Box-checking revisited
I had meant to return to my predestination series today, but something else came up, so you’ll all just have to wait in eager anticipation :). I was talking with my Dad about my previous post on the Easter service at Saddleback Church. He asked if it was specifically checking a box that I find problematic, or would raising a hand, ‘going forward’, praying a prayer, etc, all fall into the same category. I think this is an important question, because it gets to the heart of an important question: ‘what do we do with people who profess faith?’
Let me first respond to the immediate question. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with any of these things–that is to say, one is not (necessarily) sinning by employing any of these methods. The problem is that such things are liable to cause the individual to put his or her confidence in the wrong place. I just read of a Christian who was talking with a coworker about Christianity. The coworker said he had ‘prayed a prayer’ at one point, and he figured he had his bases covered because of it. Who knows how many others there may be in the same situation? It is important that we don’t give people a false sense of security. One of the idiosyncracies of Scottish church circles I have experienced in our time here is the idea of questioning one’s salvation. There is a history going back several hundred years in Scotland of people seriously doubting their own salvation–often for very long periods of time. Occasionally it has gotten to the point that people have said you aren’t really saved unless you question your salvation. This is a strange concept to an American mind, yet I have to believe that Americans, for the most part, suffer from the opposite problem–we are far too assured of our own salvation. The reason for this, to a large extent, is that we are placing our assurance in the wrong place. If asked how we know we are Christians, many of us would answer that we remember praying the ’sinner’s prayer’. The Bible, however, is clear that we are saved by the grace of Christ, and so we need to look to this grace for our assurance of salvation, not to something we have done. The tendency to place our confidence in ourselves is deeply rooted within us; we have inherited it all the way back from Adam and Eve. The church must therefore be careful to guard against our natural inclination, and emphasise instead God’s grace in ever aspect of conversion. For this reason, though I don’t think it is necessarily sinful to ask people to check a box or ‘come forward’, I can’t imagine a situation in which I would (will) do it myself.
The question may then legitimately be asked, ‘what should we do with those who profess faith?’ Along with the tendancy to trust in our own effort comes the tendancy to think we know better than God, and to therefore invent methods when he has already established his own. On the day of Pentecost in Acts 2, when they became aware of their sin through Peter’s preaching, the crowd asked ‘”what shall we do???? And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized”‘. When Philip explains the gospel to the Ethiopian Eunuch in Acts 8 and he believes, he is immediately baptised. In Acts 10, when Peter preaches to the household of Cornelius, they believe and the Holy Spirit came upon them, and Peter ‘commanded them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ’. I could point out other examples, but the point is clear: the Bible says that those who profess faith are to be baptised. Not surprisingly, God’s ordained method is more effective than checking a box, or whatever. Anyone who is at all familiar with church life knows that following up with those who profess faith is difficult, to say the least. Yet baptism does so much more than checking a card, etc. Checking a box adds another tally to a database; baptism places the individual in the church. He or she is then under the spiritual care and discipline of the elders, who can look after the new convert to ensure that they are growing in their faith. This is, of course, more difficult than the ‘check the box’ method: it will take more time and people, and quite frankly, it won’t work in a church of several thousand people. But the command of Jesus to his church is to make disciples of all nations, not to increase our market share.
We should probably note here that there are also many people who grow up in a Christian home and never remember a time that they didn’t believe in Jesus. As a paedobaptist, I believe that such people should properly have been baptised as infants (as opposed to ‘dedicated’, another method we have made up yet which lacks any biblical warrant), and are therefore non-communing memebers of the church–that is, they are a part of the people of God, but they do not receive the Lord’s Supper. When they are able to profess faith in Christ they then begin celebrating Communion with the rest of the family of which they have been a part from birth.
It would be interesting to do a study of conversions in the New Testament. I suspect that much of what has become standard in the evangelical church would be quite foreign to the early church. There is no doubt that the ’sinner’s prayer’, practically sacrosanct to us, is conspicuously absent from the Bible.
Soooo, I don’t really know what to say to sum this all up…Let’s look to the Bible to establish our church practice, and when the Bible is silent, let’s proceed on biblical principles, keeping in mind that our hearts are idol factories, always wanting to place our confidence in ourselves. Let’s avoid adopting the passing wisdom of this age, and avoid those churches which have become infatuated with it. Above all let’s strive to give our Lord the glory for what he has done, and stay away from this silly business of telling each other how many people were ’saved’ at our services.
April 12th, 2005 at 1:55 pm
“One of the idiosyncracies of Scottish church circles I have experienced in our time here is the idea of questioning one’s salvation. There is a history going back several hundred years in Scotland of people seriously doubting their own salvation–often for very long periods of time. Occasionally it has gotten to the point that people have said you aren’t really saved unless you question your salvation.”
Oh, but unfortunately this isn’t such a foreign concept to me at all. In my church I’ve seen two (very) different youth ministers come into leadership since I became a Christian in 7th grade, and one of the few things they had in common was an inability to assure any of their youth of the hope they have in Christ because they themselves often confess(ed) to serious issues with their own faith. (This is a traditional-as-can-be, Southern Baptist church I’m talking about.) There are several other church leaders (leaders!) in my community that I can think of as doing the same. It is seriously like these men, in following McLaren’s “generous orthodoxy” lead, are mistaking humility for being generously flexible with absolute truths, including salvation. And so in turn, you have youth who are not only having the typical insecurity issues of adolescence, but who are struggling because they’re practically taught that it is arrogant to be consistently assured of their salvation. It is absolutely revolting. Of course, I don’t discount the problem of over-assurance here, either.