Last Sunday, we sang a familiar hymn. It followed the sermon, as it typically does in Baptist churches. But this time, the hymn felt radically different.
I suddenly realized that “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus” is a political declaration.
Growing up, this hymn was the musical backdrop to the invitation, that revivalist innovation of Baptist liturgy during which sin-sick souls are asked to come forward and publicly declare their faith in Christ. In that moment, new believers experience forgiveness and pledge to live righteously.
In my conservative evangelical upbringing, this commitment addressed personal foibles. It was a decision not to use curse words or drink, a pledge to tell others about Jesus. By that understanding, I have turned back.
My language can get salty, and my taste for craft beer is not left unfulfilled. But more than ever, I do want to follow Jesus.
I have long known that walking this path is its own form of politics. The gospel proclaims that true sovereignty belongs to Christ and his kingdom. The church, at its best, embodies this reality as an alternative society, bearing witness and preaching justice.
But for the first time, I felt this truth resonating with every note of a song that had grown stale with repetition. No longer was it some droning remembrance of the moment of conversion.
It was at once exhilarating and sobering. I sang with unexpected energy.
This shift in my experience of the hymn was rooted firmly in the context of public worship. The preacher had noted Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness was to adopt Satanic models of coercive power. For the invitation to the offering, a church member recalled how his minister father joined civil rights marches and received death threats on the phone.
In the pastoral prayer, we interceded for victims of war and malicious government policies. At the end of the service, we welcomed new members. These included a family from Central America granted asylum and a gay man who was surprised he could find a church where he belonged.
My church is by no means perfect, but I am grateful for its embrace of a holistic gospel. Our shared practice of Christian faith has activated greater depths of meaning in an old hymn.
Let me take you on a brief tour of its words and how I read them.
“I have decided to follow Jesus”: Accepting God’s call in Christ is the one pledge of allegiance that counts. By our faith, we affirm Jesus as both master and friend.
To acknowledge his Lordship is to discern his leadings and to question the merits of every ambitious earthly leader. Those who demand our unquestioning loyalty are idols and false gods.
Do I genuinely follow Jesus, or do I make him a ventriloquist dummy for the true objects of my devotion?
“Though no one join me, still I will follow”: This verse is normally interpreted as distinguishing between “saved” and “lost,” the narrow path and the broad.
Now, I find in these words a warning against appeasing a complicit church. Far too often, the majority of Christians in a given time and place have baptized forces of oppression.
Such was the case in Nazi Germany, the Jim Crow South and Apartheid South Africa. When the church itself succumbs to the pressures of conformity and comfort, am I willing to join Jesus in the wilderness?
“The world behind me, the cross before me”: In the New Testament, the word “world” (Greek: kosmos) has several different meanings. It can refer to natural creation, humanity, or a system.
In this latter sense, the “world” is maintained in patterns and structures of society that negate God’s vision of human flourishing. Sure, this world-system is constituted by individuals who cheat on their spouses and their taxes.
But it is also upheld by hierarchies of privilege in which resources are distributed or denied according to social categories. In this system, some “deserve” rights and a fair hearing. Others “deserve” violence and repression.
Jesus, we know, was categorized as a blasphemer and a subversive. His cross was a case of a government exercising its judicial powers to get rid of an undesirable.
If I reject the system, the system may reject me. Am I prepared for what comes next?
None of this, by the way, is an original perspective on the politics of Jesus. I just never connected these thoughts with a hymn about “getting saved.” Going forward, “I Have Decided to Follow Jesus” has newfound freshness and urgency.
I can still remember when I decided to follow Jesus at nine years old. Yet I know that kid had no idea what he was getting into. The hymn represents that moment, but also every moment when I discover more deeply the significance—and the cost—of Christian discipleship.
I hope this testimony encourages you also to reimagine this classic hymn as an exercise in political theology. Whenever we sing its words, we declare our active citizenship in the kingdom that overcomes all earthly dominions.
“No turning back. No turning back.”
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Christopher Schelin is the dean of students at Starr King School for the Ministry in Oakland, California, and a senior research fellow at the International Baptist Theological Study Centre in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He is an ordained minister affiliated with American Baptist Churches USA and the Alliance of Baptists.
