Ch..ch...ch...Changes

I began really following Jesus the summer after my freshman year in college. I was on a summer project with Cru in North Myrtle Beach, SC. It was a crazy summer. I learned so much about Jesus and about being in community. I also became a fanatic. I was a fan of the evangelical worldview. It made sense of my world. I had a way to understand everything. It was my goal to convince everyone that my worldview was correct.

I had convictions. 


As I matured in my faith and became more confident in God things began to change. I grew in my ability to debate and win arguments. I was able to retain a lot of information. I took philosophy classes and discovered the beauty of argumentation and how to deconstruct others arguments. I was winning arguments at a high rate.

Then, I read three books that God used to absolutely transform me. First, I read What's So Amazing About Grace? Then, I read Putting Amazing Back into Grace. Finally, I read Blue Like Jazz. These three books took my understanding of following Jesus through a worldview and chucked it out of the window.

I began to learn the difference between convictions, persuasions, and opinions. Convictions are those things that you are willing to part company over. Persuasions are beliefs that you will argue for but will not break fellowship over. Finally, opinions are those beliefs that you hold because you "just do", these are easily changed.

As I continued to mature and grow up it began to dawn on me that I had a lot of convictions. But the thing was, they weren't real. They didn't live up to being convictions. I was not really willing to part company over them. I began to slowly place things into the persuasion category. Then many of those began to slide into the realm of opinion.

In 2007 I began seminary. I began to realize how little I knew about, anything. I thought I had all the answers, it turned out that I didn't even know the questions, let alone did I have any knowledge of answers. The number of convictions decidedly shrunk.

I was asked what's "changed in your beliefs over the years?" I am pretty sure that everything has changed. So, I am going to take the next few blog posts to walk through my convictions. Feel free drop a comment or two about what things fall into the realm of "conviction" for you.