The Altar Call, A Thing of Troubling Beauty

Roswell UMC

All your anxiety, all your care,
Bring to the mercy seat, leave it there,
Never a burden He cannot bear,
Never a friend like Jesus!
"All Your Anxiety," by Edward H. Joy

The above chorus exhorts its hearers to come to the "mercy seat" and leave their burdens there with Jesus. To many it will sound at best obscure and at worst completely foreign, but to me, a person raised in the Salvation Army, it is the very sound of my childhood.

"All Your Anxiety" is the kind of song that gets sung during an "altar call;" it encourages people to step out of their ordinary experience and come to have a special moment with Christ. That, basically, is what an altar call is: an invitation to a special encounter with God. The altar call can be an instrument of manipulation and even cruelty, but at its best, it can also be a thing of profound beauty. I have not always recognized this.

To explain in a little more detail: an altar call, or "invitation," is a portion of a church service, usually coming at the end of the service after an extended period of exhortatory preaching, in which the preacher invites his or her audience to come forward to the front of the room to pray at an altar.¹ The altar can be an object specifically designed for the purpose (say, a large block of wood suitable for kneeling around), or it can be something more ad hoc, like a simple row of chairs. The point is to have something to kneel at and rest one's head and arms against in a praying position, and to have it placed in front of the congregation.

The altar call always takes place during an extended period of singing and music. During breaks between songs, the musicians continue playing in the background while the preacher resumes his or her exhortations, encouragements, and appeals to the congregation, often inviting again and again anyone who was too afraid or stubborn to leave their seat at the first invitation.

The purpose of all this is to (1) invite people to convert to Christianity by "accepting Jesus into your heart" and (2) to offer an opportunity for Christians to either recommit themselves to Christ or pray in a special setting about a deep concern. In both cases, others will typically come to pray with those who come to the altar.

The altar call is a holdover from a tradition that still survives in parts of American Christianity, the camp meeting.

Camp meetings originated on the American frontier as a way of bringing church to sparsely populated areas that couldn't support a church building or a full-time minister. Instead of regular Sunday services, folks would plan to gather and set up camp in a specific place and time, where one or more itinerant preachers would show up and preach an extended series of sermons, typically lasting for several days. There would be a great deal of music and prayer and religious fervor, often to a degree that modern Americans might find strange or uncomfortable:

"Revival" by James Sturm, pg. 15, from James Sturm's America

The altar call originated in this setting, though it has persisted beyond it even as the American frontier disappeared and the camp meeting became a rarity, serving as it does now a much less dire need (most populated areas in the States these days having enough people to sustain stable religious communities of some kind). Unsurprisingly, the altar call still carries with it some of the camp meeting's faults, namely a certain irrational emotionalism and an over-reliance on the rhetorical skill of the preacher.

At times, the altar call can be an aggravation, or worse. If part or all of the congregation does not feel convinced by the preacher's message, or is simply not in the correct frame of mind, the altar call can be a hassle; some preachers have difficulty accepting that no one really wants to come forward, and will drag the invitation out for a while just to make sure, or to try to save face. (Making an altar call that no one responds to can be a little embarrassing.) Sometimes preachers play on the listeners' fears, usually of negative outcomes in the afterlife should they fail to accept Jesus,² in order to get people to come forward.

What's more, sometimes an altar call just is not the appropriate thing: I once was in a church service at which it was announced in the middle of the sermon that one of the congregation's members had died quite suddenly (an accidental death). The preacher chose that moment to make an extended altar call, but no one was in the mood for (re)committing their life to Jesus; we really all just wanted to go home and be sad over our friend's passing.

At the same time, however, the altar call carries on some of the best elements of the camp meeting with it, too. Camp meetings were a time of fellowship, bonding, and community for people who otherwise might not see each other much, or who might never even have met otherwise. The altar call preserves this communal element by creating a time in which members of a church body can come and pray over their concerns together, to forge special sacred bonds with God and one another in prayer at the front of a community of supportive, prayerful witnesses and friends.

Camp meetings and altar calls will likely strike many as holdovers from an embarrassing time in American religion, in which an ignorant, backward religious culture sowed the seeds that would grow into the worst excesses of modern American evangelicalism and fundamentalism. While there may be some truth to this, it misses an important fact: the camp meeting, for all its excesses, was a tool for great good. The best example certainly lies in that most daring of nineteenth-century movements, abolitionism.

