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The Evangelical Conversion Narrative

Author: D. Bruce Hindmarsh

Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand

Published: 2005-03-17

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 0199245754

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Language and Self-Transformation

Author: Peter G. Stromberg

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-06-26

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9780521031363

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Using the Christian conversion narrative as a primary example, this book examines how people deal with emotional conflict through language.

My Faith So Far

Author: Patton Dodd

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2007-06-15

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0787997889

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In this frank, funny, and often challenging memoir about life in and out of the church, twenty-something Patton Dodd reveals his quest for an authentic experience of God. On his journey he attempts to pinpoint and justify his belief in God, first with the fervent absolutes that characterize a new believer’s faith but then with a growing awareness of the cultural complexities that define his faith and encompass his understanding of Christianity. When a spiritual awakening in his last year of high school wrenches Dodd out of his rebellious party days, he embarks on a quest for God. He exchanges pot smoking for worship dancing, gives up MTV for Christian pop, and enrolls at a Christian university. Soon, however, he finds himself ill at ease with the other Christians around him and with the cloying superficiality of the Christian subculture. Dodd tells his story in contradictory terms—conversion and confusion, acceptance and rejection, spiritual highs and psychological lows. With painstaking honesty, he tries to negotiate a relationship with his faith apart from the cultural trappings that often clothe it. Dodd’s moving story paints a nuanced and multilayered portrait of an earnest quest for God: the hunger for genuine faith, the bleak encounters with doubt, and the consuming questions that challenge the intellect and the soul. This is a story that will resonate with the emerging generation of young adults attempting to break new ground within their own faith tradition.

German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion

Author: Jonathan Strom

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2017-12-15

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0271080469

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August Hermann Francke described his conversion to Pietism in gripping terms that included intense spiritual struggle, weeping, falling to his knees, and a decisive moment in which his doubt suddenly disappeared and he was “overwhelmed as with a stream of joy.” His account came to exemplify Pietist conversion in the historical imagination around Pietism and religious awakening. Jonathan Strom’s new interpretation challenges the paradigmatic nature of Francke’s narrative and seeks to uncover the more varied, complex, and problematic character that conversion experiences posed for Pietists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Grounded in archival research, German Pietism and the Problem of Conversion traces the way that accounts of conversion developed and were disseminated among Pietists. Strom examines members’ relationship to the pious stories of the “last hours,” the growth of conversion narratives in popular Pietist periodicals, controversies over the Busskampf model of conversion, the Dargun revival movement, and the popular, if gruesome, genre of execution conversion narratives. Interrogating a wide variety of sources and examining nuance in the language used to define conversion throughout history, Strom explains how these experiences were received and why many Pietists had an uneasy relationship to conversions and the practice of narrating them. A learned, insightful work by one of the world’s leading scholars of Pietism, this volume sheds new light on Pietist conversion and the development of piety and modern evangelical narratives of religious experience.

The Evangelical Conversion Narrative

Author: D. Bruce Hindmarsh

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2005-03-18

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0191529761

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In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thousands of ordinary women and men experienced evangelical conversion and turned to a certain form of spiritual autobiography to make sense of their lives. This book traces the rise and progress of conversion narrative as a unique form of spiritual autobiography in early modern England. After outlining the emergence of the genre in the seventeenth century and the revival of the form in the journals of the leaders of the Evangelical Revival, the central chapters of the book examine extensive archival sources to show the subtly different forms of narrative identity that appeared among Wesleyan Methodists, Moravians, Anglicans, Baptists, and others. Attentive to the unique voices of pastors and laypeople, women and men, Western and non-Western peoples, the book establishes the cultural conditions under which the genre proliferated.

Wesley and Aldersgate

Author: Mark K. Olson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-09-03

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1351391232

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Despite being widely recognized as John Wesley’s key moment of Christian conversion, Aldersgate has continued to mystify regarding its exact meaning and significance to Wesley personally. This book brings clarity to the impact this event had on Wesley over the course of his lifetime by closely examining all of Wesley’s writings pertaining to Aldersgate and framing them within the wider context of contemporary conversion narratives. The central aim of this study is to establish Wesley’s interpretation of his Aldersgate experience as it developed from its initial impressions on the night of 24 May 1738 to its mature articulation in the 1770s. By paying close attention to the language of his diaries, letters, journals, sermons, tracts and other writings, fresh insights into Wesley‘s own perspective are revealed. When these insights are brought into wider context of other conversion narratives in the Christian milieu in which Wesley worked and wrote, this book demonstrates that this single event contributed in significant ways to the ethos of the Methodist movement, and many other denominations, even up to the present day. This is a unique study of the conversion of one of history’s most influential Christian figures, and the impact that such narratives still have on us today. As such, it will be of great use to scholars of Methodism, theology, religious history and religious studies more generally.

A History of Christian Conversion

Author: David W. Kling

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 853

ISBN-13: 0195320921

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Conversion has played a central role in the history of Christianity. In this first in-depth and wide-ranging narrative history, David Kling examines the dynamic of turning to the Christian faith by individuals, families, and people groups. Global in reach, the narrative progresses from early Christian beginnings in the Roman world to Christianity's expansion into Europe, the Americas, China, India, and Africa. Conversion is often associated with a particular strand of modern Christianity (evangelical) and a particular type of experience (sudden, overwhelming). However, when examined over two millennia, it emerges as a phenomenon far more complex than any one-dimensional profile would suggest. No single, unitary paradigm defines conversion and no easily explicable process accounts for why people convert to Christianity. Rather, a multiplicity of factors-historical, personal, social, geographical, theological, psychological, and cultural-shape the converting process. A History of Christian Conversion not only narrates the conversions of select individuals and peoples, it also engages current theories and models to explain conversion, and examines recurring themes in the conversion process: divine presence, gender and the body, agency and motivation, testimony and memory, group- and self-identity, "authentic" and "nominal" conversion, and modes of communication. Accessible to scholars, students, and those with a general interest in conversion, Kling's book is the most satisfying and comprehensive account of conversion in Christian history to date; this major work will become a standard must-read in conversion studies.

Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580-1625

Author: Michael C. Questier

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1996-07-13

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9780521442145

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A study of conversion and its implications during the English Reformation.

Transforming Conversion

Author: Gordon T. Smith

Publisher: Baker Academic

Published: 2010-08-01

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9781441212382

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This volume offers much-needed theological reflection on the phenomenon of conversion and transformation. Gordon Smith provides a robust evaluation that covers the broad range of thinking about conversion across Christian traditions and addresses global contexts. Smith contends that both in the church and in discussions about contemporary mission, the language of conversion inherited from revivalism is inadequate in helping to navigate the questions that shape how we do church, how we approach faith formation, how evangelism is integrated into congregational life, and how we witness to the faith in non-Christian environments. We must rethink the nature of the church in light of how people actually come to faith in Christ. After drawing on ancient and pre-revivalist wisdom on conversion, Smith delineates the contours of conversion and Christian initiation for today's church. He concludes by discussing the art of spiritual autobiography and what it means to be a congregation.