Converted, always being converted

'Conversion is a turning from sin to Christ.'

Here is the question: Does conversion happen only once during a lifetime, or does it happen many times?

Jordan suggests that there are four kinds of conversion:

1. Initial Conversion -> a person 'totally outside the faith' comes to Christ for the first time.
2. Daily Conversion -> 'Each day, and many times during the day, we have to turn from sinful tendencies, and turn back to Christ.'
3. 'Crisis Conversion' -> 'At these crisis points, the Christian needs to reaffirm his or her faith by making a major break with some problem that has crept up, and make a major turn towards Christ.
4. Growth Conversion -> There are stages of growth and maturity and at each stage in life a Christian needs to come to a fuller understanding of what it means to be a Christian.

'As a person grows, his understanding of himself, of the world, and of God will change, because he is himself changing. His understanding grows wider, and embraces more factors of life. He becomes aware of things he was not aware of before. Moreover, his understanding grows deeper, and more profound. Learning to adjust to a spouse, and then to children; learning to adjust to authorities on the job, and learning how to relate to subordinates; learning how to manage money; etc. - all of these things cause a person to deepen and widen his understanding. Hopefully, they cause a person to become more and more wise and stable.' 

And here is the cash value of Jordan's analysis. If we think there is just type 1 conversion or just type 1 and type 3 conversions [ie. we have only one conversion in our lives], then we are always going to look backwards: 

'We (will) want to recapture the simplicity of that initial warm experience of the love and acceptance of God, and this is a mistake. It freezes faith at an immature level, and prevents us from pressing on to maturity. People influenced by this way of thinking tend to want to recover the experiences of their late teen years.'

from p151-161 The Sociology of the Church: Essays in Reconstruction