blip : Beyond Lost Intellectual Ponderings :

Confession to make: for a while now I’ve found testimonies troublesome. Which isn’t good, because they’re kind of the bread and butter of what makes evangelicals evangelical. For those who aren’t familiar with what I’m talking about, let me explain. In my tradition it’s common to ask (or have preachers encourage you to ask) how you got saved. You then proceed to tell your story about how you heard about Jesus and how you came around to making a decision to say the Sinner’s Prayer which involves “asking Christ into your heart.” Now, I will say that the first part, telling your story and testifying to how you’ve seen theh Spirit at work, is something I’m fully behind. I dig hearing people’s stories—it’s how I can get to know the web of experiences and moments that make you you. I also value it when people share about how they have experienced God because those are some of the most mysterious and sacred experiences people have. However, what primarily bothers me about the way testimonies are often done in the evangelical world is that they focus on a single decision: saying a prayer to accept Jesus. I don’t think the problem is focusing on a decision, persay, so long as people tell the story of what led to that decision. Rather, my beef with this whole thing is that it focuses on the wrong decision.

What’s the problem with focusing on the decision to say a prayer to accept Jesus into my heart? Well, not only is it not particularly Biblical, it’s also historically myopic and it’s captive to the individualism of our day. Here’s a little history of the sinner’s prayer (you can read a more thorough account here). The idea that a prayer made someone a Christian began after the Reformation when the issue of baptism was still unresoloved. Calvin, Luther, and most of the other reformers still accepted infant baptism. Only Menno Simmons and his Anabaptists argued for adult baptism. So baptism for most people was a citizenship thing. You got baptized as a Lutheran as an infant and that also marked your German citizenship. Thus, Protestants began focusing on prayer as how one received salvation. The whole idea picked up steam during the Great Awakening in the 18th century. Traveling preachers capitalized on Rev. 3:20: Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. Ignoring the fact that this verse was written to a church and not an individual, the preachers exhorted their audience to “just let Jesus come into your heart.” The method of having someone say a prayer was crystalized by Dwight Moody in the 19th century when he developed the system of preaching followed by calling interested listeners to come into the Inquiry Room where counselors would lead the individual through Scripture and then a prayer to conclude the deal. This was where the practice of the Sinner’s Prayer came clearly into being, though it wasn’t called such until the time of Billy Sunday. And from this we have countless preachers today calling people to become Christians by saying a prayer, and thus countless Christians who focus on that event when they give their testimonies.

So what is the alternative to the Sinner’s Prayer, with its lack of Biblical support and emphasis on my decision that happens between me and God in my heart? Baptism. Paul in Gal. 3:27-28:

As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

For Paul, it is baptism that brings us into the Kingdom of God and into Christ and it is what binds us to one another. This is why baptism is political. Baptism speaks to the fact that there is a world, a Kingdom, a city which the states and political powers of this world cannot fulfill. Baptism catches us up into God’s ongoing work of making all things new and it reconfigures our identity as citizens of the City of God. Thus, what is needed is

a rediscovery of Baptism as the foundational, authoritative act of God by which all the baptized are irrevocably assigned and commited to one another in the same act by which they are savingly joined to Jesus Christ. These two dimensions of God’s baptism action cannot be neatly separated (quoted in Sexuality and the Christian Body, Eugene F. Rogers, pg. 32, emphasis added).

It is that last sentence which hopefully guards baptism against the individualism to which the Sinner’s Prayer is prone. Baptism binds us to one another in a new Kingdom in which old divisions and hostilities are destroyed: Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female, rich and poor, eastside and westside (the gangs in my city) are now to live together without division, hostility, or hierarchy. To forsake those bonds with one another can be done “only at the gravest risk to their bond with Christ” (Rogers, 32).

Decisions to do something with the Kingdom of God offered by Jesus are great, but the decision ought to lead to baptism where we are made citizens of this new Kingdom. And that ought to be (at least one) highlight of any testimony.