In an evangelical Christian context, the word ‘conversion’ describes the turning from a non-religious or a nominally religious way of life to embrace the Christian faith. Conversion is another way of describing the radical inner awakening to God which Jesus described as being ‘born again’.
From as far back as I can remember, I was made aware of the need to be ‘born again’ if I was to be sure of reaching heaven. I have no doubt my parents and Sunday School teachers spoke of the love of God, though I don’t recall this. But the emphasis was not on loving this great Being in return but upon seeking the change which made you acceptable to God. I think I felt that God would love a reborn me rather than the me I was, and that my security in God’s love depended on my finding and entering the door marked ‘conversion’.
I remember sitting on my mother’s knee in the darkened, fire-lit back room of the house one winter evening when I was very young. I think it was Sunday, and my father was out at the Gospel Meeting. Together we sang the old chorus
In to my heart,
In to my heart,
Come in to my heart, Lord Jesus
Come in today,
Come in to stay.
Come in to my heart, Lord Jesus
I can’t recall how sincere I was in my singing. But certainly I had no sense of encountering God, no sense of joy, of ‘coming home.’ Much later, I would come to realise that the evangelical belief in the need ‘to be saved’ has room both for conversion as a ‘dramatic crisis’ and as a ‘gradual process of opening up to God.’ I would understand that quiet moments of spiritual and mental engagement with God in which the emotions are not necessarily deeply stirred can be as valid as those conversions where there is a burning sense of the divine. But from what I heard as a child, I formed the impression that you could measure the authenticity of your turning to God by the extent to which your heart was invaded by a sense of his love and joy, and this therapeutic drama forever eluded me.
I was confused because though believed the Christian message as it had been taught to me wholly and without reservation, on those occasions when I had sought quietly to respond to God, usually prompted by guilt, the outcome had not been as I had been led to anticipate. There had been no dramatic sense of inner revolution, no overwhelming inrush of God-consciousness, such as the stories of others had led me to expect.
I remember going home one bright sunny evening after church, and kneeling down desperately at the foot of my bed in the Hunting Macrae tartan kilt they made me wear on Sundays, and calling out ‘God save me!’ and listening to the silence of heaven. But driven as I was by fear rather than gently summoned by a Father’s voice I could not find that door marked ‘conversion’
I was aware of what was expected of me when an itinerant Irish evangelist, took a series of meetings in Carluke Town Hall early in my teens. Each night my parents and I listened as Eddie Macmaster spoke and sang. I found the interior of the Victorian building, its oak ceiling polished like coffin-wood, ominous.
As we walked home up Mount Stewart Street one evening, my mother said ‘One of these days John’s going to tell us he’s become a Christian.’ I felt the pressure of her expectations, and as I couldn’t deliver this gift to her, failure and inferiority.
There was a crisis when I was around 15. A family friend, only a few years older me asked if I was a Christian. I remember the room we were standing in when she asked the question, and even the title of the library book lying on the table. Was I a Christian? ‘Yes,’ I said, knowing I was lying. That fatal word ‘Yes’ cast a long shadow over the rest of my teenage years and beyond.
The next questions, of course, were ‘When?’ and ‘How?’, and for inspiration in answering them, I simply looked back to the most recent occasion when, impelled by a sermon, I had called out to God to save me, only to be met by heaven’s usual indifference.
The news that I had ‘become a Christian’ was greeted joyfully by my parents. The lie had been told, and there was no turning back. I was baptised (how did that pastor not discern the ambivalence in the heart of that young man attending baptism classes?) and joined Carluke Baptist Church, which we attended at that point.
But I had not, to my knowledge, been saved, and over the next six years I remained tense and miserable, sometimes waking at night with a strange, unsettling anxiety as once again I faced the weekly ordeal of eating bread and drinking wine as I felt unworthily, the Sunday-by-Sunday terror that an angry God might that week lose his patience and strike me dead.
The last resort, I felt, was to admit to my hypocrisy: I was quite certain that if I had the courage to do this, then someone would help me, opening my eyes to whatever it was I was failing to see. I have no idea what the particular catalyst was, but I clearly remember speaking to people close to me, telling them that I was living a lie, that I wasn’t a Christian at all, that I had never really made the decision to accept Christ. ‘Of course you are a Christian!’ I was told, and when I insisted they added ‘This is just the devil getting at you!’ ‘In any case,’ they added, ‘If you’re not a Christian, you know how to become one.’
The door marked ‘conversion’ seemed even more remote. I think I would have done anything to find God, to breach his wall of silence, but heaven seemed forever closed to me.
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