conversion. What might it look like for us to experience ongoing conversion as the people of God? How might it transform the ways we understand what it means to be the people of God in our community? In the world? Next week we’ll try to explore some of these questions.