There are some traditions which take the experience that Saul had on the road to Damascus – which take his sudden, dramatic, life-changing conversion – there are some traditions which take the experience that Saul had on the road to Damascus as the yardstick against which the sincerity or the depth of every Christian’s faith is to be measured.
If a person can tell a before-and-after story about their life in which what separates “the before” from “the after” is a decision, conscious decision, they made to embrace the love and the forgiveness Jesus offers them, then they are a Christian. If they can’t, they’re not. They use different language for this, like: “accepting Christ as your personal Lord and Savior,” or “being born again,” or “getting saved,” but it all describes the same phenomenon, the same inner phenomenon: a personal, spiritual, often deeply emotional choice to shape the whole of their life around a love for Jesus, as a response to a newfound, intensely felt awareness of Jesus’s love for them. “I once was lost, but now am found; once blind, but now I see” – that line from the hymn Amazing Grace is taken as the first and final norm: the pattern, the proof, the whole point of Christian faith.
Quite a lot follows from this: These traditions tend to be more individualistic. In preaching, a lot of emphasis is put on daily devotional practices like personal prayer and scripture-reading, on doing things to nurture feelings of piety, to keep the fire of those first strong feelings of love for Jesus aflame. Even worship, corporate worship, is less about the community than it is the individual. Music in these traditions is simple and mantra-like, repetitive enough so that worshippers don’t need hymnals to sing from; they can easily memorize the words and then close their eyes and shut out the world.
The words themselves encourage a sense of shutting out the world: I remember being at a service once, and everyone around me had their eyes closed and their hands raised up in ecstatic postures of surrender as they sung to Jesus, “It’s just you and me here now, only you and me here now.” There is a lot of vamping in the music, building and building, with crescendos and key changes that both keep the songs engaging but also intentionally and expertly bring worshippers to a place of emotional climax.
The services feel less ritualistic and structured and more free-form, with a lot of spontaneity. Rituals, like reciting the Lord’s Prayer or coming forward for communion, are too easy to do unfeelingly, almost mechanically. The individual who is to choose Jesus and love Jesus can too easily be lost within the community, or worse, hide within the community. So, in these traditions, there’s not much of that. Pastors almost never write out prayers or even write out sermons. It’s all extemporaneous, and it often comes off as more authentic, more expressive, more engaging, more immediate, more raw, more contemporary-seeming and of the moment. (Of course, as any jazz musician will tell you, spontaneity actually requires quite a lot of structure, so it isn’t that these services are not traditional; they are extraordinarily traditional. They have just exchanged one set of traditions for another, have exchanged traditions shaped in community over centuries for anti-those-traditions traditions more reflective of the pastor’s personal style.)
In the United States, “evangelical” is the sort of umbrella term for these Christian traditions, for these Christian traditions which put conversion and personal, emotional religious experience at the center of their practice of faith. Like, if Pew or Gallup or some polling organization ever calls you and asks about your religious affiliation: If you answer, “Protestant,” they will ask you another question – “Do you consider yourself to have been born again?” If you answer, “Yes,” they will count you as an evangelical Protestant. If you answer, “No,” they will count you as a “mainline” Protestant.
The centrality of conversion, of what happened to Saul on the road to Damascus, is the dividing line. Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Baptists (but mostly only the Baptists in the North, not the Baptists in the South), the Disciples of Christ, and we in the UCC, we Congregationalists, are all considered “mainline Protestant” denominations.
If evangelicals are expressive, engaging, and warm, we are lifeless, boring, and cold. We should put that on the sign out front. Some evangelical churches use, like, stage lights and smoke machines and videos in worship – again, they are trying to excite people, to get them emotional, to move them to convert. Our specialty is more, you know, putting people to sleep. That’s why I don’t have a LinkedIn. What would I even put under the skills and experience section? “I have soft hands, but you should see how quickly I can make a whole room full of people’s eyes glaze over.”
Sometimes, when people say that they think church is boring, I want to respond: Good. It’s supposed to be boring. It’s detox from the world, from the ceaseless barrage of bad news and advertisements and AI-generated clickbait – all of which is designed to grab you and hook you and suck you in and commodify and monetize your and your kids’ time and attention. It’s detox from the dopamine-response doom-loop most of us can’t not live our lives in.
Of course, it is boring to not have someone trying to entertain you to sell you something you don’t need. Of course it is boring to not have an algorithm – an algorithm which, like the Lord Almighty, knows you better than you know yourself, an algorithm before which all hearts are open and no secrets hid – of course it is boring to not have an algorithm feeding you exactly what you want, exactly what it knows you want 24/7. Why would anyone WANT to come someplace where the heat doesn’t work to be told, week after week, essentially, that life isn’t all about getting what you want when you want it? I don’t know. But church is supposed to about breaking our addiction to that.
It’s not that in mainline Protestant traditions like ours we don’t believe in conversion, or in dramatic, I-saw-the-light, the-scales-fell-off, life-changing, emotional religious experiences. We do. People hit rock bottom in their work, in their marriages, in their grief, with their kids, with their drinking. People fall hard; people fall hard into God, and they find themselves picked up, stood up, and energized and strengthened to begin again.
What happened to Saul on the road to Damascus does happen and happen here. But, more often than not, it happens differently. It should be said: Saul was a pretty bad dude. He was not the sort of guy you’d want to date your daughter. Most of us don’t have anything like his history of murderous villainy to turn away from. He is, in my opinion, too unrepresentative in his terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad sinner-ness to be made an exemplar of. What we do here, starting with children, with the babies we baptize, is to try keep them from becoming murderous villains and terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad sinners in the first place.
For us, ideally, conversion is a slow but steady, gentle, quiet, life-long metamorphosis of the self that should make more sudden, dramatic, blinding-light-with-a-voice-from-heaven conversions unnecessary. Conversion is not only something that happens once; conversion happens Sunday by Sunday by Sunday as a gradual growth in grace.
When nothing is happening, something is happening. When nothing is happening here, something is happening here. Conversion can happen as a renewal and as a deepening and as an unfolding that we are very rarely actually conscious of. God is slowly, patiently shaping us into better people. We are being transformed unawares.
If acts of service and compassion, if centering practices like prayer and meditation and journaling – and so, if peace, if perseverance in hope, if experiences of awe, if gratitude, if generosity, if sabbath rest, if forgiveness, if all of this has always been a part of our lives and our children’s lives, conversion will not need to take the form of an intense break with a painful past. In our mainline Protestant tradition, ideally, at any moment in our lives, we will be able to sing and to know to be true another line from the hymn Amazing Grace: “’Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.”
We will always know ourselves to have been and to be guided and accompanied and helped on the pilgrimage of life. Quite a lot follows from this, from this idea that God is something that we relax into: I think there is a way in which the experience of worship should be similar to the experience of a child coming to trust in their secure attachment to loving parents.
There shouldn’t be any one moment a child can point to and say: “And that’s when I knew my mom, that’s how I knew my dad loved me.” Ideally, love communicates itself constantly and quietly; a child should never know what it feels like to not be loved or even to wonder whether they are loved by their parents.
That’s what worship should be like: Like being in a loving environment in which, from birth, a deep sense of trust is nurtured, in which a deep sense of trust in the special energy we feel in church and that we come to name and know as God, is nurtured. Like feeling the special energy, the charge in the air that is God, and feeling joy or quiet peace or hope at the same time, like feeling the special energy, the charge in the air that is God, and feeling seen or feeling accepted or feeling strengthened at the same time – and coming to take that association, that association of God and love, entirely for granted. Rituals and rhythms of worship make that association and reinforce it. And so we return, for instance, to the table…