Book Review
The Stages of Conversion
I Once Was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics
Taught Us About Their Path to Jesus
by Don Everts and Doug Schaupp
Intervarsity Press, 2008
(134 pages, $16.00, paperback)
Forming Intentional Disciples: The Path
to Knowing and Following Jesus
by Sherry A. Weddell
Our Sunday Visitor Publishing, 2012
(224 pages, $16.95, paperback)
reviewed by Thomas A. Baima
When I was a philosophy student, I had a professor who would begin his Phil 101 class each term by entering the room and writing on the blackboard, "What is the main challenge facing philosophy today?" Underneath, he would write the answer: "Everything you know is wrong." Turning to the class, he would ask, "Any questions?"
I saw this same question proposed again during Francis Cardinal George's first press conference as archbishop of Chicago. A reporter asked him what was the greatest challenge he faced as the new shepherd of the Catholic Church in Cook and Lake counties in Illinois. Without missing a beat, George replied, "Well, obviously, it's the epistemological dissonance of contemporary society."
While it might not have been obvious to the press corps, those in the Church who have been trying to engage postmodernism know it to be true. These two books discuss that challenge of knowing the truth in the postmodern age and what it means for evangelism.
Everts and Schaupp construct their book around the research they did with two thousand converts. From the data they collected they have constructed a description of the inner process of conversion through which the postmodern convert passes. Weddell takes their research and develops it into a program of renewal for the Catholic Church—or really any ecclesial communion that wishes to take seriously the experience of postmodern converts. Additionally, Weddell mines the significant body of research produced by the 2008 Pew "U.S. Religious Landscape Survey."
Religious leaders need to pay close attention to the findings of such data-driven research. Weddell principally uses the data to track the flow of converts in and out of both the Catholic and Protestant communities. Her findings are staggering, not only in terms of numbers and percentages but in a much more troubling way. Church leaders are making their mission and evangelism plans based on what they presume must have motivated those who left their churches. These data show that those presumptions have nothing to do with the actual motivation of converts. Everything these church leaders think they know is wrong.
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Evangelizing Outside the Walls
Both books begin with the realization that "what worked before doesn't work anymore." Both proceed with the understanding that the ordained ministry as traditionally conceived by Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants is ill-equipped to meet the postmodern skeptic where he is—that is, outside the walls of the church community. Everts and Schaupp therefore call for a ministry outside of the walls, and Weddell promotes lay ministry by what she terms "intentional disciples" in order to bring about encounters with individuals who may become seekers.
I have carefully worded that last sentence. The most effective evangelism today does not consist in responding to seekers. Both books recognize that the journey to faith begins in a pre-seeker stage. So evangelism today is not about bringing individuals to church, but about bringing the church to individuals in a personal way and then accompanying those individuals through stages of discernment. The majority of these stages of discernment take place before seeking actually begins. In the language of the ancient Church's rite of Christian initiation of adults, it all takes place before the person becomes a catechumen. Evangelism begins in the areopagus.
Many churches are quite good at running programs for seekers. But many, if not most, are quite bad at serving pre-catechumens. This is in part because such work is labor-intensive, but it is also because, notwithstanding all our business managers and executive pastors, we have lost the skill of forming pastoral friendships. Such friendships are the bridge across which a person can walk to encounter the living God.
One key idea around which both books are organized is the notion of thresholds in the conversion journey. Everts and Schaupp describe them as: trusting a Christian, becoming curious, opening up to change, seeking after God, and entering the kingdom.
Thomas A. Baima is a Roman Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago and provost of the University of Saint Mary of the Lake in Mundelein, Illinois. He holds a doctorate from the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome/Angelicum.
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more on conversion from the online archives
more from the online archives
22.6—July/August 2009
on the Integration of Anger into the Virtuous Life by Leon J. Podles
32.4—July/August 2019
on Probability, Death & the Existence of God by Graeme Hunter
30.6—Nov/Dec 2017
on Benedict XVI on the Fairest of the Sons of Men by Michael Martin De Sapio
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