Deathbed and prisoner conversions---are they real?

I was leafing through our denomination’s periodical, The Banner, this week when I happened upon a provocative little piece written by a campus pastor. Michael Wagenman, who serves at Western University in London, Ontario, was specifically dealing with the topic of deathbed conversions. His question: Does God always accept deathbed conversions? 

That prompted my thought processes. I see some real similarities between questions about deathbed conversions and claims of conversion and statements of belief by the incarcerated. 

I cringe when I hear and see TV trial coverage of local area defendants, especially when the camera focuses on family members and friends of victims , when they are given the opportunity to address the alleged perpetrator. With tearful voices they express rhetoric of revenge and hatred. They assure the accused criminal that he or she will rot in hell. One representative of a prominent family said, a while back, that he would never be able to forgive the person on the stand, and would hate him until the day he died! 

Every time another of these episodes is shown in our local news reports, I think back on a quote that I love from Fr. Greg Boyle, who spoke at an HFP event years ago, and who has devoted his life to helping gang members. He regularly hears bitter statements from the public about gang members who have committed heinous crimes. 

Father Boyle defends his position of loving and helping gang members this way: You stand with the belligerent, the surly and the badly behaved until bad behavior is recognized for the language it is: the vocabulary of the deeply wounded and of those whose burdens are more than they can bear. 

Let’s be honest. We don’t like to hear about alleged rehabilitation of murderers and rapists, we don’t like to think that God will ever forgive gang members who terrorize and torture, and we have serious doubts about those persons who claim to find Jesus just before they die. 

And that’s why I especially appreciated Pastor Wagenman’s conclusion in his powerful article in The Banner: 

…when we believe that everyone must pay their share, when we assume there’s no free lunch, when we must have ultimate control over our lives, then the idea of God’s boundless grace becomes a stumbling block---How could God accept them? How could God ignore everything they’ve done? Until, of course, we find ourselves in that place of last resort, with nowhere else to turn but to God. Then don’t we all want a God like the one we come to know in Jesus, one who will even take a thief on a cross with him, through a dying gasp, into paradise?