Growing Christians: A four-stage catechism
I did my clinical pastoral education at the Central Correctional Institution on the banks of the Congaree River, which flows through the city of Columbia, South Carolina. The old dungeonlike facility has since been torn down and an upscale housing development is emerging in its place. At CCI, I met a guy named Pee Wee Gaskins. Great guy on the surface; also a notorious serial killer. Pee Wee asked for communion just before I left the prison that summer to return to seminary. A couple of months later he was linked to (and eventually executed for) an in-house radio bomb that killed a fellow inmate. I've often wondered whether Pee Wee asked for communion as some sort of precrime absolution for what he was hatching. Sometimes Christians think conversion is only for flamboyant and notorious sinners like Pee Wee.
Conversion is always a lifelong process. It is never finished for any of us. "For while we are still in this tent, we groan under our burden, because we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up in life" (2 Cor. 5:4). Six weeks of instruction in an inquirers' class and a handshake into church membership isn't going to foil the Father of Lies. It never has. "The number of people who claim to have been Christians for years but who lack spiritual depth and maturity is reason for alarm," writes Gordon T. Smith. "Consider the possibility that at least part of the root of this problem is a weak understanding of Christian conversion."
In his excellent book Beginning Well, Smith suggests that renewal will not occur in churches until pastors and parishioners embrace three specific things: 1) a "clear goal" that moves the justified sinner from acceptance and forgiveness in Christ to growth in holiness (sanctification); 2) a "good beginning" in which a local congregation expects and looks out for people who are turning to Jesus, assisting new converts in this turning and helping them become conversant in the vocabulary of conversion; and 3) an "intentional program of spiritual formation" in which newcomers are invited to grow in faith alongside other converts and seasoned church members.
