In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
A new report sponsored by Wycliffe College’s Institute of Evangelism called Finding Faith in Canada Today offers (in their words) a “particularly Canadian take” on how adults are coming to know Jesus Christ these days.
Tom: I haven’t spent much time thinking about whether there is anything unique about the process of getting saved in Canada as opposed to getting saved anywhere else, but I am prepared to be schooled if necessary. Immanuel Can, what interested you about this report?
Immanuel Can: Someone sent it to me. She and her husband are heavily involved in outreach, so it’s not surprising she found it. What interests me is that it claims to explain something very, very important: how and when people are getting saved today. That should be of interest to any Christian, no?
Jumping Out
Tom: Absolutely. I will say I found a few of its claims surprising, and others very much as I suspected. What jumped out at you, IC?
IC: Right away, the claim that conversions are happening at the same rate as they usually have. Conventional wisdom and skeptical traditions both claim that Christianity is on the decline; and in the West, we seem anecdotally to think it’s harder for people to come to the Lord these days. The survey suggests that the demographics might not bear that anxiety out.
Tom: Yes, I found that interesting. I’m in a church these days that has multiple baptisms every year, and the number of relatively new Christians I observe enjoying the fellowship of the believers every week is very reassuring. But I tend to think of this congregation as a bit of an outlier. If the conversion rate across Canada is remaining relatively consistent over time, I’d be very happy. Of course, the comparison to times past doesn’t tell us whether the historical conversion rate was particularly high, or whether the efforts of Christians to reach their friends and neighbors were as effective as they could be, it just tells us that nothing too very different is happening today.
Assessing Ambiguities
IC: Well, and it doesn’t break things down by theology or “denomination”, if we can use that horrid word.
Are the people “becoming Christians” doing so on the terms understood in the
Tom: A very good question. I didn’t realize the survey was Anglican-sponsored, but that may account for the self-acknowledged absence of change in the lives of many of the survey participants since “conversion”. When I read that few of the participants were more likely to read their Bibles or attend church regularly since conversion, and that few had changed their views on social issues (except, perhaps, to become more liberal), I began to wonder what was up. Were these survey participants all squeaky clean-living unbelievers who only needed to reach an understanding of who Christ is, but had little about their lives that needed his transforming power? Or, alternatively, had they not really come to grips with who Christ is at all, and therefore had not understood what kinds of changes come with acknowledging his holiness and lordship? I frankly don’t know. I don’t see real conversions where people don’t change significantly in the immediate aftermath. I can’t recall one.
Running the Numbers
IC: I’ve seen other research, and quite a lot of it, that says the mainline churches are declining in numbers very, very fast. But many of them don’t preach anything an evangelical would recognize as a “gospel” and are more-or-less humanistic social clubs. As for the clerical traditions, most also don’t have a gospel of salvation by grace, so what happens to our statistics if their numbers (up or down) are rolled in? It’s very hard to be sure what the survey is really indicating, but my educated guess would be that there’s actually growth in the evangelical side, and rapid shrinkage in some other quarters. But it would take a careful differentiation between types of “salvation” in the survey to tell us that.
Tom: Yes, I think that’s a fair observation.
One of the report’s conclusions from the data is that Canadian adults are getting saved from ages 17-70, with no great drop off in the later years of life. That is encouraging to me. My anecdotal observation was that it gets harder to come to Christ as you age. People double down on the choices they made earlier in life and become hardened to the gospel as they near the big exit. Maybe this doesn’t invalidate what I’m observing, because I’m thinking of men or women with repeated opportunities to accept Christ who keep passively rejecting the gospel. “He who is often reproved, yet stiffens his neck, will suddenly be broken beyond healing.” But perhaps this survey indicates there are older folks who have not heard and understood the gospel until later in life. There is hope for the elderly, and I like knowing that.
IC: Yes.
Evangelizing the Church
Now, another thing that was among their major conclusions is that we ought to evangelize to the church, not just to the outside world. What would your comment on that be, Tom?
