Jan. 16, 2022, column:

Conversions to Christianity can be dramatic, or quiet process

Fanny Crosby, 30 years old and without sight since she was a baby, was a teacher at the New York Asylum for the Blind when she and some friends attended a revival at the Methodist Broadway Tabernacle in 1850.

Fanny Crosby

She was moved enough to go forward at the end of two services, “seeking peace from her inner spiritual struggles, but found none,” according to Vance Christie, a pastor and Christian writer. Then on Nov. 20, 1850, she prayed at the tabernacle’s altar, later recalling “that the light must indeed come then or never.”

Christie wrote that as the congregation sang, “Alas! and Did My Savior Bleed?” and the line, “Here, Lord, I give myself away,” “Fanny expressed that commitment as the desire of her heart, yielding her life to Christ. Immediately her ‘very soul was flooded with a celestial light,’ and she sprang to her feet, literally shouting, ‘Hallelujah!’”

Not all of us have a dramatic conversion story like that. Some are more like Ruth Graham’s, which she said, according to writer Richard Hollerman, was like this:

Ruth Graham

"I have had ‘crisis’ experiences, but my salvation did not happen to be one of them, for I cannot remember the time when I did not love and trust Him. In fact, my earliest recollections are of deep love and gratitude that He should love me enough to die for me.”

Ruth Graham’s parents had been missionaries, and like many who grew up in the church, she couldn’t pinpoint a date that she first believed. Her husband, Billy Graham, also grew up in a Christian family but knew the day he gave his life to Christ.

Peter Smith wrote in the Louisville Courier-Journal that Billy Graham “credited his conversion to the work of Mordecai Ham, a native of Allen County, Kentucky, and one of the most fiery and controversial evangelists of his generation.”

Billy Graham

In 1934, Ham preached a revival series at Charlotte, North Carolina, near the Graham farm. Smith wrote that the teenage Graham “attended out of curiosity but was transfixed by Ham, who looked straight at him and said, ‘Young man, you are a sinner.’ Graham soon made a confession of faith."

Of course, Billy Graham convinced millions to make decisions for Christ in his own decades-long ministry.

Martin Luther King Jr., honored for his civil rights work, certainly was a believer, as “the Rev.” in front of his name attests. Like Ruth Graham, his acceptance of Christianity might be called a process.

The Journal of Lutheran Ethics quoted King’s autobiography: “Religion has just

Martin Luther
King Jr.

been something that I grew up in. … The church has always been a second home to me." According to the JLE, “King explains that he never experienced a conversion per se; however, he does say, ‘Conversion for me has been the gradual intaking of the noble ideals set forth in my family and my environment, and I must admit that this intaking has been largely unconscious.’”

Many Methodists know the story of their church’s founder, John Wesley. It may not have been the day he first believed, but his experience at a 1738 meeting on Aldersgate Street in London was his defining moment.

According to United Methodist Communications, “As he heard a reading from Luther's Preface to the Epistle to the Romans, he felt his ‘heart strangely warmed.’ Wesley wrote in his journal that at about 8:45 p.m. ‘while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my

John Wesley

heart strangely warmed.

“I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.’"

Wesley’s mother, Susanna Wesley, had a similar experience in 1740. She had been a devoted Christian while raising a huge family. But according to Vance Christie, "A significant spiritual event took place in Susanna’s life in January 1740 at a communion service led by her son-in-law Westley Hall. She afterward wrote of the incident:

“’While my son Hall was pronouncing these words in delivering the cup to me, “The

Susanna Wesley

blood of our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee,” these words struck through my heart, and I knew that God for Christ’s sake had forgiven me all my sins.’”

Christian History & Biography magazine reported that in 1850, the future great preacher Charles Spurgeon converted to Christianity after seeing a vision, “’not a vision to my eyes, but to my heart. I saw what a Savior Christ was,’ he wrote, ‘I can never tell you how it was, but I no sooner saw Whom I was to believe than I also understood what it was to believe, and I did believe in one moment.’”

Charles Spurgeon

And one of the most dramatic conversion accounts is that of Oxford professor and writer C.S. Lewis, who had to overcome intellectual objections before he became “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England,” in 1930, according to scholar Alister McGrath. But that decision in his Magdalen College room was a belief in theism – in God, but not in Jesus Christ.

The final step came in 1931, after discussions with Christian colleagues J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. Three days after a long talk with those men, Lewis rode in a sidecar of his brother Warnie’s motorbike on the way to a zoo. “When we set out I did not believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did,” Lewis wrote.

C.S. Lewis

Walter Hooper, later the renown writer’s secretary, called Lewis the “most thoroughly converted man I ever met.”

Fanny Crosby apparently was pretty converted, too, considering the 9,000-plus hymns she wrote. My favorite evidence is the opening of a familiar one:

"Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine, O what a foretaste of glory divine.

“Heir of salvation, purchased of God, Born of His Spirit, washed in His Blood."