Picture yourself in a church on a Sunday. The organ starts playing, the preacher starts welcoming you home, to the family of God. You find yourself walking down the aisle and kneeling at the altar. In your mind, you’re becoming a Christian. For some people, you’re becoming a cliché. For your family, you’re becoming something unfamiliar.

I grew up Roman Catholic. I have four Catholic sacraments to my credit, and from my first communion until I ultimately crafted a way out of Sunday mass, I took the eucharist pretty much every weekend of my life, and every holy day of obligation, too. But by the time I hit eighteen I had had enough. I picked my college based on two criteria: it was within driving distance of my rock band, and it required very little spiritual engagement.

Two years later, during a celebration of communion, I converted to evangelicalism. I had only recently started going to church again, now at the college-age service of an evangelical church. Suddenly I was paying attention to the story I had heard nearly every week my whole life, and suddenly it made sense. And I quickly decided that if I’d found God at this church, then God must have been missing from the church of my youth.

We tend to think of spiritual transformation in conflicting ways. Our conversion is a personal affair—no one can discount it. Yet we want our loved ones to experience what we’ve experienced. Indeed, we often romanticize sharing our new beliefs, seeing people’s souls as targets and our witness as darts. But one thing doesn’t happen when we experience spiritual transformation: the people we know and love do not cease to be three-dimensional beings with distinct identities and their own way of engaging the world around them. People’s lives are affected by the mere fact of our conversion, and we owe it to ourselves and to our loved ones to acknowledge and shepherd the impact of our life-change on the people in our lives.

Rejecting my parents
What looks to us like a saving encounter with Jesus Christ can look to our loved ones like an initiation rite into a cult. Try to imagine how you would feel if your college-age daughter sent you this e-mail:

Dear Mom & Dad:

P.S.: Please send money.

Replace witch with evangelical, services with mass, and Ostara, the vernal equinox with the resurrection of my sweet Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Replace Rain with Brother Dave, and this e-mail has morphed from every evangelical parent’s nightmare to something very much like my parents’ introduction to my conversion to evangelicalism. When I told my parents that I couldn’t consider myself Catholic anymore, my dad asked me if I was saying so just to make them angry. When I was later baptized in an evangelical church, my mom’s card expressed her regret that she hadn’t made my childhood faith more real to me.

Frankly, I had given no prolonged thought to why I couldn’t count myself Catholic or why I should be baptized. I dismissed the undeniable contribution Catholicism has made toward worldwide mission and Christian witness, and I ignored the value of the mass and Catholic spirituality as vehicles for spiritual disciplines such as confession, prayer, silence and fellowship. In short, I took virtually no time to reconcile my newfound faith to the faith of my childhood.

I also neglected to consider the central role of Catholicism in my faith development. A weekly remembrance of the Lord’s Supper, a powerful experience of the gravity of sin and the grace of pardon in the sacrament of confession, even the embodiment of sacrificial living I witnessed among priests and nuns all shaped my expectations of what it means to be saved and commissioned by Jesus. However my evangelical conversion unfolded, it would be shaped by my Catholic birthright—whether I was conscious of it or not.

I’m not entirely to blame for my oversimplification of my conversion. The evangelicals I met my first year of college had no good feelings toward Catholicism; one had actually written a paper for his (public) high school “proving” that the pope was the antichrist. I didn’t accept his thesis, but I did blindly fold his beliefs into my new theology, which meant for me that to accept evangelical Christianity was necessarily to reject my family’s Catholic Christianity.

Such rejection would be difficult for any family to accept, but for Catholics it’s particularly painful. Catholicism rivals ethnicity in its formative role for Catholics, where sacraments like baptism, the Eucharist, confession and confirmation serve as rites of passage to strengthen the bonds of self-identification over time.

Meanwhile, American Catholics have experienced more than a fair share of marginalization. While President Kennedy was warding off claims that he would hand over control of the United States to the Pope, my dad was being kept out of college fraternities because he wasn’t a Protestant. As you can imagine, telling my parents that I was leaving Catholicism cut twice: I was rejecting who I was, and I was embracing a culture that had cast them aside.

