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Please go to this link and read about the outstanding
Banff Conference this November. You’ll be delighted with what you find.
Dear Folks,
Some stories.
About this time of the summer, forty-seven years ago I became a Christian at Gull Lake Baptist
Camp in Alberta. Ken Hilmer and Reg Bibby were counsellors so they, along with the Holy Spirit and my
parent’s prayers bear the responsibility for the beginning of a life of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
Billy Graham became a Christian as a teenager at one of the many evangelistic meetings that
were available to him in that era. He claimed in later life to have had a total of four changes or
conversions in his life; the first to Jesus which fed all the purpose, meaning and joy in his life. The second
was to a repudiation of racism (just as the first conversion was a repudiation of sin) and reconciliation
with others. The third was to a willingness to embrace fellowship with other believers (indeed to talk to
those of other faiths). And finally, a turning to peace and to a rejection of nuclear weapons. These
changes are Billy Graham’s constructs, not mine. Interesting none-the-less.
John Stewart asked Jim Wallis (Editor of Sojourners) about his new book a couple years ago. The
book went by the interesting title: God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get
It. Nasty eh? Everyone annoyed yet? Wallis said “I started writing in part because I have had two
conversion experiences; my first was to Christ as my personal Saviour and the second conversion was to
the poor (a paraphrase).
Two further thoughts. I was listening to the Billy Graham scholar Grant Wacker from Duke
University this past week who said the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association doesn’t refer to “converts”
but “enquirers” believing that the veracity of spiritual commitment must be verified by the individual
with God through the Holy Spirit not enumerated by some other party. Interesting.
Secondly, I remind us all of the idea, that in the stages of awareness, belief and maturing we use
the terms belong, believe, become.
Warmly,
In Christ,
Jeremy
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