PONDERING CONVERSION

RETHINKING OUR ROLE AS CHRISTIANS IN THE LIVES OF UNBELIEVING NEIGHBOURS

As fewer and fewer Canadians report connections to church, it can start to seem Christianity in our country will disappear. But Judy Paulsen, director of the Institute of Evangelism at Wycliffe College, isn’t buying it. She points to a 2017 Angus Reid survey that reveals fully 30 per cent of the Canadian population believes in God and prays. “Their theology may be all over the place,” Paulsen says, “but they had some kind of faith. That’s over 10 million people. Those people we should be interested in.”

Lee Beach, director of ministry formation at McMasterDivinity College, also sees hope. “Numerous churches across Canada are thriving, but that’s a story that doesn’t always get told.”

This has become more obvious in the pandemic. A recent Angus Reid poll found more Canadians have turned to prayer and as many as 20 per cent had been assisted by faith groups in their communities.

“These are still signs that the Christian faith still has a currency in our culture. It’s just expressed differently than it used to be,” says Beach.

Vancouver church planter Jason Ballard, who also serves as senior network director at Alpha Canada, has witnessed “an openness for Jesus. Globally there’s a massive coming to church.”

Given the cultural context it may be more important to ask why people are seeking and coming to faith. Before answering that, let’s consider that the reasons people aren’t connected to church are very real – and the approach to turning that around needs to be done with care.

WHAT IS THE CHALLENGE?

New Leaf Network describes itself as “a Christian Canadian Network that cultivates and supports Starters and Planters.” Jared Siebert, its founder, explains disconnection is found mostly in two demographics – Dones (turning away from faith) and Nones (no experience of faith).

Dones were raised in the church and often in an evangelical context. “They know a lot about Christianity and don’t like what they know. They will even describe their lack of faith as once blind, but now I see. That group – people who say they now have no religion – is the fastest-growing religious demographic

in Canada across the board, in Islam, Christianity.”

Some will stay Done, done with the Church, but still believing in God, says Siebert, also the author of Gutsy: (Mis)Adventures in Church Planting (New Leaf Network Press, 2016). “It’s organized religion they’re allergic to – the whole church life thing with pastor, church board, baptism. And they can be difficult to reach. That can change if a Done connects with a church that addresses the reasons they left.”

As for the Nones, they are two to three generations out of the Church and have been raised in a culture that has lost touch with all things Christian. As Beach notes, “We live in a place where our story is no longer known. My son’s friend didn’t know what a Nativity scene was. When I grew up, even though we weren’t a church-going family, I was at least aware of some Bible stories.”

However, Siebert believes Nones are in some ways easier to reach “because they have fewer preconceptions about what Christians believe.”

The challenge with Nones, he adds, lies in the lack of any spiritual framework to work with. The last person Siebert led to faith was challenged by this. “He had to count the cost – whether his family would still respect him, would he become a right-wing troglodyte and did he really believe this stuff.”

Coming to faith in a culture with little Christian background will require a significant mental and emotional shift, Paulsen concedes. Especially since trust in the Church is so eroded. “They read the papers, the stories of sexual abuse, the money scammers, the haters.”

On these issues Paulsen points the work of Everts and Schaupp in I Once Was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught us About Their Path to Jesus (InterVarsity Press, 2008). Their book points out, “The first threshold [Nones] often need to get over is suspicion of Christians, which often happens by meeting one they can trust. Once this sort of trusting relationship develops, they may be a long way from exploring Jesus for themselves, but they have moved to a place where they can say, ‘Oh, I guess Christians are okay.’ Once that happens they move from neutral acceptance to curiosity to being open to change, followed eventually by a seeking phase. Finally, after grappling with questions about faith and their own experience of Jesus, they reach a point at which they actually respond to God.”

Coming to faith in a culture with little Christian background will require a significant mental and emotional shift.

It’s one thing to hear God loves you, and another to experience that through community and in the Holy Spirit.

HOW DOES CONVERSION HAPPEN?

Conversion is an ongoing journey. “You’re always being converted in certain ways,” Beach says. “We each have seasons where faith is vibrant, and others where we feel distant from God. There have been times in my life when I had to re-evaluate what I believe.”

While Steven Studebaker, McMaster Divinity College professor of systematic and historical theology, agrees – and thinks Evangelicals tend to overemphasize the moments – his own experience was fast. At 19, and “going downhill,” he knew people who’d been “murdered, in prison, living lives of utter dissipation. I could see the trajectory of my life in the lives of those older friends, so I was afraid and had the sense I was getting down the path far enough that turning back wasn’t possible.”

He worked with several Christians who talked about their faith. One night, after staggering home high on cocaine and alcohol, he was desperate and just prayed, “If you’re out there, and what these guys say is true, please save me from freebasing [taking] cocaine.”

However, he wasn’t ready to quit alcohol or become a Christian.

Miraculously he did stop what he describes as an “increasingly uncontrollable addiction” to cocaine. A month later, his Christian coworkers invited him to Bible study where a “biker dude” told him God brought him there to save him, and if he didn’t, he’d be going to hell. “I thought, He’s right, so I said the Sinner’s Prayer. After that, I was told I needed to be baptised in the Holy Spirit and I said, ‘Sure, I’ll take it.’ They laid hands on me and prayed, it was totally life transforming. I stopped all the drinking, carousing, drugs, everything gone.”

While everyone’s faith journey is unique to them, Ballard has observed at Alpha and in church plants some striking commonalities in the decision to follow Christ, namely “the Christians they’ve encountered, the friends they’ve built, the difference they see that Jesus makes in other people’s lives.”