Wikimedia

As Marilynne Robinson puts it in her essay "Who Was Oberlin?", the abolitionists of the early 1800s "embraced unpopular, deeply controversial opinions. There was such a powerful stigma attached to abolitionism before the Civil War, and after it as well—what fanatics these people must have been to hate slavery so much they wanted to put an end to the institution altogether!—that to this day it is treated as at best a dubious project."³ While ending may slavery seem like the obvious moral choice to most people today, it is wise to bear in mind the weight of history and social pressure that the abolitionists were up against in the 19th century. Slavery of one kind or another is as old as human civilization itself, and it is no exaggeration to say that much of the prosperity and happiness of the abolitionists' neighbors would have rested on the economic benefits provided by an enslaved population. To the people of their day, the abolitionists were viewed the same way one might view a group that was trying to end the existence of marriage, or money, to name two equally venerable institutions. They were, in a word, radicals.

They were also certainly in the right, which should only serve to enhance our view of their courage. The abolitionists worked tirelessly and, in extreme cases, even fought and died in order to end a barbarous and inhuman practice. They successfully spread the message of freedom and justice from place to place and state to state, moving west to settle and create states of the union that would be free from slavery. The key motivation of the abolitionist movement was a Christian belief in equality of people before God. And the main tool by which the message of abolitionism was spread to the frontier was none other than the camp meeting, complete with altar calls during which people would affirm their commitment to the cause of abolition.⁴

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I have not experienced many altar calls in the last few years; my current church does not employ them. There was a time when I would have called them at best unnecessary and at worst actively harmful to the faith—what use, I wondered, was all this focus on emotional conversion experiences?

I have since circled back round to appreciation, however. The altar call, when done appropriately, when the congregation is ready, when the Spirit of God is moving, can be a special, I dare say sacred, time in the life of the Christian. To quote another Salvation Army tune:

When God comes near,
It is a special moment. 
He calms my spirit,
He takes away each fear. 
Oh such an hour, 
Of sacred, special friendship:
Such is the time,
When God comes near.

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1. In Salvation Army parlance, the altar is often called a "mercy seat," a lovely Old Testament reference which hearkens back to William Tyndale's beautiful, though illegal, English Bible translation. Hence the reference to "mercy seat" in the song at the beginning of this post.
2. Hell, in other words.
3. Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books, pg. 176.
4. I will note here that "the abolition of slavery and the advancement of women's rights were strongly associated in the period before the Civil War;" Robinson also says of Charles Finney, an influential revivalist preacher of the era who serves as her primary example in writing about this period, "Charles Finney was a great reformer. His two signature causes were the abolition of slavery and the enhancement of the status of women." Both quotes ibid., pg. 170. When I Was a Child is a fantastic book, by the by.

Give to Everyone Who Asks of You

For two years immediately after finishing college, I served in an AmeriCorps program with a group of 100+ other young adults. They were a bright, energetic, and above all else, idealistic group of people. "Idealism" was literally in the job description, and it was a principle that came up daily as a part of the organizational culture.

(I say this to show that the conversation that follows does not involve any cynical, jaded souls, but two people who cared deeply about and worked to improve the lives of others.)

One day during this time, I was at the office with a friend, and conversation turned toward giving money to people who begged on the street. I expressed some ambivalence about it; "It's hard to know what the money is going toward, and it might be better in general to give to charity," I mused.

My friend, on the other hand, stated that he thought it was wrong. Not questionable, not a gray area: wrong. He pointed out that many people begging on the street suffer from addiction to harmful substances; he felt it was his responsibility to not feed these addictions by giving away money that could possibly be spent on substances to abuse.

I have no memory of whether I responded with any kind of counterargument. But I have done a great deal of thinking about conversation since.

Eventually, I concluded that I had been wrong. And that my friend had been wrong, too.

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"When the Bible refers to the poor, I think of those who are downtrodden emotionally or romantically, not those who are poor financially."
— Bible Students Say.. (@BibleStdntsSay) April 7, 2014

Any Christian argument against giving to the needy is going to run up against a number of, to put it mildly, strong arguments from scripture pointing in the exact opposite direction. Perhaps the most famous and wrenching is a parable Jesus tells, in which he depicts himself reprimanding a group of people at the end of time, saying "You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels; for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me." And they ask Jesus in turn, "Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?" And he tells them, "Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me." When we refuse to give to the poor, in other words, we refuse Jesus himself.

More so even than this image—Jesus, destitute and in need of my help—the scripture that I am mentally confronted with whenever I refuse money to a beggar is the direct command* Jesus issues to his followers: "Give to everyone who asks of you."

