“Used with permission and originally published at WorldViewChurch.org“
(Rosaria Champagne Butterfield lives with her family in Durham, N.C., where her husband pastors the First Reformed Presbyterian Church of Durham. Rev. Chuck Huckaby is the Minister of Congregational Life at First Protestant Church in New Braunfels, Texas. His video reviews are also available on Youtube.)
Review by the Rev. Chuck Huckaby
Rosaria Butterfield’s Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into Christian Faith demands serious attention by all evangelicals interested in the areas of Christian lifestyle, worship, worldview and evangelism. Her narrative describes her self-described “trainwreck” conversion. It documents how Christ confronted and captured someone who never considered herself a “seeker” until Christ first came calling.
The unlikely human agent in Christ’s pursuit of Mrs. Butterfield was the pastor of a small reformed church from what some might call an obscure denomination. A friendly letter asking simple questions about the process by which she arrived at her conclusions prompted a conversation. Subsequently a friendship formed with the pastor and his wife. Then she found herself obsessed with reading the Bible, and the changes in her life became obvious. A conversion which cost her everything ensued. The chink in her armor turned out to be the presuppositional and spiritual questions postmodern thought refused to ask because they were considered silly.
While Butterfield’s conversion is a triumph for Christ and testimony to the faithfulness of His servants, it is thankfully not a triumphalist puff piece on Christians in general. The conversion that deconstructed her life and worldview taught her a thing or two about how Christians fail homosexuals and postmoderns. One such failure is an unbelief in Christ’s power to transform people and the Bible’s power to captivate people. She likewise warns against an overzealous quest to supplicate and “identify” that denies Christ by boldly saying that people may embrace both Christ and their sin.
Notably, the church Butterfield today embraces will never be considered “seeker sensitive.” Instead it embraces a clear theology in the Westminster Standards, observes a strict Sunday Sabbatarianism, and practices exclusive psalm singing. Evidently the profound conversions evangelicals claim to seek have little to do with worship style and everything to do with a willingness to step outside the safety of the church building to engage the real world.
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