“Rededicate”
Much of the evangelical religious experience centred around the concept of conversion. A bold, stark conversion narrative often gained traction in the community. If you led a morally empty, tawdry, violent or even sexually questionable life before your conversion then you had quite a story to tell, quite a testimony. There were stories like this and some of them were likely true. The majority of people within the evangelical community however, came from one place - the evangelical community. Most converts came not from the other side of the spiritual tracks, but from the homes of families who were part of the church. This meant that the conversion narratives were usually not that dramatic. One remedy for this was to use the “all sin is the same” fallacy (I’ll cover that topic in a future newsletter). Another was to really try to play up how terrible the behaviour of even a pretty nice, well-meaning, quite compliant child might be.
That’s where we get to the evangelical word of the week, “rededicate”.
Rededication meant, at some spiritually significant prompting (after a sermon in church, often after a talk at camp, sometimes at an event that was attended annually) to look over your life, realize how terribly you had failed and then “rededicate” your life to Jesus. Rededication provided at least a couple of things. One, it provided the powerful motivation of guilt in the service of affecting some kind of immediate change. Two, it provided something akin to a conversion experience for people who might not have the salacious story to tell about their life. Rededication was a way of declaring “from now on”. Rededication also provided better visuals for the altar calls at camp and in church. There might not be many or any new converts after a talk, but there were pretty much always rededications.
“This year I am really going to mean it.”
“I am giving my life to Jesus, again.”
Like any form of expressed determination for change, sometimes rededication worked. “From now on” moments can be real.
My problem with rededication as a spiritual concept is that was by nature self-centred. The heart of the spiritual life, in good Christian theology, comes not from an idea that our dedication to God is in any way impressive, but rather from the realization that the love of God is secure.
My identity comes not from my determination, but from God’s love for me apart from anything that I do or decide.
Like most evangelical words, “rededicate” has a counterpart in the world outside of evangelicalism. I recently came across a satirical movie preview that gets to the heart of this. It is from “Funny or Die” and it casts Brooke Shields as a woman seeking to discover her true identity and call in life. Each incarnation of the character in the pretend movie is a kind of rededication. Instead of rededication to God, it is rededication to an idea of selfhood that can be discovered in some kind of job or hobby. It’s funny for the same reason that evangelical rededication could sometimes be funny. Good Christian theology offers a critique to this self focus. Our identity comes not from our job or our hobbies or our newfound personal expression. Our identity does not come from our determination to do things for God or even to take our faith seriously. Our identity comes from the fact that we are loved by God and we are not alone. This is true not only for us, but for every person. Every person is loved by God.
God has turned towards each of us and all of us.