Why am I a Christian?
The Evangelist finished his message and invited people up to the front to “make a commitment” so, making sure I wasn’t the first, I nervously stepped up. When everyone had gathered, the evangelist bid us to pray with him, so I prayed hard and … nothing happened.
I don’t whether I was expecting a voice, a bright light, choirs of angels or what, but this was no Pauline conversion. I felt quite happy that I’d decided to make this decision, but I didn’t experience anything mind-blowingly revelatory. Those who had come to the front were herded away to a back room.
“How does it feel to be a Christian?” I was asked. “Great!”, I lied through my teeth to the grinning counsellor; I really felt little different, but I took the leaflets I was given and went home.
But to continue the parallel with St.Paul, though there was no blinding light, this was another step on my “road to Damascus”. My parents had always encouraged me to go to Sunday School, although they themselves went to church infrequently. All through my childhood I was brought up in the Christian tradition and had no real reason to doubt the existence of God. Psychologists might suggest that this strongly influenced my decision to become a Christian and they would probably be right, but I know that since that time, I have had to re-examine what I believe time and time again when panic and doubt have set in.
If my faith was purely a product of conditioning, I would no longer be a Christian. Yes, Christianity does seem to stand up on its own.
My faith is quite an intellectual one in that I have wrestled for years with trying to relate a super-natural God to the tangible world around me. Obviously I still have, and probably always will have, problems and doubts, but I have seen nothing yet which I find irreconcilable with the idea of God. In short, I don’t have enough faith in secular argument not to be a Christian.
I could argue for hours why Creation and the Resurrection seem to make sense and why we should consider the Bible to be a reliable historical document, but by itself, intellectual argument is not enough.
It may seem that the beginning of this article was having a dig at big Christian rallies and fire-and-brimstone-preachers, but this is not the case. Whilst I went home from that meeting feeling little different, I know that my life was changing, looking back on how I suddenly realised a few weeks later that I was actually being nice to people and not walking around feeling depressed and hurt all the time.
On top of all my intellectual belief in God, I now had personal experience of Him. Isn’t this a little over the top, one may ask, especially if this is not being asked from a Christian perspective? I can’t pretend for one minute that I have ever had a vision, seen God in person, or actually heard any heavenly voices and nor can I pretend that I am free from doubt, anger and depression — yes I still feel all of those, and more.
But I have been helped in coming to terms with these things. It is difficult to write an article such as this without making a Christian’s faith seem like a bed of roses, which it isn’t, but I have experienced the potency of prayer and love of God too many times in my life to discount the idea of a God who is there and is actually interested in us!