Bill Leonard: Conversion crisis demands new approaches

In light of a “conversion crisis” in Baptist life, churches may need to consider changing the language they use to communicate to nonbelievers, a church historian told a teleconference audience.

Baptists began as a “believers church” that required an individual profession of faith in Christ and evidence of conversion by each member before baptism, said Bill Leonard, founding dean of the School of Divinity at Wake Forest University.

“In 2021, there is in a sense a conversion crisis among evangelicals in general in the U.S. and among Baptists in particular,” Leonard said. “Fewer and fewer people are attending church. Fewer and fewer persons are seeking baptism and professing faith.

“And passing on that faith is increasingly difficult, because fewer families bring their children to church at an early age to be nurtured.”

Leonard led a Zoom discussion titled, “A Sense of the Heart? Rethinking Religious Experience and Conversion 2021,” in conjunction with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s virtual general assembly.

‘A direct encounter of the soul with God’

Baptists need to wrestle with important questions, he asserted: “How does the objective idea that God loves the world become subjective in the experiences of individuals? How does God find God’s way to me?”

Christianity always has faced the reality of personal religious experience that involves both God’s transcendence and God’s immanence and incarnation, he noted.

“In the early church, early Christian dogmatism was transformed by mysticism—from corpse-cold dogmatism to the standard definition of mysticism: a direct encounter of the soul with God,” Leonard said.

The Protestant Reformation moved many Christians from the idea that Christ comes to believers through the elements of the Eucharist to the position that Christ encounters individuals through faith alone, he noted.

Later awakenings led many Protestants from the Calvinistic view of a limited atonement for the elect to a “whosoever will may come to Christ” view, he continued.

“Revivalism evolved. It begins with heart-warming religion—with dramatic religious experiences in New England churches and in frontier camp meetings,” Leonard said.

“But over time, particularly as revivalism is institutionalized, … revival often moves from a heart-warming experience into a confessional transaction—pray a prayer, say these words, believe in your heart, and all is settled.”

‘How does our church tell the Jesus story?’

So, Leonard continued, each congregation today finds itself needing to answer the questions: “How does our church tell the Jesus story?”

American churches—particularly Baptist congregations—need to ask why fewer individuals are responding to the gospel, as well as what trends in church and culture affect how the gospel message is told and how it is heard, he asserted.

Churches today make a mistake if they assume people who attend worship automatically “know and understand what it means to have a personal experience with Jesus,” Leonard said.

People in 2021 “hear multiple plans of salvation in multiple contexts,” and congregations need to be able to clearly communicate their understanding what a personal encounter with Christ means, he added.

Leonard suggested the atoning work of Christ on the cross that makes salvation possible and the teachings of Christ, particularly as capsulized in the Beatitudes, are inseparable.

“Both are to be taken seriously and lived out in the church, in the individual and in the world,” he said. “Fragmenting that story [of Jesus] into separate pieces is not helpful at all.”

Leonard recommended churches “cultivate multiple entry points into faith,” providing a variety of ways people may enter into the faith community and have a personal encounter with Christ—whether that involves a dramatic immediate transformation or a more gradual nurturing approach.

“As strange as it may seem to say, our culture needs the church right now,” he said. “It doesn’t always know that, and we’ve not been the best as the church in noting how we can respond to the culture and the needs there.”

‘Offer healing for brokenness’

Leonard suggested churches consider adopting the language of “brokenness” rather than speaking of “sin” initially in seeking to present the gospel to nonbelievers.

“We need to see the gospel as a response to human brokenness,” Leonard said.

Nonbelievers may not understand or relate to “the rhetoric of sin,” but “everyone in the culture, sooner or later, knows about brokenness,” he explained.

“That’s not judgmental. That’s not pejorative. That not self-righteous. It is a shared brokenness,” he said. “The church is the incarnate response to brokenness.”

The church also incarnates “the intentionality of grace,” Leonard continued. “The grace of God made known to us in Jesus Christ is the gift we really bring to the world.”

Rather than beginning with the story of Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus in John 3 and what would be—to the larger culture—confusing language about being “born again,” Leonard encouraged churches to “begin with Jesus by the lakeshore” and his message that “God’s new day has come near.”

“That is an ever-present call, not simply in the first century but in every era,” Leonard said. “The motive is to offer healing for brokenness.”