"Conversion" (of Someone's Loves)

Reading John G. Stackhouse's essay in the recent edition of Books & Culture, I was struck by the following thoughts:

Jesus called us to be his witnesses, not his experts in comparative religion. We cannot prove that Jesus is the world's one Savior and Lord, or that the Bible is alone the Word of God written. Only the Holy Spirit of God can do that. What we can and must do is what Christians can uniquely do: Testify to our experience and conviction that Jesus is indeed Savior and Lord and that the Bible is the Word of God written, and invite men and women to consider those startling propositions for themselves on the way to encountering Jesus himself. No other religion in the world places Jesus Christ where he belongs: in the center. That is our uniqueness, by the grace of God, and therefore our responsibility, by the command of God. That is all we must do—and we must do it.

. . .

Conversion is the hardest work in the world, since fundamentally it means to change someone's loves. (Have you ever tried to change your child's values? Have you ever tried to change your own?) Such change is literally a miracle of transformation each time, and thus the special province of the Holy Spirit. Yes, let us marshal all the tools and skills and energy we can, but let us use them not anxiously nor proudly, but in the humble confidence that comes from doing God's work in league with God's Spirit, under his direction and in his own good time, in his truly global mission.

Stackhouse was addressing what he felt to be an over-emphasis among some missionaries on conversion, focusing too much on an "Us/Them" or "Lost/Saved" type mentality that has produced some unfortunate consequences in various cultures around the world. However, whether or not I fully agree with all of Stackhouse's analysis, the thought that conversion has less to do with changing one's "beliefs" and more to do with changing one's "loves" was a surprisingly refreshing thought. Perhaps I've become a bit tired of a Christianity that emphasizes right belief as the primary framework for a relationship with God, resulting in an overly cerebral faith. Conversion of someone's loves seems to put the emphasis of faith back into the heart (as opposed to the head), which also just happens to be where all my Sunday-school teachers told me Jesus should live.