I'm now reading Rodney Stark's book The Rise of Christianity and found some interesting comments on how and why religious conversions occur. At one point in his career Stark studied a fair number of people who had converted to the Unification Church - the Moonies. In what I am about to quote he generalizes after his study of the Moonies, but he says that this concurs with his studies of conversions to other faiths. One of the unique things about this study is that he was able to interview many people who were in the process of conversion. In other words, he knew them for some time before and after their conversions. It sounded a little weird to me, for instance how could you know somoene was "on the road" to conversion. But from what I gather he immersed himself in a group of Moonies so he was able to interact with many whom they were "witnessing" to during the process of their conversion. This is his summary on pp. 16-17:
We soon realized that of all the people the Moonies encountered in their efforts to spread their faith, the only ones who joined were those whose interpersonal attachments to members overbalanced their attachments to nonmembers. In effect, conversion is not about seeking or embracing an ideology; it is about bringing one's religious behavior into alignment with that of one's friends and family members.
Interestingly, he says that in postconversion interviews, the converts almost always say that they converted because of the doctrine or ideology. Yet, he is not persuaded this is so. On page 16 he says:
Lofland and I also found it interesting that although all the converts were quick to describe how their spiritual lives had been empty and desolate prior to their conversion, many claimed they had not been particularly interested in religion before.
And, on pages 19-20:
Had we not gone out and watched people as they converted, we might have missed this point entirely, because when people retrospectively describe their conversions, they tend to put the stress on theology. When asked why they converted, Moonies invariably noted the irresistible appeal of the Divine Principles (the group's scripture), suggesting that only the blind could reject such obvious and powerful truths. In making these claims converts often implied (and often stated) that their path to conversion was an end product of a search for faith. But Lofland and I knew better because we met them well before they had learned to appreciate the doctrines, before they had learned how to testify to their faith, back when they were not seeking faith at all. Indeed we could remember when most of them regarded the religious beliefs of their new set of friends as quite odd. I recall one who told me that he was quite puzzled that such nice people could get so worked up about "some guy in Korea" who claimed to be the Lord of the Second Advent. Then one day, he got worked up about this guy too. I suggest that this is also how people in the first century got worked up about someone who claimed to be the Lord of the First Advent.
As I often do, I'll share some knee-jerk reactions to all of this.
1. I would take these thoughts as helpful and generally true, but not absolute.
I can't remember who it was I recently met but I heard the testimony of someone who came to Christ through Christian television. Although Christian television is not really my cup of tea, this person said they were down, they were searching, and they came to Christ quite apart from a social group that drew them to Christ.
Helpful thoughts on this can be found in Richard Peace's book Conversion in the New Testament. Peace's book is more about the difference between conversion as process and conversion as crisis or event. He contrasts the quick and sudden conversion of Paul with that of the slow and incremental conversion of the twelve. His main point is that we have approached evangelism as if the Paul's are the norm so we've gone for methods that are designed to produce a quick and sudden conversion. He thinks that more people come to Christ the way the twelve did than the way Paul did and so we need to adjust our evangelism methods accordingly.
Fair enough and the point is well taken. There is a real sense in which Peace's theories on the conversion of the twelve can dovetail with Stark's position. Jesus formed a close knit community which provided an environment for conversion and the twelve came to faith that way.
Yet the fact is that there are still plenty of Paul's out there as well as Philippian jailers and other "gentile-type" converts whose conversions could not be explained in Stark's terms. So, my point is, take Stark's words as very helpful, but not absolute.
2. Stark's explanations seem purely naturalistic while the Bible explains conversion as a supernatural thing. At the same time, this supernatural event often takes place through quite ordinary means, thus Christians ought not to be too quick to dismiss Stark's findings.
I'm thinking particularly of the story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19ff. When the rich man in Hades asks Father Abraham to send Lazarus miraculously back to his brothers, Father Abraham tells him to choose the more ordinary means of the Word of God - the law and prophets. I'm using this as one illustration of how the gospel was ordinarily transmitted through the preaching of the Word through the existing networks of family and community.
3. Stark's findings dovetail with Os Guiness' and others work on plausibility structures.
As Guiness mentions in The Gravedigger File and as I quote in my post "The Social Dimension of Belief"
"the degree to which a belief (or disbelief) seems convincing is directly related to its "plausibility structure" - that is, the group or community which provides the social and psychological support for the beleif. If the support's structure is strong, it is easy to believe; if the support's structure is weak, it is difficult to believe. The question of whether the group's belief is actually true or not may never become an issue."
Those attachments to friends and family that Stark speaks of are the groups or communities that Guiness speaks of which provide psychological and social support for belief.
4. The supernatural nature of Paul's conversion combined with Guiness's teaching on plausibility structures help explain the apparent disconnect between Stark's theories and the gospel witness where the early disciples left their closest family members (to whom they were attached) to follow Jesus.
in other words, there was a plausibility structure in place, the Messianic hope, which could overcome the family attachment.
5. Having said that, it is not as if there was no community in play in the conversion of the disciples.
The band of disciples themselves formed a new kind of family to which they could form a mutual attachment. Also, these early disciples could interpret their newfound faith in Christ as faithfulness to the larger, historic Israelite community to which they belonged.
