Coming To Faith The Hard Way

For some time, Donald Haynes has been writing interesting and challenging columns for the United Methodist Reporter, a high quality denominational newspaper. In a recent piece, he details what he believes has gone wrong with the denomination's efforts to transmit its theological heritage effectively to its members. One assertion in particular is a real eye-poker, to the effect that emphasis on the development of character through "rational enlightenment" has been substituted for emphasis on the making of disciples through openness to the Holy Spirit. With respect especially to the nurturing of children in the church, conversion has been replaced by confirmation.

In this season of Confirmation Sundays in many churches, I have been thinking a lot about this remark. One of my own most memorable experiences of how confirmation can go wrong, in Dr. Haynes' sense, involved a family's surprise turn-up at the chancel rail during a worship service one Sunday morning. They came with with their 12-year-old daughter, whom I had received into membership the previous week with her Confirmation Class. As the family made its way with great dignity down the center aisle during the second hymn, a staff member raced in from the side to thrust a bowl of water into my hands and explain quickly that the parents had forgotten to mention before confirmation training began that their daughter had never been baptized, and that they had just revealed this fact as the rest of us were proceeding into the sanctuary with the choir.

It did not seem to me to be a big deal at the moment to shift into the baptismal liturgy and bring this newest church member's initiation experience to conclusion, even if in reverse order. But to our quickly intensifying consternation, the deal was big to her, although not in the way any of us could have expected. She --- I will call her Betsy --- looked at her parents with anguish, asked plaintively what she was doing up there, fidgeted when her mother reminded her that "we've been all through this," and then, with a little prodding from her dad, smiled sweetly as she answered the questions I asked her and as she let me drip water on her head.

After the service that morning, I tracked down Betsy in the Fellowship Hall to see if she would share with me what had been going on with her earlier. She told me that she had known that she was the only member of her Confirmation Class who had not been baptized, but that she saw no reason why this should get in the way of getting signed up for church membership with all of her peers. "After all,'' she said, "I got all my homework right." For a moment, I wondered if there might be any way to declare a baptism null and void.

But baptism is not the real issue here; conversion is. Not in the sense that Dr. Haynes uses the latter term. He seems to mean by it a personal experience of some sort, as a prerequisite to living the Christian life with some sense of accountability, and that encouraging it should be made something like a linchpin of the discipling process. I am not sure about this, and I will not accept his attribution "liberal" for not being sure about it. What I am sure about is that the Christian gospel does both speak of and call for conversion in the sense of a conscious decision to turn one's attitude, decision-making, behavior, and relationships in a direction imitative of Jesus', and that without conversion in this sense, we have at best only the outward form of faith, without the inner substance. Betsy finished confirmation training, as did her classmates, un-converted in this latter sense. And it was almost inevitable that she and they would do so, for the reason that Dr. Haynes cites: teaching people about things --- some of them even religious --- has become an easier way to bring and keep them in the church than praying for them to be converted.

I cannot agree with Donald Haynes that modern Christian education is the great spoiler of preaching enthusiastically for conversion and of learning truly about sin and grace. But I cannot agree with modern educational approaches that make Christian learning too easy, either. Censoring the Old Testament, apocalypticizing the Lord Jesus, and deifying the dogmas, by way of examples, make genuine conversion all the more difficult. The lonesome valley that leads to faith is one that each must travel alone, in part by asking all the questions we can think of along the way, and hoping sometimes against hope that there will be an educator or two turning up every now and then who knows the importance of not making the struggle too easy for us.