The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor's Journey into Christian Faith

by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

This word—conversion—is simply too tame and too refined to capture the train wreck that I experienced in coming face-to-face with the Living God. I know of only one word to describe this time-released encounter: impact. Impact is, I believe, the space between the multiple car crash and the body count. I try, in the pages that follow, to relive the impact of God on my life.

lives. I was an “out” lesbian in the same way that I am now an “out” Christian. It would never occur to me to live my life in falsehood, and I had and have the kind of privileged jobs (then as a professor and now as a Christian wife) where I do not have to be “careful” or closeted.

Their catch phrases and cliches were (and are) equally off-putting. “Jesus is the answer” seemed to me then and now like a tree without a root. Answers come after questions, not before. Answers answer questions in specific and pointed ways, not in sweeping generalizations.

Here is one of the deepest ways Christians scared me: the lesbian community was home and home felt safe and secure; the people that I knew the best and cared about were in that community; and finally, the lesbian community was accepting and welcoming while the Christian community appeared

(and too often is) exclusive, judgmental, scornful, and afraid of diversity.

It has always seemed to me that without the proper response to failure, we don’t grow, we only age.

So I was and am willing to take the risk of being wrong for the hope of growing in truth.

Ken, of course, knows the power of the word preached but it seemed to me he also knew at that time that I couldn’t come to church

it would have been too threatening, too weird, too much. So, Ken was willing to bring the church to me.

Good teachers make it possible for people to change their positions without shame.

Ken stressed that he accepted me as a lesbian but that he didn’t approve of me as a lesbian.

I learned the first rule of repentance: that repentance requires

greater intimacy with God than with our sin.

How much greater? About the size of a mustard seed. Repentance requires that we draw near to Jesus, no matter what. And sometimes we all have to crawl there on our hands and knees. Repentance is an intimate affair. And for ...

When Christ gave me the strength to follow him, I didn’t stop feeling like a lesbian. I’ve discovered that the Lord doesn’t c...

Obedience comes before understanding.

I learned that we must obey in faith before we feel better or different. At this time, though, obeying in faith, to me, felt like throwing myself off a cliff. Faith that endures is heroic, not sentimental.

I’m grateful that the Lord brought me to a church that was as strong on teaching as it is on compassion.

I had to lean and lean hard on the full weight of scripture, on the fullness of the word of God, and I’m grateful that when I heard the Lord’s call on my life, and I wanted to hedge my bets, keep my girlfriend and add a little God to my life, I had a pastor and friends in the Lord who asked nothing less of me than that I die to myself.

How did the Lord heal me? The way that he always heals: the word of God got to be bigger inside me than I.

if people in my church really believed that gay people could be transformed by Christ, they wouldn’t talk about us or pray about us in the hateful way that they do.

When I became a Christian, I had to change everything—my life, my friends, my writing, my teaching, my advising, my clothes, my speech, my thoughts. I was tenured to a field that I could no longer work in. I was the faculty advisor to all of the gay and lesbian and feminist groups on campus. I was writing a book that I no longer believed in.

The world’s eyes register what a life in Christ takes away, but how do I communicate all that it gives?

If my life was the only evidence that Christ was alive, would anyone be convinced?

A habitus is a way of life that forms habits of the head, habits of the heart, and habits of the mind.

Sometimes in crisis, we don’t really learn lessons. Sometimes the result is simpler and more profound: sometimes our character is simply transformed.

We develop a taste for godly living only by intentionally putting into place practices that equip us to live below our means. We develop a taste for God’s standards only by disciplining our minds, hands, money, and time. In God’s economy, what we love we will discipline.

Our hearts will become hard to the whispers of God if we turn our backs on those who have less than we do.

twin values of our culture:

acquiring and achieving.

Jesus’ injunction that God is more greatly grieved by the sins of those who claim to know him than by those who know him not, struck a chord for me.

There is a fairness and capaciousness to Jesus’ words that simply is not reflected in modern evangelical culture.

my sexuality was sinful not because it was lesbian per se but because it wasn’t Christ-controlled. My heterosexual past was no more sanctified than my homosexual present.

In understanding myself as a sexual being, responding to Jesus (i.e., “committing my life to Christ”) meant not going backwards

to my heterosexual past but going forward to something entirely new.

I

learned that sin roots not in outward behaviors, but in patterns of thinking.

experienced with great depth the power and authority of God in my life.

When you die to yourself, you have nothing from your past to use as clay out of which to shape your future.

The saving grace of salvation is located in a holy and electing God, and a sacrificing, suffering, and obedient Savior.

Stakes this high can never rest on my sincerity.

As I stood before the congregation to make this profession of faith, I felt the assault of my disloyalty to the gay community as powerfully as I did my loyalty to Christ.

This experience taught me a powerful lesson about evangelism: the

integrity of our relationships matters more than the boldness of our words. Because

Would I be welcome because I’m visibly saved? Which is the greater of God’s gifts, being made in God’s image or being saved, or both? Are we to rank-order these? Are we to treat the visibly saved with greater honor than all of humanity, made as it is in God’s image?

“Unbelief puts circumstances between itself and Christ, so as not to see Him…Faith puts Christ

between itself and circumstances, so that it cannot see them

God allowed me to rise as high as I could and fall swiftly and publicly. Had my sin not preceded me in a public way and had my repentance not been my lifeboat, had I found myself neatly protected within the confines and choice-making of Christian family and community, I today would probably have been the greatest of all Pharisees.

I came to believe that my job was not to critique and “receive” a sermon, but to dig into it, to seize its power, to participate with its

message, and to steal its fruit. I learned by sitting under Ken Smith’s preaching that the easily offended are missing the point.