6. All of this is to say that, even if we want to quibble with Stark on some of this and even if we could prove him wrong, he's mostly right and mostly consistent with Scripture. And this leads to a major problem for modern Christians, especially of the evangelical variety.
7. This major problem is that most modern Christians have disconnected themselves from unbelievers, thus we are unable to provide a community or plausibility structure which will provide the seedbed of faith for unbelievers.
I don't have any real scientific evidence of this, it just seems to me to be intuitively and anecdotally true. I have heard on numerous occasions that most Christians lose any and all meaningful contact with non-Christians within a few years of becoming Christians. Again, I haven't seen any research to back this up, but it seems true to me.
I came to Christ as a young person and quickly immersed myself in the Christian subculture. From my experience, the goal of church was to help Christians disassociate themselves from non-Christians and find spiritual "havens" and "protection" within the church. This is certainly what I did to the point that I now have pretty much no meaningful contact with non-Christians (which makes it very hard for me to practice what I am preaching here!).
But Stark has some haunting words in this regard on page 20:
Most new religious movements fail because they quickly become closed, or semiclosed networks. That is they fail to keep forming and sustaining attachments to outsiders and thereby lose the capacity to grow. Successful movements discover techniques for remaining open networks, able to reach out and into new adjacent social networks. And herein lies the capacity of movements to sustain exponential rates of growth over a long period of time.
8. Which, in my mind, validates Anthony Bradley's question as to whether or not evangelicals like non-Christians. Anthony said this:
Based on recent interactions with uber-church people I'm convinced that the more Reformed and conservative a Christian gets the less likely he is to want non-Christians in his life. The proof abounds (I could give you addresses of entire churches like this). Many Conservative and Reformed evangelicals, especially, don't really believe that being God's people means pursuing unbelievers and incorporating them into "covenant life." This explains why neither their personal lives nor their churches have a vibrant non-Christian presence.
I posted on this here and got some widely divergent opinions on the validity of Anthony's thesis. I am willing to concede that he spoke in very black and white terms and so plenty of people could point out some greyness in the matter and I know there are many exceptions.
But Stark keeps using this word "attachment" to describe the kinds of social networks that make belief plausible. When Anthony hints that evangelicals don't "like" non-Christians we could have some fun Clintonian-style debate over what the word "like" means. It just seems to me that you can tell who people like by looking at who they hang out with. And it seems to me that the people you hang out with are the people you are "attached" to.
For most of my Christian life I have missed the significance of table fellowship in the gospels. But it is clear that Jesus enjoyed table fellowship with "sinners" and that this signified a level of intimacy with those "sinners" that made the religious people very uncomfortable.
And while we may not understand table fellowship in our day the way they understood it back then, it does provide some help in understanding the nature of friendship. Your friends are the ones you eat with regularly, or maybe that you golf with or I suppose for women that you shop with and do other things that women do (yeah, yeah, I know - stereotypes, I got a million of 'em). In other words, your friends are the ones you spend your discretionary time with. You can tell who you like not by who you say you like but by looking at who you spend discretionary time with - these are the people you are attached to.
I am fully aware of the dangers involved here - bad company does corrupt good morals. There is also the issue of time. Most of us have most of our time already spoken for and it is a fight just to spend time with our families and make it to one or two church activities a week where we can establish any kind of Christian friendship.
I don't mean to be flippant about this - as I said, I don't practice what I am preaching here.
Yet, I am haunted by Stark's words. If he is right, then no matter what my good intentions are in reaching out to nonbelievers I have pretty much disabled myself in the area of outreach to nonbelievers.
And I am afraid that I am illustrative of a large part of the church. If w are to grow the church and the churches we will have to come up with a way to allow nonbelievers to "attach" themselves to our communities. And if Stark is right, we'll have to find a way to do this so that these attachments become a means to conversion rather than the result of conversion.
There's a kind of irony here, isn't there? Let's make sure that more of our friends are unbelievers. Why? So that these friends will become believers.
If it were as simple as that, then the strategy is designed to fail upon the success of the plan! We'll either fail as friends (treating them like bagged game), or we'll fail as evangelists (because we only have so much time in our lives for new friends to target for conversion).
Anyway, is conversion really so much a matter of method as this? Although there are many circumstances, only one motive saves: that is, the grace of God, through faith. At what point are the circumstances of conversion confused with the motive? How concerned must we be with making ourselves seductive?
How about this: to begin with, pastors and elders should make private and public supplications, prayers, intercessions, and especially, thanksgivings for all people who are near and far, high and low, friendly and hostile. Why? Because whoever would bless our God and Father must learn to bless people, who are made in the likeness of God; and because it fits the will of God for us to desire all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. Let it be made clear that, this is our faith.
If this wins converts, sociologists will have their ideas of why it works. If it does not win converts, the sociologists will have their ideas of why it doesn't work. But when we speak of strategies, tactics, methods, and motives as the sociologist measures such things: my impulse is to distinguish the environment from the power as the explanation of a changed heart (in this case: friendship is not the means of conversion, rather it is the circumstance).
