Rocky Cape Christian Community

D. L. Moody and Ira Sankey holding a revival meeting, Boston, Massachusetts, 1877.

Oh do not let the word depart and close thine eyes against the light;
Poor sinner harden not your heart, be saved, oh tonight!
 
    Oh why not tonight, not tonight? Oh why not, oh why not tonight?
    Wilt thou be saved? Then why not, oh why not, tonight?
 
For nearly two hundred years America, and consequently the rest of the world, has heard a steady chorus of pleas to get born again, to believe on Jesus and be saved. Not only D. L. Moody and Ira Sankey, but hundreds and finally thousands of evangelists from all Christian denominations (both Protestant and Roman Catholic) have joined that chorus to keep revivals breaking out one after the next since the 1830s.
 
"Are you born again?" has become not only the standard question, but the message of evangelical Christianity. Yet how you answer it makes less of a difference than what you might think. If you are like most Christians today, your answer would be wrong. And the question itself is definitely wrong.   
 
Jesus never asked it.
 
Being "born again" (Has it really happened, or has it not?) is nothing for you to decide. If you are born again you have seen and entered the Kingdom of God, your entire life standing in visible testimony to the fact. If it doesn't, you have not been born again.
 
A strictly spiritual or invisible "new birth" could not possibly exist. No more than strictly spiritual and invisible human beings. Do you keep checking your children to make sure they have gotten born yet -- or totally born, or born in the proper way? If your children get into trouble, if they turn sick or fight or fall into puddles and rip their clothes, do you gravely ask them for their birth certificates? Or how, exactly, they felt during birth, and what other evidence they can give of having gotten born at all? Do you take them to the doctor to verify their birth for sure?
 
Of course not. And neither does God.
 
If they're born, they're born. You never need to think or discuss it again because their birth is self-evident. You focus instead on keeping them healthy, growing, learning, and alive.
 
So does God.
 
* * * * *
 
"You must be born again. . . ."
 
Only the tiniest minority of Christians, only one out of a thousand -- or of a million, perhaps -- has ever bothered looking into these words of Jesus and finding out from his conversation with Nicodemus what he was talking about. For all the rest of today's Christians, getting born again has come to mean nothing more than the awesome experience, their "crisis conversion," in which they encountered God's mercy for the first time.  
 
It happens like this: The drunkard, the fornicator, the proud empty Pharisee or the suicidally wretched sinner, comes to a spiritual and emotional melt-down. The weight of guilt presses so heavily upon his soul that his life begins to crumble and break apart. Then, perhaps through fiery preaching, an altar call, a great hymn, or simply on a quiet walk through the woods, the sinner gets overwhelmed with an inner compulsion to get right with God. The Spirit of God speaks to him. He hears (or perhaps just remembers) the invitation of Christ to come to him if one is heavy-laden and receive rest for one's soul. With the whole weight of past sins flooding over him, the penitent one cries out to God, pleading in Jesus' name for mercy, until suddenly, miraculously, thanks to the blood that flowed on Calvary, he senses his guilt washed away, his sins blotted out to be remembered no more.
 
At that moment, in place of crushing guilt comes an incredibly great rush of gratitude to God for his mercy and grace. His unbelievably great love, so energising, so exhilarating it threatens to overwhelm the newly converted sinner to where he goes beside himself in joy. He sings and cries and shouts. He leaps into the air (or at least feels like it), and if he gets the immediate support of many others to whom the same thing is happening, the atmosphere may become charged with absolute frenzy. Everyone crying, praying, confessing one to another, exulting in new-found freedom and peace, the likes of which cannot have happened before. . . .
 
But it has.
 
It happened to me thirty-four years ago (while I was a horse-and-buggy-driving Orthodox Mennonite), and I know it has happened to most of you.  
 
Crisis conversions. Mass conversions. Great weeping revival conversions where thousands upon thousands fall on their faces and get delivered from their sins have been taking place for centuries. While America and Europe, with all the rest of the "Christian world" in tow, keep prancing down the broad road to apostacy and ruin, not having missed a beat.
 
Born again, yet moving rapidly away from God. How can that be? Is anything wrong?
 
Do we need yet greater and better revivals? Do we need to pray and shout or plead and cry and sing even louder and longer for people to get born again for real?
 
No we don't. We need to come to our senses and realise that for two hundred years we have mistaken crisis conversions for the new birth. We have zeroed in on conversion as an end in itself, as the goal of everything we live and work for, and in so doing we have nearly wiped true Christianity, Jesus' Gospel, from the face of the earth.
 
A Christianity consisting of people focused on the crisis of conversion, a Christianity that gets no further than continually repenting and believing and being delivered from its sins, is by nature weak, wishy-washy, and categorically incapable of heading in any constant direction, let alone any good direction, from one generation to the next.
 
Conversion-focused Christianity falls immediately into petty power-struggles, false prophecies, doctrinal wrangling and tangling, missionary enthusiasm that sprouts great crops of weeds, and that brings about the shipwreck of faith, rampant apostasy, in not too many years.
 
So, what is its alternative? Where is the better way?
 
We may find the Way by turning to Jesus' Gospel, to John chapter three, and listening to what he really said. Jesus said we must get born again to see  

 
Have you seen it?
 
Could you describe it to me?
 
