Should Evangelicals Revive Confession?

March 08, 2011 by Kyle Roberts

Continued from Page 1

The Church is the means through which grace and the forgiveness of sin becomes a concrete experience. We can experience God's grace through the vulnerability of confession and the willingness of another to express forgiveness and act as a witness to God's forgiveness. This can only really take place in a community of people who recognize and acknowledge that they are no more deserving of God's salvation and covenant grace than anyone else. As Bonhoeffer put it, in the church, in the community of believers who have realized the forgiveness of God, we might "dare to be sinners" (111).

I'll never forget an evening during college when a good friend came to me with a heavy burden, a sin he needed to confess. This sin did not involve me. It was something he had experienced years before, but something that still weighed him down because he had never confessed it. All I had to do was listen to his confession, pray and cry with him as the grace of God and the love of Christ spoke the word that his sin had been forgiven and his humanity had been affirmed. Now, in place of the bondage of sin, there was only grace.

If confession is so life-giving and so liberating, why don't we do it more? It may be that we, as churches, communities, and Christians, have not created environments of openness and vulnerability based on the simple notion that all of us are sinners—truly sinners—and we all stand in equal need of God's grace. As churches put confession into practice, there are obvious considerations to be made regarding appropriateness of time and place for confession, the necessity of the development of trust and strength in relationships in which confession can safely occur, and a refusal to pervert the importance of confession into yet another legalism.

Furthermore, confession is easily abused, and this warrants care and wisdom in practicing, encouraging, and modeling it.

It may be that confession is a lost art in many evangelical churches. If so, we might receive a word from an unlikely source: that enigmatic hermit, Felix Bush. Get Low inspires reflection on the power of confession and its role in cultivating Christian community and freeing the heart from the often-heavy burdens of life. These burdens are too hard to bear alone.

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About Kyle Roberts

Kyle Roberts is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology and Lead Faculty of Christian Thought, Bethel Seminary (St. Paul, MN). He researches and writes on issues related to the intersection of theology, philosophy, and culture. Follow Kyle Roberts' reflections on faith and culture at his blog or via Twitter.

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