The Trouble with Conversion

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This post has made its way around facebook several times, and I figure that it is better to try and write a response with a (hopefully) concise blog post than to fill up everybody’s facebook comments with rambling stream-of-thought paragraphs. So here it goes:

nitpicking

For the most part, this blog has good points. Or, at least, talks about values in youth ministry that I share. The third point about parents? A good reminder. Youth ministry can too easily feel like a means by which youth pastors single handedly drag adolescents into the kingdom of heaven. That can’t be right. I have to be reminded that it isn’t all on my shoulders.

But there are a couple of little things that irk me. This post (and many like it) purport to tell us exactly what factors keep kids in the church post graduation. Yet it does so without referencing some sort of large scale research (for instance, the National Survey of Youth and Religion, or those who wrote books summarizing it like Kenda Creasey Dean or Christian Smith). It boggles my mind how people can do that. If you are going to make giant, sweeping statements like this, please reference the objective data.

Also, I think the end goal of having all my students be able to lead Bible studies as the model of what ‘equipping’ looks like ignores what James says about how “not many should be teachers” (James 3:1) – not to mention simple ratios of leaders to non leaders in amy given Bible study (unless Bibles studies are exclusively evangelistic, which is a different problem for another time).

But this is just nitpicking. Small potatoes. My main problem has to do with the emphasis on conversion.

The trouble with conversion

Andrew’s blog checklist:

  1. Attempt at controversial title to grab attention
  2. Write good

Before you write me off, I don’t have a problem with conversion per se. I have a problem with his insistence on the “on fire” converted student as the exemplary student.

His concern with a lack of emphasis on conversion isn’t new. When I was doing research for my final research project for my MA, I found the very same concern in a 1978 dissertation by a Methodist named Charles Courtoy from. He complained that mainline youth ministries didn’t focus on conversion and longed for them to adopt that emphasis from Evangelical churches and parachurch ministries.

And maybe that is a selling point for you on why this blog post is correct: mainline churches were not known for spiritual vitality among youth in those days (or in the decades that followed). But I still contend it is a misplaced focus. And here is why:

The sociological argument

The first reason is that I knew plenty of “converted” high schoolers who abandoned their faith. And I knew plenty of “good church kids” who didn’t (myself included). When I attended Moody Bible Institute, I found that many future pastors, who grew up in church settings that placed an emphasis on conversion, either did not remember when they converted, or prayed a “Sinner’s Prayer” at the age of 3. I contend that no one in that setting remembers what the old self was like. And when you can’t remember your life before Jesus, all this talk of the old self going and the new self coming becomes a theological exercise, but not really a biographical one.

And beyond my own personal anecdotal evidence, I think “conversion” goes against what we hope for our students’ spiritual lives. It certainly goes against what I hope for my own children. I hope they have grown up hearing the gospel all their lives. I hope they consider the language of faith their second (or even first!) language. I hope, by the time they reach youth ministry, they aren’t in need of conversion. At least not in the darkness to light kind of way he is describing.

Do they need to make personal decisions about their faith? You bet. Do they need to start taking risky steps in living their faith? Sure. Do they need to understand that following Christ is a costly, dying-to-self, kind of life? Yes.

But when we elevate our most energetic, active, and fire-y kids as leaders and models, we risk communicating that they embody the only normative model for a life of faith. And that might create an environment in which our students manufacture religious zeal in order to appease us. And I think all of us know stories of the most zealous teenagers burning hot and fast and abandoning the church.

The biblical argument

But what about what Paul says about darkness and light? If Jesus is really Lord in their life, shouldn’t we see the evidence of Christ’s work in their life?

Funny you should ask, because that is exactly what Paul was asking. Except he does so from a very different place. When he charges the Romans, in Romans 6, to be dead to sin and alive to Christ, he is appealing to already baptized Christians. Christians who have already publicly declared the Jesus is Lord (putting a target on their backs, because that declaration meant that Caesar is not). When Paul retells his confrontation with Peter in Galatians 2 about Peter’s hypocrisy with regards to the law (and charging him with unintentionally preaching a false gospel), he is talking to an already-converted Peter. When he is writing to the Corinthians about sleeping with their mothers-in-law, he is writing to a church!

Paul regularly invokes spiritual realities of the believer to encourage righteous living. He says that since you have been baptized your life ought to look different. Not that once you are baptized your life will automatically look different. So when he says that when the new comes “it won’t be iffy”, that is reality that didn’t exist int he churches to whom Paul was writing his letters.

We ought not to shame or despair when “good kids” do bad things. We ought to encourage them like Paul to live into their baptism. It doesn’t mean that they aren’t really it Christian (and that, by extension, they won’t remain Christians). It means that they are just like Christians have always been: inconsistent people who don’t always behave in a manner that is worthy of their calling.

In fact, as I was thinking about this I had someone point out something a pastor had once said to them: that the Christian life was full of mini conversions. I don’t think any of us experience the life of faith as a life in which we are completely changed without faltering. And so why should we expect or model that kind of life to our students? What will keep them in the church is not insisting and expecting them to not mess up because they are “unconverted Evangelicals”, but showing them what a true walk of faith looks like: steps forward and steps back, empowered by the Holy Spirit, leaning on grace. not converted once, but going through continual conversions.


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