Nothing frightens me more than the fact that of all born again believers (including recently born-again Hutterites, Mennonites and Amish) that I have met in the last thirty years, only the tiniest of tiny minorities has any concrete idea of what the Kingdom of God even is. Or how it would look if it came from heaven to earth, as we keep praying in the Lord's prayer.  
 
So focused has modern-day evangelism become on crisis conversions, that getting BORN AGAIN has taken centre stage. It has become the essence of all that gets preached or done, while the good news of the Kingdom of God has gotten lost by the way.
 
What horrible deception!
 
What a shocking state of affairs while we stand on the brink of global catastrophe, everything falling apart around us. The church reduced to nothing more than a birthing clinic, bringing souls to spiritual life but leaving them stranded and perishing on the sidewalks of the world.
 
Is there anything wrong with having a crisis conversion experience?
 
Certainly not. Many believers (particularly those that have lived in sin for a long time) have had them -- but not nearly all of God's children have them. Just like in a natural sense (birth by water) so there is variety in spiritual birth. For some it goes easy. Slick as a whistle. For others it is a great life-threatening struggle. Where we go seriously, dreadfully, wrong is where we make one way of birth, one crisis conversion experience, a standard for the whole church. "Either you get gloriously converted, born again with all the emotions I experienced, or I will disown you."
 
Focusing on crisis conversions leads us into the foolishness and error of the glorified testimony. Instead of preaching the cross, instead of witnessing to Jesus' Gospel of the Kingdom, we get up and tell long seamy stories or write entire books about the horrible things we did and how amazingly we got delivered.
 
None of the apostles (not even Paul) did that. No crowd needs to feed its carnal appetite by hearing you talk of all that filth and violence, all you did while drunk, or what you pulled off as a youngster in your grandparents' hay mow. It is a shame, said Paul, to speak of what gets done in secret and forgetting what is behind we are to press on toward the mark of our high calling in Jesus.
 
Focusing on crisis conversions makes heroes out of the really bad guys, long-haired tattoed bikers and drug addicts that get marvellously born again, while marginalising or downplaying the experience of those that grew up in godly homes. Putting such a premium on having the wildest most disgusting stories to tell, it either pushes those with less-than-dramatic experiences into the background, or else into sharing long testimonies that are largely fake or blown out of proportion.
 
Focusing on crisis conversions feeds spiritual pride like nothing else. The brother or sister with the most dramatic tale to tell becomes a spiritual giant, taking for granted that he or she is spiritually far ahead of the rest. How many born-again young people don't think they know more than their preachers, their parents, or the old stuffy churches to which they belong?
 
Focusing on crisis conversions makes people egotistic and worldly. Not knowing anything about the kingdom of God, never having seen the Kingdom demonstrated or heard it preached, they think being a Christian consists of getting born again and telling others to get born again too. Being a good missionary is all that matters, but to live in and like the world does not matter, in their minds, at all.
 
Focusing on crisis conversions makes people judgemental, partial, and absolutely impossible to get on with. All it takes is for someone to whisper, or for the doubt to be raised, about someone's else's experience (perhaps he's not even born again. . . .) and the greatest walls of prejudice, suspicion, and treachery go up at once. Families and churches fall apart. Vicious cycles of accusation and finger-pointing get everyone into apocalyptic moods. How, after all, can a poor young man keep living at home if he knows in his heart that Mom and Dad are not yet properly born again?
 
Focusing on crisis conversions distorts all of Jesus' teachings, upsets his real Gospel (the Gospel of the Kingdom), and creates spiritual rivalry among believers that always results, sooner or later, in carnality of a different kind. (No longer the tattoed biker kind but the proud puffed-up wanna-be preacher kind.)   
 
Who, or what, will redeem you from that?
 
You need to change your focus. Like Nicodemus, you need to come to Jesus and learn what it means to get born again so you may see the Kingdom of God. Then you will see all of life -- human life, plant and animal life, cosmic life, in every one of its social, economic, spiritual, physical and eternal aspects -- in a totally new and unfamiliar light. What was up will suddenly go down for you. What was down will come up. For to see the Kingdom of God is to see Jesus. No glorious experience, no crisis conversion to talk about for the rest of your life, but God's supremely glorious Son, resplendant in his garment dipped in blood, conquering the universe -- now. As if born again you will see completely out and beyond this world, this planet with all its woes, into coming worlds, new heavens and a new earth where righteousness dwells.
 
Then you will have more than cheap entertainment like this:

 
Then, having caught a glimpse, not of any great evangelist, but of Jesus and his cosmic kingdom, you will remain permanently transfixed. Transformed. Business will never settle back to usual again. Another life, totally new ETERNAL life, will begin for you in Jesus' Kingdom community on earth.
 
Will you let me make a prophecy?
 
Either you born-again Hutterites, Mennonites and Amish (or born-again whoever you are), overcome your focus on crisis conversions to rediscover the Kingdom of God, or you and your families and born-again churches will soon be exactly where D.L. Moody and Ira Sankey's fancy-hatted respectable-businessman Boston crowd ended up a century ago.
 
Time (or the end of time) will reveal it all.
 
Peter
 
Rocky Cape Christian Community
19509 Bass Highway
Detention River, Tasmania 7321
Australia
www.thecommonlife.com.au