What I hadn’t done but should have done was to think—not just about myself, but also about how my decisions affected two people who had always been and always would be a central part of my life.

Alienating my siblings
Not only does conversion affect family identity, but it also rubs up against family values. A Christian might see a missionary as serving God and loving neighbors; a non-Christian might see the same missionary as an imperialistic tyrant committing cultural genocide. The truth might lie somewhere in between, but plan for lots of difficult conversations between the two until the truth comes out.

When my grandfather died I seriously considered skipping the funeral. I was volunteering with my church’s youth group, and to attend the funeral would be to miss an important meeting. My brother was horrified. I had put my “new faith” before my family, and telling my brother that “Jesus commands us to hate our family out of love for him” was not going to give my “new faith” any credibility.

A friend of mine once asked my sister point blank what she saw as different about me. She thought about it a bit and said, “He used to want to change the world.” My friend replied with “Maybe he wants to change the world a different way,” which I thought was pretty clever, though I don’t think it reassured my sister much.

What my brother and sister consider salutary or commendable is not necessarily set against what evangelicals count as morally good. But different Christian subcultures tend to grate against one another, and against subcultures outside the Christian faith. Much of how American evangelicalism is expressed is cultural, which is to say that it is not fundamental to faith in Jesus Christ. To attend my grandfather’s funeral was a family value that fit well within evangelical beliefs, but I got distracted by the cultural need to contribute to the success of my church meeting (and perhaps by my own psychological need to be important to my colleagues). If we neglect to submit our priorities to Jesus, no matter how superficially devout they appear to be, we may wind up unnecessarily alienating people who are being more righteous in the moment than we.

Straining my distant relations
So much for the hazards in our closest relationships. What of those we don’t see regularly, whose understanding of us is restricted to brief and intermittent encounters? Conversion experiences will have an impact on these relationships as well.

My family is not merely Catholic, it’s Irish Catholic, which means we can be . . . well . . . boisterous. My uncle, for one, who lived far enough away that we rarely saw him, and who had long since abandoned the faith, asked me what happened to me at college. I was naive enough to think this was my chance to win my uncle to Jesus, so I started to rehearse my testimony. He let me go on for a moment and said, “Well, in my experience, if you need a crutch, you’ll eventually find it.” So ended our conversation.

Soon I started raising funds to do full-time ministry. I sent out a letter—a common enough practice in my evangelical subculture but completely taboo in the culture of my family. Another uncle responded with a letter of his own, telling me that I could be in a cult if I wanted to, but he wasn’t going to pay for it. I learned later that my uncle and aunt had been offended by the passing remarks of a friend at my wedding, that we were who we were for no other reason than that Jesus had redeemed us—again, common language for evangelicals but foreign to Catholics and offensive to family members who had raised me to be a good boy and to do the right thing. Our relationship was strained for years.

I’ve spent a good number of post-Catholic years in a seeker-sensitive church—about as far from the liturgical tradition of my childhood faith as I might travel. But some key principles of seeker-sensitivity would have helped me in the early years of my conversion: what sounds normal to my ears may sound strange, radical or even absurd to the ears of others. It takes patience, care and humility to make your world make sense to another, and to neglect these virtues is from the outset to alienate those who visit your world.

Trampling my own pearls
When I used to hear the phrase “Be careful not to cast your pearls before the swine, or they will trample them and then come after you,” I pictured my story as the pearls, and the swine as anyone not sufficiently inspired by my story. This did wonderful things for my ego, but I now think I mischaracterized things.

For one thing, what would nice Jewish boys like Peter and John be doing with pigs? Pigs were unclean animals—literally and ritually. They were thoroughly superfluous to the person of faith in Jesus’ day, not unlike much of my conversion story and the trappings of cultural evangelicalism I adorned myself with.

