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.