Calvinism: My Journey There and Back Again (Part 1)

It’s Calvinism week here at mtvpastor, where I’m going to weigh in on the growing controversy within the Southern Baptist Convention. To those who don’t know about the Calvinism debate: don’t worry, you’re not missing much. To those of you caught up in the hype and wonder why I’m choosing now to write about it: it’s already been predestined that I would write about it today, so why fight it?

A good controversy like this can’t be settled in one post, so I’ll be sharing fourteen years of thoughts over the next few posts. To start, I want to share with my story. For me Calvinism isn’t some esoteric debate, it’s something I struggled with for years before coming to a peace about it. Alas, let the saga begin:

Growing up in church as a kid, I was naturally an Arminian (the theological belief that we have a choice in our salvation). There was no overt debate about it, that’s just all I ever knew. It made sense to me; we had a choice about many other things in life, why not salvation? Wasn’t that the whole point of preachers working up a sweat and pleading with people to walk down the aisle? If it was all predestined, then why all the effort? I would hear adults use variations of the argument, “God loved us so much that he gave us free will.” Sounded solid to me. I never questioned it.

Fast forward several years. I graduated college and was in training with 120 other college grads for a two-year missionary stint overseas. It was a blast. What I didn’t know was that a majority of the other trainees had just gotten back from Passion Conferences and were still hopped up on John Piper. Suddenly, the classic Arminian vs. Calvinism (the theological belief that God has already predestined who will be saved) debate revved back up. To counter my suddenly weak-sounding arguments of logic, the Calvinist camp had Scripture. Lots of it. I would pull a VBS verse here or there. They would counter with Romans 9-11. My arguments were crushed.

Curious about the whole debate, I left for the mission field with a few Piper books under my arm. Little did I know the quantum world shift I was about to experience. Come back tomorrow to see just how far down the yellow brick road I went . . .