It's such a simple command: Just give. Don't think. Don't judge. Don't worry. Give.

And, simple as it is, it can be quite hard to actually do.

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As was mentioned, one obstacle to giving to the homeless is the fear that it will feed addiction. "It's a waste of money," "It does more harm than good," etc.

A few months ago, I read an article, written by a real, live, homeless person, that altered my view of addiction and homelessness. I'll let his words speak what I can't really do justice to:

I've coined a phrase for the kind of sleep you get on the street: "the one-eyed sleep of the homeless." When you sleep in public—well hidden though you may be—anyone can walk up on you in the middle of the night. It may be another homeless person looking for a good place to sleep. Or one of the nighttime criminals who beat the homeless and steal from them. Or the police, looking to move you out of  your spot. You never know what to expect, and it makes sleep difficult. Sometimes I'll see a homeless person dead asleep in the middle of the day on the sidewalk along some busy thoroughfare, but I don't know how they do it. Unless they've simply collapsed from exhaustion. Or maybe they're drunk or high.

Alcohol and drugs do play a big part in street life. I've tried to stay away from drugs and have succeeded for the most part. Drink, however, has been a different story. We all have our poisons, something that helps carry us through, that gives us pleasure, whether good for us or not. But when you're homeless, you definitely need something to take the edge off being exposed, every minute of every day. It's difficult to explain this to someone who has never had to live outdoors in the midst of several thousand people roaring around them at all hours. ("Homeless in the City," Theodore Walter, emphasis added)

Substance abuse is a coping strategy for the homeless, who deal with unbearable quantities of stress. In giving someone money, I trust that they're going to use it to get what they feel they need to keep going one more day, even if that includes substances that may not be good for them in the long run. They know their needs better than I do. I remind myself that if the recipient of my money is suffering from addiction, my money may help keep them from feeding that addiction in more dangerous ways, like theft or prostitution. Above all else, I remind myself of Jesus' commands: to give to the one who asks, and also to judge not lest I be judged by the same standard—how often, after all, have I spent money on things that are not healthy for me?

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For me, the other major obstacle to giving is more selfish: I tend to worry that I am being conned somehow. I know I have been conned out of money with a slick story at times, and it's a terrible feeling.

But what this feeling boils down to is pride. I get mad that someone fooled me into handing over my hard-earned money after I hear a made-up story. Which, when I think about it, is essentially what I do every time I go see a movie or buy a novel. Even if the story coming out of the stranger on the street is marketed a bit more aggressively or is somewhat less entertaining than I'd like, no story I ever hear is going to be worse than A Rat's Tale, a movie that features marionette rat puppets and terrible rat puns like "aloe verat"** and which is, I can assure you, totally real and not made up, because my sisters and I sat through the whole thing in a movie theater as children.

However little the recipient may seem to need or deserve my money, I remind myself when handing over my cash that it is unlikely that a successful person with access to steady work is going to be out on the street begging. If someone asks for money, there is a high likelihood that they need some, no matter the way they go about asking.

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Last year, I decided to try out the traditional Lenten discipline of almsgiving.† I made a conscious effort to always have cash somewhere I could get it easily on my person, and anytime I saw someone begging or was approached by someone asking for money, I had some to give. Each day, I relieved myself of some of my cash by placing it in a different pocket, and told myself it was no longer mine: I was simply carrying it for the next person I met who needed it. I found this practice to be such a relief to my anxieties over giving that I have never stopped since. I recommend it to all who would take seriously Jesus' command to give.

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*This command is found in both the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew. The first half of the command in each version is essentially identical, and the second half somewhat amusingly demonstrates the differences between the two authors—Mathew has a tendency to soften Jesus' more extreme social teachings in Luke (or perhaps it's the other way around?); see, for another example, the contrast between the Beatitudes in each. 
**Not only is "aloe verat" a real, live, terrible rat pun from this film, it is in fact the MacGuffin that drives the whole plot.
†I will admit that in writing this post, I worried about Jesus' command to give to the needy in secret. I actually kept my Lenten discipline to myself for a long time, and only told someone about it when it would have required a lie to keep it secret, at which point it seemed like I might be taking the whole secrecy thing a bit far.

Photos:
1. Chris Sampson
2. Edouard Manet, "Beggar with Duffel Coat" - This is one of my favorite pieces of art at Chicago's Art Institute; it's one of a pair of portraits that Manet painted in which he portrays beggars as noble philosophers.