Shouldn't we say that, in any situation, only spirit begets spirit, life only comes of life, only faith transmits faith? Then let us pray for grace, that we might live according to our faith in every relation.
Posted by: Mark McConnell | November 16, 2006 at 03:12 PM
Touche', Mark.
I guess I don't have a lot of experience with living a life removed from non-Christians. For as long as I have indentified as a Christian I have been surrounded by friends who were not. In college I came to cherish this fact, because I learned so much from them. They knew what I believed and who I was, and if those things were out of alignment they could see, sometimes even more clearly than I could. They were always there to provide a challenge, to make me rethink my beliefs and my life. I am stronger because of them.
Posted by: Michelle | November 19, 2006 at 05:37 PM
"He contrasts the quick and sudden conversion of Paul with that of the slow and incremental conversion of the twelve."
Although Paul's conversion wasn't so quick and sudden. Hard to kick against the goads...
Posted by: Catez | November 21, 2006 at 06:03 PM
I disagree with your conclusion, here. I think the right conclusion from (what is hinted at despite the obscuring naturalistic errors which will probably deceive more than it helps in) Stark's work would be that the church needs to stop being a place individuals come to, and *become* the sort of community the disciples were. That is, people--and families, and groups--who encounter the church should find themselves more drawn to Christ as lived in the church than to even their own families.
Without that, our "ties" to unbelievers will merely be trade-offs against our faith.
Cheers,
PGE
Posted by: pgepps | November 22, 2006 at 04:09 PM
Believers should not have unbelieving friends. We should preach openly and clearly to our acquaintances, and if they respond, then we can be more than friends, we can be brothers and sisters in Christ!
Otherwise, knock the dust off your sandals and move on. Do not continue with people who reject God. We are not called to live in a worldly fashion, to "find people to hang out with"; we are called to preach Christ.
We should not be rude or cold, but we should not become close or expend energy that could better be used to spread the gospel to people who might respond. How many hours do people spend watching football with unbelievers that could be better spent studying the Bible or evangelizing.
The church should be all the friends or family anyone needs, a community of believers who come together to praise God and teach us how to bring others to Christ. It's not there to attract sinners, but to build up those already saved.
Any other use of our time is a waste. We will have to answer for every mindless drama we watch, every bit of small talk with God-haters, every extra nap....dying to yourself doesn't leave a lot of room for selfish pursuits.
Posted by: James Deacon | November 24, 2006 at 09:53 PM
"As for those who have not yet been called, we should pray for them to God, who calls into existence the things that do not exist. But we must by no means act haughtily towards them, as if we had distinguished ourselves." - Article 15, Canons of Dort
The Fifth Commandment
"You shall not kill.
"We should fear and love God, and so we should not endanger our neighbor’s life, nor cause him any harm, but help and befriend him in every necessity of life." Luther's Small Catechism
"... charitable thoughts, love, compassion, meekness, gentleness, kindness; peaceable, mild and courteous speeches and behavior ; forbearance, readiness to be reconciled, patient bearing and forgiving of injuries, and requiting good for evil; comforting and succoring the distressed, and protecting and defending the innocent." WLC A-135 (What are the duties required in the sixth commandment?)
What I'm trying to summarize is this: the command is, "love your neighbor". That's what we should mean by "befriend unbelievers" (if we're going to speak that way)- not because they are unbelievers, or because they are potential believers, but because they are neighbors.
Posted by: Mark McConnell | November 25, 2006 at 09:46 PM
Not for me. When I became a Christian in 1974 (after being raised in the church), I had to leave some wonderful friends and a terrific main line church to follow Jesus. They "played church" better than any group I've ever found. Unfortunately, Jesus was not preached or taught.
Posted by: Norma | November 29, 2006 at 04:01 PM
I am reading Stark's Rise of Christianity, and many other of his books and articles for my masters thesis in religious studies. I think his findings are VERY compelling.
You might want to try his article: “How New Religions Succeed: A Theoretical Model” in The Future of New Religious Movements, David G. Bromley and Philip E. Hammond editors. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987.
In it he gives a list of behaviors that, if followed, pretty much assures that a new religion will succeed.
As for some of the responses you got to your original posting - how very curious!
I am a Swedenborgian and am interested in these concepts because I want my religion to grow - simply because it is good and true and has so much to offer the world.
It is all about love!
Suzy Laidlaw
Posted by: Suzy Laidlaw | January 02, 2007 at 05:37 PM
I am reading Stark's Rise of Christianity, and many other of his books and articles for my masters thesis in religious studies. I think his findings are VERY compelling.
You might want to try his article: “How New Religions Succeed: A Theoretical Model” in The Future of New Religious Movements, David G. Bromley and Philip E. Hammond editors. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1987.
In it he gives a list of behaviors that, if followed, pretty much assures that a new religion will succeed.
As for some of the responses you got to your original posting - how very curious!
I am a Swedenborgian and am interested in these concepts because I want my religion to grow - simply because it is good and true and has so much to offer the world.
It is all about love!
Suzy Laidlaw
Posted by: Suzy Laidlaw | January 02, 2007 at 05:38 PM