Tom: Yes, that came out of a data set that said 18% of conversions were people who were already attending church. The conclusion of the analysts was that churches should start catering to that potential 18% who may already be sitting in the pews, ready to hear the gospel preached in church. That’s faulty reasoning in my book. I see those numbers as reinforcing my own belief that church meetings are primarily for worship, teaching, fellowship and prayer, rather than for overt evangelism efforts. After all, 82% of the people in the pews of those churches met the Lord elsewhere. That’s the big takeaway from their data, and they are reading it backwards.
So, I don’t think their data drove their conclusions; I think their preconceived notions of what the church should be doing drove them.
IC: An excellent point.
Salvation as a Process
What about the fact that they claim that conversion, for most people, is a kind of process, rather than a sort of decision-of-the-moment; how would you react to that?
Tom: I think it’s a long overdue recognition of the reality of modern, Western conversions. I welcome it. When Peter spoke at Pentecost and 3,000 Jews confessed Christ in a single day, the abruptness of their conversions was entirely a product of having all the necessary information at hand to make that decision. Their background in Judaism caused them to seek Messiah, and Peter had just proved to them from the scriptures that Jesus Christ answered to every word of the Old Testament prophecies about him. We cannot possibly duplicate that sort of instant understanding in Western cultures, so we cannot expect to duplicate the obedient response that followed it. Most of the audience for any gospel presentation in the West these days is ignorant of the entire Old Testament. So of course educating them is a process, and it may be a lengthy one.
IC: Yes, I agree. It’s often not possible to say, for example, at precisely what moment a merely verbal profession transforms into a deeper commitment to the truth of what the mouth may have been long practiced to say. But I think there’s a good reason why the apostle Paul instructs, “let all things be done for edification” in the church; the process of educating believers in what they are truly being invited to believe is, in itself, a process of conviction and spiritual regeneration. That the convert, after the fact, is unable to pinpoint the precise moment when edification led to salvation does not, for one second, imply that no precise moment existed. Perhaps it did. God alone knows what it is, if it did, though. This should caution us against pressing too urgently for a verbal confession-on-the-spot that might turn out afterward to be little more than compliance in the heat of the moment, with the heart left unchanged.
The Role of Good Teaching
This, too, pertains to your earlier objection to preaching salvation to the church. There won’t be much edifying going on if all we do is badger believers to make sure they’re saved at the expense of developing their awareness of the great truths that inform that. But good teaching testifies and saves, as well as maturing the believers.
Tom: Can I take you up on that great line “good teaching testifies and saves”? That was my experience in the eighties with a youth group. I won’t even say the teaching was always good, but we were always in the Bible and the errors I made got caught and hammered out in time. What’s interesting is that a whole group of kids, almost a dozen, came, studied and eventually confessed Christ over a three-year period without any gospel preaching or formal evangelism at all. It was pure Bible study. Many are still going on for the Lord today.
IC: The chart of “Most Significant Factors in Becoming Christian” had some surprises. Anything of note to you, Tom?
Tom: Oh, that is well worth pointing out. Right at the top were “Friendship”, “Church”, “Spouse/partner” and “Reading Bible”. Down at the bottom were youth groups, online church, websites and Christian camps. My personal experience has been that youth groups are fairly effective. Surprise number one. But the prominence of friendships on that list was huge to me. Some Christians disdain friendships with the unsaved, perhaps feeling their carnality will rub off. This survey strongly suggests it can work the other way if you are intentional about it. My personal experience agrees with the survey. Get out there and make contact with people. I do believe that’s how the gospel spreads.
Relationship Evangelism
IC: Well, is not the whole plan of salvation a relationship? We are invited into fellowship with the Lord of glory. If you don’t know God, who’s better to introduce you than somebody who has a strong relationship with him and with you?
But why don’t Christians make more unbelieving friends? That, I think, is a topic for another THH, is it not?
Tom: I agree IC, let’s do that.
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