The Andrew case disappoints me because it seems everyone dropped the ball at every stage of the game.  I’m seeing Mars Hill people declare Andrew a liar and unload all sorts of statements about him even though Holcomb wrote that the church was not going to public discuss the situation.  Way to completely contradict what one of your pastors said in public, Mars Hill members.  :(  Look at what this approach to “church discipline” has done, it’s inspired dozens, maybe hundreds of MH members to go public and attack someone who’s been under “discipline” without doing anything to avoid the risk of having the procedure seen as tainted by variables such as nepotism, conflict of interest, double standards, or retaliation.  If Andrew is a liar then it should be easy to discredit his claim that he was engaged to a pastor’s daughter.  Instead what seems to have taken place is campus pastor profiles have been scrubbed of any information about spouses or children.  There’s not necessarily a one-to-one correlation, of course, but all of these things are not exactly new.  There was a lot of stonewalling and evading questions while making public statements about the poor character of fired pastors back in 2007. 

Weirdest of all is realizing that when there was a high profile divorce in the church back around 2005 we were advised to not shun the person who filed for divorce and left.  That made things even more bewildering when those of us who were members in 2007 were told to shun one of the fired pastors. Over what?  Disagreeing about the by-laws?  Since when do thirty guys on an elder board all have to agree on everything?  I’d feel better if elders on an elder board DIDNT’ agree about important decisions, especially after how the capital campaign from 2005 turned out.  A lot of ex-MH folks I’ve talked to have come to realize that our stories were conversion stories.  One of my friends said that 2007 showed him that all sorts of little things that he thought were just oddities that didn’t speak of bigger things were tips of a giant iceberg. 

Sorry for your loss, JS.

I’m used to looking up words when reading books. I’ve never been stumped by a newspaper. Until today.

It’s more reason for me to desire to become a Brit.

I’m not an obstreperous person…

We’re never going to stop you using that word now, are we? (sw)

I agree with the position that says membership in a local church is a key part of a profession of faith. The act of choosing to renounce membership is a big deal. But it is not as some call it “self-ex-communication”.

It should be enough to report that John Smith has resigned his membership.

It’s prompted by news of Michael Sudduth’s conversion from Reformed Christianity to Vaishnavism, and the way in which Sudduth describes his conversion not as a sudden break with his past, but standing in continuity with it – even though, as Silliman puts it wryly, ” these faiths are not normally understood as in proximity to each other.”

Silliman observes that this is a common feature of conversion experiences: the experience of conversion “as realization and recognition of what is already true, as acknowledgement of what already is the case, rather than as some sort of change”. Even where the convert tries to present it as a rupture, often there are tell-tale signs that they really see it as a continuity – such as Scott Hahn’s (and other Tiber-swimmers’) description of converting to Roman Catholicism as “returning home”.

I left a comment on Silliman’s post which is still awaiting approval, so thought I’d post it here as well in the meantime:

This chimes with my own experiences of “conversion” over the years: from, to and within Christianity, and indeed in other contexts (e.g. politics, or for that matter – going back a while now! – falling in or out of love).

It reminds me of the observation (whose source I can’t recall offhand, though it is quoted by Žižek in a couple of his books) along the lines that “revolutions retroactively create their own antecedents”; that is, they create a new perspective on history that makes the revolution seem, with hindsight, obvious and inevitable.

One thing this does is highlight the inadequacies in our whole (post-enlightenment, liberal, individualistic) understanding of “choice”. We like to think that we make our choices as free, autonomous individuals. However, as you observe, in conversion the moment of “choice” is often experienced as an “involuntary” acceding to the already known/believed. As I understand it, there are good reasons from both social psychology and neuroscience to support this. I’d also throw in René Girard and his concept of “mimetic desire” for good measure. Not to mention Marx. And St Paul…