Summoned to Responsibility: It's Just Your Life

The Moral Dimensions to Conversion

What is the role of ethics in conversion?

When Individualism Isn’t Really Your Problem

I’m in the midst of teaching a compressed January course on “Missional Ecclesiology” for our Doctor of Ministry program,¹ and I found myself turned around by a comment that a student made. Perhaps I just need to pay attention more: in November, I taught a short course for Kinisi Theology Collective up in Boston, and the conversations with students there around the essence of the church as “the church in the ruins” will probably make their way into a book I’m desperately trying to finish.

The course I’m teaching this week is “Missional Ecclesiology”, which presupposes that the mission of the church and the essence of the church are held together in a way which invites revision of how we do church practices if we find them at odds with being God’s people in the world. Within this literature, it’s fairly common to note that the confessions and practices of the church don’t connect: it could be for reasons of hypocrisy, or because the church is implicitly dualist. But missional ecclesiology supposes (rightly) that the same God who calls the church into being is one who sends it into the world, and that this process of “keeping in step with the Spirit” is just normal.

As such, when there’s dissonance, it’s an invitation not to identify hypocrisy in the church, but to operate with some modest self-criticism. The Spirit who makes us alive and able to hear Christ is the same one who is sent by Christ and leads us into the world: sometimes, we do this well and sometimes, we’re like Peter in Galatians 2 and need some fraternal correction.

On the moral dimensions of this framework, I get leery with some of this literature, as it can trend in some unhelpful directions. In less careful hands, it ends up being “don’t like how the confessions your church makes about God are at odds with your commitments about justice? Revise your doctrine in light of your desire to do good in the world!” At its best, however, it’s an attempt to keep churches aware of the relationship between theology and ethics: that ethics is not what happens after your theology is sorted out, but ethics is always in play as we confess God.

A student from the Dallas area began by describing his church’s evangelistic strategy of knocking on doors, how they challenge attendees who are cohabitating to get married, how they offer opportunities for men to join spiritual accountability groups. As one who went through Evangelism Explosion in high school, I felt a rumbling in the force, and my ill-tuned ears perked up in uncharitable ways: this smells like individualism, I thought, that the point of coming to Jesus is to amplify your personal well-being.

One the one hand, the practices which my student was describing felt like self-actualizing kinds of things, that being a Christian makes you a better person, that being a Christian means an inevitable pull toward getting your life together.² But the more I listened, the more I came to conclude that the student was describing a church which summoned men to come from the shadows and out into the light. It was evangelism and missions-as-learning-to-take responsibility for one’s own life.

In a culture of sloth, the problem of sin looks less like an overt rejection of God, and more like a refusal to even care about the question. And thus, coming to God means likewise overcoming inertia and to come out of hiding. And this is a very different dynamic than pure assertion of self.

The Summons to Responsibility, The Call to Faith

Bonhoeffer, in his Discipleship, describes the dynamic of Jesus’ ministry as one in which people who are hiding in the anonymity and safety of the crowd are called out of that crowd and into the light of standing before God, not as a permanent status of being an individual, but as an interstitial state of being part of a community gathered around Christ. We must first, as with Adam and Eve, cease hiding in the trees, and be summoned to stand before God—but not as one who will kill us, but as one who calls us back to life.

This, as Bonhoeffer writes in various places, is part of what it means to be responsible: to be summoned into a community where one’s being is caught up with the good of others. To refuse to be part of a crowd is to recognize that one has agency, gifts to be exercised, and that these gifts and agency are meant to be taken up in order to be a part of the community of Christ. In Life Together, he names this dynamic of being knit together with others as part of the internal dynamic of being a church—the strong and the weak taking up together on the basis of what Christ is doing between them: our moral agency is to be used for each others’ sake that together, we might image to the world what the body of Christ looks like.

And so—far from being an occasion for amplifying individualism— being called back to life, and taking up the responsibility of one’s own life for the sake of others, are part of the same package.