Actually, I think the pearl is and will always be the gospel—the story of God’s love. I waste the story of God’s love when I allow it to be overrun with my piggish cultural biases and self-centered spirituality. Even worse, if I surrender the gospel to such careless rooting, I put myself in danger. My biases and self-centeredness can overwhelm me, to the point where I am trampled by myself and separated from the truth.

Ah, the truth. The truth is that God created a relational orientation for humankind and called it very good. The truth is that we should view our sinful selves with as much skepticism as we do those around us. The truth is that we owe a debt of love to our loved ones and a debt of honor to the people who raised us.

The truth is that once upon a time a young Jewish man brought his brother to meet Jesus and help fit his two worlds together. Once upon another time a Samaritan woman asked her whole town to help her make sense of her encounter with the Son of God. And once even a Roman centurion heard the good news because a Jewish man learned to be careful with the pearls he’d been given.

So What Do We Do with Our Conversion?
I could regret forever the trappings of my transformation, but I cannot regret my transformation itself. My adult awakening to the reality of Jesus was like my own resurrection, and to minimize it for the sake of family peace would be to reject my own soul. But I’m also called to honor my father and mother, and to live at peace with everyone as far as it lies with me. And besides that, I love and really like my family, and I owe them a debt of thanks for establishing a foundation of faith even when I looked for ways of escape. So I face an unstoppable force—my conversion to evangelicalism—and an immovable object—my place as a member of my family.

The apostle Paul taught his non-Jewish converts to stay as they were, this in spite of the majority Jewish membership in Christianity and the undeniable Jewish roots of Christian faith. Paul saw early on that the lines between what is fundamental to faith and what is consequential to culture often blur, and that even the most well-intended were capable of attaching divine sanction to traditions and cultural foibles. So Paul’s converts were not expected to, among other things, practice circumcision—a key symbol of God’s covenant promises to the Jews but unrelated to Jesus’ gospel of grace. What was true about Christianity would necessarily be discovered somewhere beyond cultural Judaism.

More radical, perhaps, Paul advised believers married to nonbelievers to stay put. Their conversion had changed them, no doubt, but it had not changed the fact that they were in a binding relationship. Non-believing spouses would have to come to terms with the new pearls in their relationship, but they would not have to do so by themselves.

But there’s more to it, I think. Paul promised his jailer that his whole family would be saved through his faith—which is not to say that the jailer had enough faith to carry his pagan relatives into heaven with him. No, faith is as much a group virtue as it is an individual virtue.

Faith and family
The people closest to us, whether they share our faith or not, are close enough to us to know how we think, how we react or overreact to novel ideas, what is important to us and why, and how our faith ultimately intersects our life. The Catholic church traditionally has seen not the individual but the family as the point of reference for human society, and for good reason: among our families we cannot long perpetrate much silliness, nor can we for long lose ourselves in a societal soup.

Likewise, those closest to us cannot get away with folly if we catch a whiff of it. As well as our loved ones know us, we know our loved ones. My family has been forced to deal with some of their biases against evangelicals and some of the superficialities of cultural Catholicism as a result of my wife’s and my being in the family.

And faith is one of those subjects that won’t be ignored. Bring Jesus into your life and he won’t forever stay out of your conversations. When faith and family collide, faith at the very least has a fighting chance.

So I think that Paul would tell us, at the moment of our conversion, “Stop. Take a breath. Give yourself some time to come to terms with your transformation. If God gives you a new name, so be it. Wear it proudly. But remember who you are.

You are a sinner who does not yet fully know your own mind, so don’t neglect the insights of those who know you best. You are a person with a history, a community, an unfolding future; don’t circumcise yourself just to prove your fidelity to Jesus. Let Jesus enter into your world, and see what he does with it.

David Zimmerman is an editor with InterVarsity Press. He is the author of Comic Book Character: Unleashing the Hero in Us All and the Weblog Strangely Dim. See www.ivpress.com/campus/sd/.