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Three Leveled Conversion

Paul Hiebert wrote, "Conversion to Christ must encompass all three levels: behavior, beliefs, and the worldview that underlies these. Christians should live differently because they are Christians."

With so many in our nation today stating they are Christians, or they believe in God or the Bible but when pressed on the matter, they don't really know or understand what it is they profess. Hiebert challenges this position of people and thinking they are converted when it is very likely that they are not. He continues to expand these three lines of thought:

"However, if their behavior is based primarily on traditional rather than Christian beliefs, it becomes pagan ritual. Conversion must involve a transformation of beliefs, but if it is a change only of beliefs and not of behavior, it is false faith (James 2). Conversion may include a change in beliefs and behavior, but if the worldview is not transformed, in the long run the gospel is subverted and the result is a syncretistic Christo-paganism, which has the form of Christianity but not its essence. Christianity becomes a new magic and a new, subtler form of idolatry."

In other words and in a more formulaic approach:
Behavior + Based on traditional beliefs = pagan ritual
Belief change - Behavioral change = false faith
Belief change + Behavior change - worldview change = syncretistic Christ-paganism

I don't know about you but I do not want to waste my time with rituals for an alternative god, faith that is false and practices that may look Christian in form but have very little if any impact. I don't want to give my life to mediocrity or to a ho-hum status towards whateverism. I want my life to count for something greater. I don't want to cause others to think they are true Christian only to find that I am really making wolves in sheep's clothing. 

Hiebert is calling for a full-focused approach to seeing the core changed--where the behavior and the beliefs are changed, and that is at the worldview level.

"If behavioral change was the focus of the mission movement in the nineteenth century, and changed beliefs its focus in the twentieth century, then transforming worldviews must be its central task in the twenty-first century."

What will it take for us to see this accomplished in our churches and our homes today? It is an all church issue because it is a discipleship issue. Will you join me in taking up this compass to help steer us into a straighter journey with one another towards the kingdom living today?

(p12 of Paul G. Hiebert's, "Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change," Baker Academic, © 2008).


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