Converting The Churched - Controversy Revisited Converting the Churched: Controversial Then, Controversial Now
 If you spend much time hanging around a mainline church, the issue of evangelizing people from other religions is sure to become a topic for discussion. In John Wesley, A Biography, church historian Stephen Tompkins deals extensively with a different controversy, one that still ruffles feathers now: converting professing Christians. So why does evangelizing Christians cause such a stir? For one, it threatens people with generally good hearts who have had positive faith experiences, yet have never truly surrendered their lives to Jesus Christ. We don't want to think that our faith has been inadequate, so when people tell us that we're not okay, our first response is to defend ourselves. We don't want to accept the possibility that religion can be a matter of the head without being a matter of the heart.
Surely John Wesley had reason to think that his Christianity was valid. He was an Anglican priest, after all. He had also taught at the university level, and experienced persecution by being part of the "Holy Club". His attempts at holiness before his conversion probably make post-conversion attempts by most of today's evangelicals look weak by comparison. But not until his mission to convert Native Americans in Georgia and his subsequent conversations with Peter Böhler, did he begin to realize that his own conversion had never happened. Wesley even experimentally preached this doctrine before his famous conversion experience at Aldersgate Street.
The rest of course is history, and Wesley's insistence on this doctrine got him thrown out of many churches for the rest of his ministry. If you read the accounts in his journal, you'll find Wesley and his friends chased out of different towns by people throwing rocks because he dared to ask people to test themselves and their own faith. Today, of course, when we do that, we are accused of "not being ecumenical" or being "one of those evangelicals", which is in itself interesting since I've been told that some statistics show that even in the average evangelical church, only half the people have experienced a valid conversion. I admit that I don't have the statistics to back that up, and I wonder if even George Barna could pull off an accurate survey about that. (Unconverted "evangelicals" are probably harder to reach than unconverted mainliners.)
I'm not going to insist that a rigid "date and time salvation" model is the only valid paradigm for Christian conversion. But surely there needs to be some type of conscious conversion, because without a realization of our own inability to earn salvation and a deliberate repentance and sole reliance on what the crucifixion accomplished for us as individuals, Christianity becomes nothing more than a different version of every other works-based religion on the planet.
8:06:11 PM 
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