What I want to illuminate in this particular instance is not just that sometimes individualism isn’t that, but the thesis that conversion has not just moral implications, but moral content to it: ethics, once again, is not that which happens after conversion, but travels with it.

The Multiple Moral Dimensions of Conversion

I want to be careful with this claim, because this can easily become a kind of warmed-over 19th century Protestant theology that’s best avoided: that being the people of God is a matter of recognizing human dignity, or enacting social ethics, or something like this. Von Harnack’s dictum that Jesus preached the “universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man” renders useless not only most of the New Testament, but makes it hard to see why anyone would convert to a religion instead of just adopting a new philosophy.

But over and again, the summons to Christ is not only a call to God instead of nothing, but a call to the moral life of God instead of nothing in particular. In linking together obedience to God with particular forms of behavior—going and sinning no more, rising up and walking, leaving malicious forms of employment—ethics repeatedly comes along not as an afterthought but as the grounded shape that conversion takes.

It is too low stakes, in other words, to ask people to simply adopt belief in God instead of nothing, but the right kind of stakes to ask that people turn away from the life that is killing them and to be joined to the God who summons us to life. In delineating what it means to be the people of God brought out of Egypt, Exodus bundles together hallowing God’s name with not committing adultery; in naming what the Spirit’s work looks like, Paul names gentleness, kindness, and long-suffering.

In his The Open Secret, missions legend Lesslie Newbigin offers this caveat:

If the church that is the bearer of the gospel has also the right to lay down for new converts the ethical implications of conversion, the mission has become simply church extension….If we had attended more diligently to the testimony of the [converts], we would have learned that the experience of conversion to Christ does indeed have a necessary ethical convert. It does mean a new way of acting. But the point of ethical crisis is often quite different from the one in the mind of the missionary.³

I take his point here to be similar to the one raised in Acts: Gentile conversion doesn’t mean adoption of all that incumbent upon circumcised Jews, but that which is learned in tandem with the Gentiles. When Paul attends the Jerusalem council, it is no small detail that Titus—a Gentile convert—was there in the room.⁴ What Newbigin has in mind here, it seems, is that if there is to be a unity among churches, particularly on the moral lives of the converted, it is one which is elicited with testimony from the converted themselves. Weaponizing the new to the faith for or against wokeness, or for or against your favored cultural flashpoint neglects that churches emerge in and through the one work of the Spirit, thus drawn together in critical conversation, albeit a conversation in which the conversion is mutual.

Acts 15 offers something of this, I think: the Gentiles are not asked to refrain from all that constitutes them as Gentiles, but to refrain from that which would be a barrier to them being incorporated into a Jewish church: idolatry, sexual immorality, blood and bloodsport. Innumerable issues of ethical clothing, table manners, economics, and prejudice await on the other side, but in terms of the priority concerns, the focus seems to be on that which would prevent them from being one differentiated body.

All of this is to say something simple, but difficult: that moral divisions among Christians are not always a matter of departure from historic norms, but trying to attend to the difficulties of converting to God through Christ’s body, the church. At some level, it’s hard to know when this process has gone askew, as the church can only operate according to the light which has been given in through the Scriptures and the church’s witness across time. In these matters, then—fully acknowledging Newbigin’s concern that the converted just look like images of the missionary—defaulting to those things questions which affect incorporation into Christ’s own people, a people with a rich tradition of Law and Gospel, canonically dense, and historically distended (and culturally and historically variegated). All else can then have a space to work out that which needs to be done next.

1. I’m exhausted from being up last night with vomiting dog, but have loved the class thus far. Come apply and learn with us!

2. It’s not wrong, in the sense that coming to Jesus is raising a person out of death. But I’m leery, for reasons I’ve named in earlier writings, for equating God’s work with empirical effects.

3. Ibid., 138-39.

4. Galatians 2:1, though unmentioned in Acts 15.