I am writing this letter on the day on which the Church celebrates the Feast of the Conversion of St Paul. This week I shall be preparing our Lent study course which will make use of a book on St Paul recently published by our former Archbishop, Rowan Williams. As a congregation you are also currently involved in discussions about the future development of this church’s life and mission and the new Vicar who might take this forward. So putting those three things together it seems appropriate to reflect on the theme of mission and conversion.
When St Paul heard the Lord calling him on the Damascus road he heard himself addressed by his Hebrew name, Saul, the name he was proud of and which marked him out as being of the tribe of Benjamin from which had come Saul, the first King of Israel (not perhaps a very propitious heritage). Saul came from a mercantile family in the cosmopolitan city of Tarsus at the mouth of a river flowing into the Mediterranean in South Eastern Turkey. In non-Jewish circles he may already have used the name Paul. Nevertheless, one of the many consequences of the Damascus experience was a permanent change of name, signifying the fact that he would now spend most of his time as the first apostle to the gentiles. The change was not an easy one for it symbolised his agonising struggle with his Jewish heritage under the compulsion of the crucified and risen Lord, who was sending him out into a world where he would meet the hostility of both Jews and gentiles.
We tend to think of Paul as the classic example of instant and dramatic conversion – but that was not how it seemed to Paul, himself. His calling at Damascus was a momentous experience but one that he saw himself as having been prepared for since birth (Gal.1:15). He believed that God had set him aside before he was born. Damascus was a point of crisis within an unbroken process going on from birth to death; Damascus was the moment he had to face up to the constant pressure of God’s purpose for him.
And that perhaps is the first insight we need in thinking about conversion and our responsibilities in mission. God is always at work in people even before they come into contact with us. The first step in mission is the task of discerning where God might be at work in the society around us, both in individuals and in aspects of our culture. And the next step involves working out how we might respond to what God is already doing in order to build up a relationship with those who in one way or another are coming under the pressure of God.
Such responding is a difficult thing given other aspects of our culture. For many people (within the church as well as outside it) the language of mission and conversion may imply brain washing, or emotional exploitation, an attempt to entrap you and embarrass you and insult your intelligence. Somehow, then, we have to find a way of approaching and perhaps challenging people in a way that doesn’t scare them off or embarrass them, but enables them to think more about the Christian faith, offered rather than imposed, exemplified rather than explained, answering the questions people bring with them, rather than telling them what we think they ought to know. In the end, however, the question of conversion can’t be avoided. What sort of person do you become if you find yourself wanting to be a Christian or to go deeper than a nominal identification?
The popular (Dawkinsesque) answer to that question would probably be that you will have an un-enquiring mind, more interested in answers than questions, closed to the discoveries of modern science, emotionally in need of crutches, heavily into self denial, and inclined to be authoritarian. An alternative answer (perhaps more closely related to Anglicanism) is that you go to church because you like that sort thing in a vaguely mystical but essentially private way, without believing anything very definite. If you don’t recognise yourself in either of those descriptions then you may have something to learn from St Paul.
First, you will be dissatisfied. You will have a constantly niggling sense of the omnipresence of dishonesty both in yourself and in society; a dishonesty which thrives on the illusion of being in control, on doing what your society expects of you, on the deliberate disregard of the suffering and deprivation of large sections of the human race. You will also be dissatisfied with the materialist explanation (science can answer all important questions) of the world. Hearing God’s call makes you dissatisfied and it also makes you repentant. You will come to acknowledge your own part in all this dishonesty, even though you may not fully understand it; you will come to understand that you need help (grace) to change and grow; you will recognise that human goodness is actually an heroic task in which you have to learn to live with repeated failure and yet not be depressed by that; and you will also recognise that you need to be part of a community in which you can learn and grow. And finally by hearing God’s call you will become not only dissatisfied and repentant, you will also become more and more amazed; amazed by the beauty and complexity of the world and by our capacity to go on questioning it; and amazed by what God can do in our lives when we trust ourselves to his care and remain open to the risk of living truthfully and hopefully in a universe that is always harder than we want it to be.
And if you are these things, if you are dissatisfied, repentant and amazed you will grow also in the sense of what it means to be yourself, and discover as Paul did, your true identity.