Conversion: Embracing Transformation

Our Continuing Conversion, part 3

As a kid, I loved Transformers^®. Autobots and Decepticons. Dinobots. Soundwave. Buzzsaw. Optimus Prime. Maybe it was because I knew there was something there, a little bit more than meets the eye. My mom might have bought me an eighteen wheeler, a little toy cassette player, or a car, but I knew that under my skillful hands I could make them capture their true essence. I could reshape and remold them to become what they were, robots in disguise.

For a few weeks we’ve been exploring how we understand “conversion.” Last week I tried to tease out some of the implications of the revivalist understanding of conversion that we have inherited from some of the forebears in our tradition. When we think about conversion, our minds often wonder back to a moment in time in our own when we were “saved” or back to the great revivals or gospel meetings on the frontier or in the churches where our own faith was born and nurtured.

For all of the great moments that have come from these events, the powerful impact that they have had on many people, our over emphasis on conversion as a moment in time has short changed us as individuals and as a community of believers of spiritual formation, of transformation into the image of Christ. It has also hampered our ability to engage change in ourselves, in others, and in the church by leading us to believe, even subconsciously, that change stops at baptism. But this is a misunderstanding of the telos or goal of the Christian life.

The Christian life is not only about looking to our past, to a moment in time where we were converted. As Christians we must also look ahead to our future, to that which we are to become or are becoming. We must allow our future to guide us as we continue in process, under the transforming power of the Spirit of God, who has started something in us and is continuing to create us until he brings that work to completion (Phil 1:6). If we want to remain faithful to the breadth and diversity of the witness of Scripture, we have to recapture the importance of our continual conversion or transformation (see Rom 12:2; 2 Cor 3:18; Gal 4:19; Phil 3:19-20), both as individuals and as a Christian community. We need to rediscover the beauty of the “both/and” of conversion and salvation, that it is something that both happens at a moment and yet that is constantly in process in us and in the church until the coming of Christ, the Parousia.

At its heart, this is where Paul’s understanding of Christ and his understanding of the Christian life intersect. In other words, this is how the Christ event becomes the foundation of his understanding of the telos or goal of the Christian life. Listen to the beautiful way he describes the goal of his ministry to the Christians at Thessalonica: “Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus direct our way to you. And may the Lord make you increase and abound in love for one another and for all, just as we abound in love for you. And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints” (1 Thess 3:11-13; cf. 5:23-24 & Phil 1:10).

This is a beautiful picture of the goal of the Christian life: God continuing to change Christians, to shape and mold them so that they may be blameless at his coming. That God is helping Christians become what they have already are, the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:21). Irenaeus captured Paul’s idea in the second century when he wrote, “[Christ] became what we are in order that we might become what he is.” “In the Christ event [his life, death, and resurrection], Christ ‘became what we are.’ The ultimate goal is that humanity be transformed into his image, that is become ‘what he is’” (Thompson, 25-6). We are convicted, convinced that a Christian is not just, as Fiona Apple would sing, a “better version of me.” As Christians, we begin the process of becoming something so much bigger than ourselves, we become what Christ is.

This may help us capture what Paul meant when we wrote that as Christians we are not just “saved,” but that we are “being saved” (1 Cor 1:18). Salvation is not simply something that we get, a prize to attain or gift to receive. Salvation is something that we grow into (or better are grown into by God), a journey that we are on, a partnership with God and God’s mission in the world. We are saved, we are being saved, and we are swept up into God’s bigger mission of salvation for the sake of the whole world. We are reconciled to God and ushered into the new creation, so that we can share in God’s ministry of reconciliation in the world (2 Cor 5:16-21). Throughout our lives, we are transformed by the creator God who continually makes all things new, to more fully embrace the ways of God for the sake of the world.

Next week we will continue to explore the implications of this process, as we consider our conversion to the ways of God. May God give us the grace this week to embrace our continual conversion by the power of the Spirit of God.