Alpha is a program involving weeks of discussion groups and meals together followed by a special weekend away. The weekend may not be as dramatic as Studebaker being prayed over by bikers, but it plays a similar role in people’s faith journey. Ballard explains, “It’s as if the penny drops from head to heart. It’s one thing to hear God loves you, and another to experience that through community and in the Holy Spirit, and God wants to do both in our lives.”

Time and events accumulate in each person’s faith journey, Paulsen notes. Planting the seed early – being taken to VBS as a kid, going to Catholic school – is an important step in the process. But there’s hope for those later in life, especially at transition points – marriage, birth of a child – or crisis points such as divorce, death of loved one, illness when big questions about the purpose of life come up.

Sometimes that will coincide with encountering a Christian who “presents a compelling argument or demonstrates a compelling love at just the right time,” she adds.

However, most of the time coming to faith is a gradual thing with the median length of time being three years and some taking as long as 15 years.

THE IMPORTANCE OF QUESTIONING

People begin their search within the context of their present lives and reality. Christian apologist Alister McGrath was once an atheist scientist who revered Richard Dawkins. “Religion was for losers . . . science says there is no God, so that was the end of the discussion.”

But while studying at Oxford, an honest search for truth led to rethinking his position, and he saw that the case for atheism wasn’t what he thought – and neither was Christianity. “It turned out to be more exciting and interesting,” McGrath says in an interview searchable on YouTube. (https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp6SuVaxuJ0). For him it was an intellectual conversion. When he realized some things scientists believe can’t actually be proven true, he began to consider the other side, that “There might be a God after all, and the way the world is might effect a deeper meaning beyond.”

Ontario astrophysics student Nikhil Arora came to Christ by way of questions. Growing up Hindu in India, he got no answers to his incessant questioning, and when he moved from home at 15 to attend university in England, he declared himself an atheist. As a scientist he believed there was no evidence for God, and ultimately concluded, “It wasn’t worth my time investigating whether God existed or not.”

But arriving in Canada for postgrad studies, he met a fellow astrophysics student who encouraged his unrelenting questioning. A year later she invited him to church where the warm welcome made him feel awkward. “We scientists

are awkward to begin with,” he says. “But I continued going and discovered this was not superficial affection – they were open to all my questions too.”

Eventually, he met Bruxey Cavey, teaching pastor at The Meeting House, a multisite Ontario Anabaptist church, and for the three-hour lunch he questioned and talked, then questioned some more. Cavey told him to eat while he answered some of those questions.

What impressed Arora was the intellectual willingness of the Christians he encountered to answer his questions with honesty. But what finally made the penny drop was “not trying to scientifically prove God exists, but how to treat the person next to you.”

This skeptic’s journey is a familiar one to Cavey. Although growing up in a Christian home, he had a “young adult season of questioning everything and deconstructing everything.”

The Church, he adds, “needs to allow people to voice their disappointment with religion, their doubts and questions. I like bringing all this up in conversation – it’s modelling what I will eventually ask them to do.”

WHAT ROLE CAN CHRISTIANS PLAY?

Our role is a secondary one on the journey to faith, Paulsen says. “God is the primary caller of people. A person turning to Christ is a work of the Holy Spirit, not about right technique and right arguments, or the best-prepared evangelism.”

God uses almost anything, she says. “Mystical experiences, like dreams or visions, can start the process, though it’s not something we talk much about in our rationalistic society, even in Christian circles.”

She also knows people who explored faith because of “a stained glass window, the wedding of William and Kate and wanting to know why they included God in the ceremony, a Gideon Bible opened on a business trip, or a friend passing along C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. One explored faith because of a social media post, another because of their child’s questions about God. The most unusual? When an index card containing the partial sentence ‘God is constant’ blew onto a condo balcony one blustery October night.”

Those whimsical, serendipitous experiences are why Paulsen is

“more convinced than ever God is calling people all the time. We just have to believe that and make ourselves available to His work.”

That’s good news, she adds. “If we believe God is calling people to Himself, and His greatest desire is for all people to know Him, then it takes some of the heaviness of evangelizing off the Church.”

Which isn’t the same as letting the Church off the hook. “The Church should think of itself as a secondary force of conversion, meaning that all Christians everywhere, in congregations or in their places of work, are invited to participate in God’s work of conversion,” she says. “If we’re confident about that as Christians, we realize that to participate in evangelism is a joy. At its simplest level, God does the converting and invites the Church to participate and be involved.”

If you think about it, your role is more one of “spiritual midwifery,” Jared Siebert says. “I’m not converting anyone, because what’s happening is supernormal and natural, which is Jesus loving somebody back to life. I just keep my antenna up for people in my life who might be pregnant in the Spirit, to notice and to ask if they have someone to walk with them through this. I’m not the Holy Spirit and none of this is my responsibility. My role is to walk alongside.”

Since God is at work in the world our task, Lee Beach says, “is to discern where that might be with family and friends, and to ask how we can join in with what God is doing in their lives. This is different from doing evangelism 20 years ago.”

One of Alpha’s goals is to give people a “chance to wrestle with and explore the Christian faith,” Ballard says. “But the other is to offer meaningful community. It focuses on what we share in common, this idea of hospitality, the table and doing life together. Church is at its best when that kind of community is welcomed, even where lifestyles might be different. When a person knows someone is really listening to them, and actually cares about what they’re saying because they care about you, it’s powerful.”

Beach agrees. “There is nothing like people shaped by love, kindness, tolerance and openness into a community of support. I’ve been part of great churches that aren’t perfect, but doing their best to embody Christ.”

That Spirit-empowered reality is why the Church has survived for more than 2,000 years.

“A person turning to Christ is a work of the Holy Spirit, not about right technique and right arguments, or the bestprepared evangelism.”