Reverend Jim's Testimonial Round-Table

Jim Cymbala with Ann Spangler, The Rescue: Seven People, Seven Amazing Stories...

Reverend Jim Cymbala pastors a Brooklyn congregation, so he draws worshipers from the borough’s diverse residents, from successful entrepreneurs to iconoclastic hipsters. All have personal stories, many involving journeys through life’s greatest depths. With their permission, he brings several of them together in one short volume you could read in one energetic reading. They make an interesting glimpse into the mind of the Christian convert experience.

In religious studies, scholars speak of “testimony,” a personal narrative of how one came to profess religion. Testimony is common in highly personal religions, such as Mormonism and Islam, but also evangelical Christianity and Quakerism, as well as in party politics (which often has an evangelical quality), and recovery groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and Weight Watchers. Being able to describe one’s conversion is a necessary marker of authenticity.

These stories involve a reliable pattern, which Cymbala adheres to. The tellers offer an intimate, detailed personal narrative of their pre-conversion experience, often involving confessing some form of self-seeking. Lucrative but debauched Wall Street careers; sexual promiscuity and drugs; gang involvement. True testimony involves what AA calls “a searching and fearless moral inventory,” which we must share publicly. We must expose the false gods we formerly worshipped.

In voicing these confessions, there’s a fine line between owning up and exhibitionism. I admit personal trepidation during the confession stages, because I formerly had a pastor who would repeatedly confess pre-conversion sexual excesses in lurid detail. It quickly became clear he didn’t regret those days, he missed them. To his credit, Cymbala, telling his parishioners’ stories, doesn’t do this. He manages to land on open-hearted honesty without wallowing in anything.

So. That’s my first fear about testimony conquered.

But testimony always involves the admission that the thing we sought previously didn’t fill a need. We skidded downward. We hit rock bottom. We reached the point where, like these storytellers, we found ourselves sleeping in an alleyway and contemplating suicide, or struggling against the ravages of sexually transmitted disease, or giving birth at an absurdly young age. The evidence that we’ve lost control stares back at us, sometimes literally.

Reverend Jim Cymbala

Cymbala’s conversion narrative requires believers to have some personal experience with God. This may involve an external voice, such as an evangelist, speaking the word aloud; it may involve God speaking inwardly and calling us to action. Either way, it isn’t an academic abstraction or a family inheritance; one believes because one has had something intense happen to them, forcing us to change our lives and perspective.

Accepting that call doesn’t mean we’ll automatically have a good life. Just like the alcoholic or the overeater may lapse back into bad habits, Cymbala’s subjects admit, good Christians can fall into self-seeking behavior and need a second calling. Several of them concede to what Christians call “backsliding.” But in hearing that call and responding to it, these believers accept that their self-made narratives are insufficient for a world too complex for individuals to control.

Thus we enter the final stage of testimony: the post-conversion narrative. Having had that intimate religious experience, the believer confronts life with a renewed sense of purpose, taking on challenges that once seemed insurmountable. Here we see something I appreciate about the testimony tradition: it presents faith as guidance for this life. Not how to get to heaven when we die, but how to face this life we’ve been given, in all its sloppy, uncontrollable glory.

A few testimonies involve the subjects talking about the good things God has delivered them since their conversion. And I do mean things. From the simple, like getting a derailed career back on track, to the vast, like receiving a massive buyout from an unscrupulous former employer, the subjects credit their conversion with material rewards in this world. I admit, I find this squishy, and fear it creates the misapprehension that Christians have things easy in life.

These promises of material reward, however, are outliers. Cymbala mainly focuses on the one trait his converts share: a calling to live more purposefully, with a goal (“eschaton” in theology-speak) in mind. Christianity might provide you material converage for life’s constant uncertainties. More important, it gives you something to life for, something to move toward.

Cymbala writes for two audiences: people unpersuaded by faith, yet open to the experience, and believers seeking reinforcement of their experience. For those audiences, he delivers. He follows the testimony pattern without merely mimicking it, and mostly avoids common stained-glass pitfalls. It’s a good read for current and aspiring believers.