How Your Understanding of Conversion Impacts Your Ministry

The non-Calvinists are right: a church’s understanding of conversion will impact its practice of ministry.

Now, the non-Calvinists fear that believing in God’s sovereignty over conversion leads to passivity and inactivity in evangelism. I don’t believe that’s true, but the underlying instinct here is correct: your doctrine of conversion will push or drive—like an engine—your ministerial practices in this direction or that.

So how do you and your church answer doctrinal questions like these:

• Is God sovereign over conversion? If so, how and in what way?
• What role does preaching the gospel word play in conversion relative to other human inducements?
• Does conversion involve just belief or repentance and belief?
• What does conversion have to do with our inclusion in the body of Christ?

Your church’s answers to such questions will shape its approach to disciple-making.

For instance . . .

Suppose a pastor’s doctrine of conversion makes room for the necessity of “belief” but downplays the call to “repentance.” His sermons may offer glorious apologetic arguments for the mind, but there won’t be much about God’s law for the conscience or God’s love for the heart.

Or suppose a church affirms the individual’s need to repent and believe, but leaves no role for God’s sovereignty over salvation. That church’s practices, over time, may incline toward the pragmatic at best and the manipulative at worst. Or, alternatively, if a church emphasizes God’s sovereignty over and against the call to repent and believe, it may well fail to invite, nay, to plead with people to taste and see that the Lord is good.

Or suppose a church affirms that, to become a Christian, Jesus must be your Savior but denies that he must also be your Lord. It might have a role for church membership, but it will have no role for church discipline, which in turn will reshape what membership is and eventually render it meaningless. Membership won’t be about Christians growing together into the character of Christ but about attracting consumers.

Or suppose a church’s doctrine of conversion emphasizes the gospel’s work of reconciling us with God (as in Eph. 2:1-10), but tends to overlook that same gospel’s work of reconciling us with the household of God (as in Eph. 2:11-22). That church might do a good job of sounding the horn for holy living and even every-member ministry, but you may not hear many notes about living our daily lives together in hospitality and mutual care, as we encounter in the first chapters of Acts.

Obviously, I’m brushing in broad strokes here. Also, people can say they believe one thing but do another, because a space can exist between what we think we think and what we actually think, or trust. This means, in other words, our practice is sometimes better than our doctrine—but sometimes it’s worse. Calvinist ministries can look non-Calvinist, and non-Calvinist can look Calvinist.

Nonetheless, in general, the doctrine of conversion we write down on paper will always yield ministerial tendencies, even if not inevitabilities. The important thing, therefore, is working to know what the Bible teaches about conversion, and then striving to trace out how this practically impacts making disciples. You might say there is a line of dominoes between the doctrinal and the practical.

The goal of the 9Marks at Southern Seminary conference in Louisville on February 26-27—if you can make it—is to help you do just this, to more clearly identify these dominoes, and to consider together how they relate to one another.

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Editor’s note: If this topic of how the doctrine of conversion relates to pastoral ministry interests you, join in next week in Louisville for our annual 9Marks at Southern Seminary conference.