Jesus said “Follow me” thirteen times in the Gospels. Nothing indirect about it, those simple words make for a most serious command. Contrary to how lightly the command is taken by many Christians today, to follow Jesus as a disciple meant rigorous training with a result of genuine Christian conversion whereby the candidate came to embody an ethical life; “on earth as it is in heaven.…”
After Jesus’ death, conversion came to mean something very different to contemporaries of the Apostles than to modern day would-be disciples. For one thing, as the disciples were dying off and then their followers as well, the early church began development of a pathway to discipleship which required several years of catechism before the individual was ever baptized. That’s because the goal was genuine conversion designed to facilitate a change in the whole person. Nowadays, Christian life often begins and ends with baptism.
This is a far cry from the formational change a catechumen underwent in the early church. Whereas today it can be impossible to tell a self-identified Christian apart from someone with strictly secular beliefs, the early converts were expected to demonstrate “a dynamic change in belief, behavior, and belonging,” according to Alan Kreider, an early church historian. Furthermore, education of Scripture came afterward-until the time of Constantine. (In fact, Constantine waited until he was on his deathbed to be baptized because he did not want to change his behavior or his beliefs!) In other words, it was not head knowledge that mattered most, but a genuine Christian conversion in all aspects of a person and one’s life in relation to others.
How important it is in our times to wrestle with the spirit of what the church only a few generations removed from Jesus was trying to keep alive and implement by understanding how it understood Christian conversion. Its essence was the formation of a people who understood clearly their responsibility to serve the poor among them — and especially people low on the social hierarchy which would have included slaves, outcasts, immigrants, women and children and all those on the margins.
What I see is usually a watered-down meaning of conversion where one’s personal (and strictly private) relationship with God is one of projection of what one wants God to be and one that is in support of the status quo rather than seeking to emulate the God of justice and deliverance evident throughout the Hebrew and New Testaments; a God whose love for humanity is shown consistently through justice for the vulnerable and commitment to righting what is wrong in our communities.
As followers of the way of Jesus, Christians are called into formative conversation so that we can be faithful witness to and within society. What good is it to claim to be a Christian when we act like everyone else and where our churches are places where no justice work is being undertaken? The church ought to be comprised of a justice seeking people because we have encountered the God of justice.
— Reflections appears regularly on the religion page. The column features a variety of local writers, coordinated through the Monroe Area Clergy Group. Christie Mandas is the associate pastor of St. John’s United Church of Christ in Monroe.
