September 6, 2009 | 8:00 a.m.

Conversion Management

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 150
Acts 10:1-33

“John baptized with water,
but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”

Acts 11:16 (NRSV)

Categories–I think about how much
we use them. This is not that. This belongs.
That does not. We cannot do without sorting,
without categories, without definitions.
. . .
I need to learn this in life:
When to recognize, to name, and to sort—
and when to immerse, to soak, to tumble,
and be rinsed free of opinions.
Grant that I may as much as possible honor You in all things.

Gunilla Norris
“Sorting Wash”

The book of Acts begins where the Gospel of Luke ended. It gives an account of how the early church came to be: from the resurrection of Jesus to the ministry of Paul. The first half of Acts focuses mostly on the Jewish-Christian church, and the second half of Acts on the Gentile-Christian mission.

As the book of Acts recounts, the church grew by means of conversion. The book is loaded with different conversion stories. The one in chapter 10, which we read this morning, is significant, not just because each and every conversion is significant, but more because this story was about the first Gentile to be converted.

Once you read this story in the context of what precedes and what follows, it becomes clear that the first conversion of a Gentile can be seen as a “tipping point” in the life of the church. For the author of Acts, this one conversion holds a kernel of the possibility of great sudden change that will follow.

Up to now, the church consisted only of Jewish-Christians. Jesus, who was a Jew, had preached and taught among fellow Jews, and his disciples, who also were Jewish, carried on Jesus’ ministry, growing the Jewish-Christian church in Jerusalem. It is not until Peter, a Greek-speaking Jew, was intimately involved in the first conversion of a Gentile that the church would be set on a new and different course. The conversion of Cornelius, a Gentile, was immediately followed by many more conversions of Gentiles. So astounding was this experience to Peter and other Jewish-Christians with him that Peter went up to Jerusalem to give a step-by-step account of this conversion. Before the Apostolic Council, Peter stood and gave testimony that God had granted Gentiles the Holy Spirit, just as God had granted it to them. God, he said, “has made no distinction between them and us” (Acts 15:9).

In his popular book The Tipping Point, science journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell has written about the phenomenon of how little things can make a big difference, how little changes can have big effects. Things that you might consider to be incidental can turn out to be quite consequential. One way by which this can happen is by what Gladwell calls “a word-of-mouth epidemic.” Gladwell cites a well-known story from American history to demonstrate this point: the legend of Paul Revere’s midnight ride from Charlestown to Lexington.

On the afternoon of April 18, 1775, a young boy who worked at a livery stable in Boston overheard one British army officer say to another something about “hell to pay tomorrow.” The stable boy ran with the news to Boston’s North End, to the home of a silversmith named Paul Revere. . . . As the afternoon wore on, Revere . . . became more and more convinced that the British were about to make the major move that had long been rumored. (p. 30)

As the legend goes, it was Paul Revere’s ride by which word was effectively spread that the British were coming, resulting in an organized colonial militia that would confront the British and ignite what has become known as the American Revolution. Malcolm cites this story as an example of how news that travels word-of-mouth can incite a movement (p. 32).

I have always found it quite remarkable that Christianity, a worldwide religion today, still spreading rapidly among the people of Latin America and Africa, began as a very small movement in which a very small number of eyewitnesses told stories about Jesus, what they heard him say and what they saw him do. All those years ago the church began and today continues to grow by word-of-mouth, one conversion at a time. It is, I think, the most remarkable example of a word-of-mouth epidemic. Gladwell explains that as surprising as it may seem, it is nevertheless “safe to say that word-of-mouth is—even in this age of mass communications and multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns—still the most important form of human communication” (p. 32).

Change involves, of course, not only word-of-mouth contagion. Dramatic change involves other factors as well. How change can happen, especially how big change can happen, is a question in which most everyone, it seems, would take an interest. In a world that is changing more rapidly than we have ever experienced before, it makes sense that individuals, businesses, and institutions feel the need to understand the possibilities, the processes, and the management of change.

The church is no exception. No matter how much we might like the church to be our refuge from the rapidly changing world we face each and every day, the church too must keep changing. This has become clear especially to many mainline denominational churches in the U.S., which are struggling with the reality of a shrinking membership. What sociologists of religion are finding is that the decline in mainline church attendance correlates with the rapid rise in cultural diversity. In contrast with the 1990 census, in which there were five racial categories with which persons could identify, the 2000 census included sixty-three racial categories (Eric Law, Sacred Acts, Holy Change, p. 10). In order to adjust to changing demographics, not just in urban but also in some suburban and rural areas, churches have to learn how to keep changing themselves.

In his book Sacred Acts, Holy Changes, Episcopal priest, director of the Kaleidoscope Institute, and consultant to many congregations nationwide, Eric Law distinguishes between two motivations driving churches to change. Some churches, he has found, strive to implement changes because they want to survive. In the face of a changing world, they don’t want to become obsolete and die. These churches operate out of what he calls a “maintenance model” (p. 34). They are willing to make only those changes that will allow them to remain as they always have been. In contrast to the maintenance model is the missionary model of being church. The missionary model works on the premise that, unlike other institutions, the church is called to change not for the sake of its survival but for the sake of its mission. “We change,” Law writes, “in order to present Christ anew to a world that has changed and is still changing” (p. 27).

Christians have understood the change that they undergo as “conversion.” Sometimes we tend to think and talk about conversion as something that happens to a sole individual, as if it had no communal dimension to it whatsoever. Living in a time when scientific rationalism frames our way of thinking, we may tend to view conversion as an esoteric and emotional event that escapes any kind of communal explanation or verification. This is not, however, how the church has always understood conversion.

For the author of Acts, conversion was something that happened as much to the church as to the individual convert. The story of Cornelius’s conversion is at the same time a story about the early church’s conversion. By this, I don’t mean to say that each time a new person joins the body of Christ, the body itself is changed. This may be the case, but it isn’t the point of the story. If we follow the story carefully, we notice that Peter and Cornelius are both recipients of visions, guiding them to act in new ways. Peter, in this story, represents the church. He is an official of the church and in time becomes known as the rock upon which the church is built. In Peter’s vision, three times a voice commands him to kill and eat food that Jewish law deemed unclean. When Peter says, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean,” the voice in his vision tells him, “What God has made clean you must not call profane.”

Interestingly, this vision, according to biblical scholars, is older than the story we read from Acts. Debate over eating clean and unclean foods already existed in Jewish communities. It was an issue that Jesus found himself addressing during his lifetime. While the issue of clean and unclean foods originally had nothing to do with human relationships, here it does. By inserting the vision account into this story about the first Gentile to be converted, the author of Acts relates the two issues. He portrays Peter as interpreting the vision about food in such a way that it has meaning for how the Jewish-Christian church should relate to Gentiles. “You yourselves know,” Peter says, “that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean.”

Inherent in the very mission of the church is the call to conversion—not only the conversion of persons who are new to the Christian faith, but also the conversion of ourselves as we strive to be faithful in a changing world. Peter and, through him, the church were called to give up some of their most deep-seated categories for ordering the world so that they could begin relating in a new way to people different from themselves. This was the conversion that set the church on a new course of faithfulness. We are so fortunate to have this story of the early church saved as part of our scriptures. There are lessons to be learned from the early church, lessons about how fully we must be willing to change ourselves, not so that we can survive, but so that we can spread God’s good news to the ends of the world. Thanks be to God. Amen.