“Leave Your Seat. Leave Your Sin” Part III
It’s all good? Hardly. How the invitation has corrupted evangelicalism.
by Michael Spencer

Occasional abuse does not render a thing evil. This is common sense and evident to any reasonable person. Defenders of the public invitation are usually congenial about admitting to its abuse, yet they are quick to maintain that those abuses do not interfere with the many benefits of the invitation when rightly practiced. While a cursory critic of the altar call might be persuaded by this claim, a closer examination will find just the opposite to be the case. The public invitation itself has corrupted much of evangelicalism.

It is important to remember the basic historical background of the invitation. In short, it was unknown in Christianity until the middle of the nineteenth century. If the advocates of the invitation can convince themselves from a highly biased reading of scripture that the public invitation is biblically sanctioned, they will be disappointed to find that the invitation apparently vanished without a trace from Christian history. It cannot be found until the innovations of America’s second great awakening took hold in the ministries of Finney and Moody.

Most interesting to me is the absence of the public invitation in the ministries of two important evangelical figures: George Whitefield and Charles Haddon Spurgeon. Both Whitefield and Spurgeon are among the greatest evangelists of their generation, but neither practiced the public altar call in any form. Whitefield preached the necessity of regeneration, but not the public invitation. Spurgeon saw many thousands come to Christ during his ministry, but he never used an altar call, and criticized Moody for using it in his British meetings. Interestingly, the altar call was imported into Spurgeon’s church after his death, and the church declined immediately. While there is no claim of cause and effect, Ian Murray has helpfully documented that the older members of Spurgeon’s congregation knew a significant shift had been made by the addition of this innovation, and they specifically noted Spurgeon’s refusal to use such means.

The use of the altar call came alongside a series of theological shifts in evangelicalism. These shifts were foundational, as evangelicals rejected the Biblical foundations of reformed theology. The invitation was not simply pragmatic- it was deeply rooted in significant theological changes regarding human ability, the extent of depravity, the work of the Holy Spirit, the place of regeneration, the nature of faith and the relationship of faith and works. What were these shifts?

Each one could occupy an essay unto itself. I will simply list several of the most significant.

• The shift from believing regeneration was a work of the Holy Spirit prior to faith to believing regeneration was a work that resulted from a human action.
• The shift from believing that baptism was the only Biblically prescribed public response to the Gospel to seeing altar calls and enquiry rooms as Biblically endorsed responses.
• The shift from depending on the work of the Holy Spirit apart from means other than preaching and prayer to assuming the Holy Spirit would use any means calculated to bring people to faith in Christ.
• The shift from insisting that a person establish a visible testimony in a local church to assuming that anyone responding to an invitation was converted.
• The shift from the preacher being an expounder of scripture to allowing the preacher to direct the invitation through whatever means he might choose.
• The shift from emphasizing human inability and depravity to emphasizing human ability and responsiveness.
• The shift from scriptural regulation to pragmatic experimentation.
• The shift from guarding a faith response from any association with a human work to freely associating faith with many human works.

An exploration of these shifts will reveal that each one is a corrupting error with devastating consequences. It is to those consequences that I will now turn in the remainder of this essay.

The public invitation has filled local churches with the unconverted.

I am not an advocate of any notion that the local church can ever be completely free from unconverted members. Scripture is very clear that the visible church will always contain members who are unconverted. Yet, while the visible church is not commissioned to try and discern what only God can know, there is a very real danger of making a credible profession of faith so easy that the church will be filled with those who are not converted.

As a lifelong Southern Baptist, I have been keenly aware of the “inactive” church member, the invisible church member, the walk-the-aisle-and-right-out-the-door member. Southern Baptists have millions of professed members who have no place or part in the visible church. In fact, many of these inactive members made little more than a one time response to an invitation and were immediately baptized and counted as members of the church. This absurd situation- which grows worse every year- is a direct result of Southern Baptist’s love affair with the public invitation.

The public invitation gives a false assurance of salvation to the unconverted.

While few invitationalists will spend any time debating the invitation, they will spend hours debating the salvation of those who have responded to the invitation. The consensus among Southern Baptists, with their devotion to once-saved-always-saved and their almost total neglect of the Biblical teaching on perseverance, is that these invisible Christians will be in heaven BECAUSE they responded once upon a time to a public invitation.

This assurance to the church is doubly tragic as an assurance to the lost that they are saved as a result of responding to an altar call. At least Arminians have a theology that will conclude these persons are lost (again!) and need salvation. The Southern Baptist formula of “once you walk the aisle you are going to heaven” is a four lane expressway to hell.

The public invitation corrupts the role and practice of the preacher.

One of the truly remarkable results of the use of the invitation has been the transformation of Christian ministers from preachers and proclaimers to manipulators and salesman. In fact, sales techniques and other pressure tactics are highly valued among invitationalists as “getting results,” and results are what matters.

When anyone reads Spurgeon’s sermons, they will be impressed with the earnest, impassioned invitations which often conclude the messages. Of course, these were invitations where the preacher was representing the invitations of God in the Gospel, and Spurgeon spared no emotion in presenting those invitations with all the powers of persuasion he possessed.

Yet, Spurgeon did not tell the congregation to close their eyes and raise their hands. He did not say go to a friend and bring them with you. He did not use tactics to manipulate a result. Spurgeon could be criticized- and was- for his use of emotional pleading, but those pleadings were never joined with tactics to bring people to the front to register a decision.

Today ministerial manipulation is a highly valued skill. Ministers who can effectively get people down the aisle are considered superior evangelists. Of course, once this corrupting error has been set loose in Christianity, there has been no limit to what some will do, and if it results in “decisions,” it will be defended as an anointed work of God.

The public invitation makes pragmatism, not scripture, the authority that regulates worship.

I have never met an avowed Christian pragmatist in principle, though I have met hundreds in practice. There is an instinctive resistance to openly rejecting scriptural regulation of the church, even by those who want no part of confessional or governmental regulation in the church.

But the public invitation has been the battering ram that has brought down scriptural regulation within evangelicalism. Thousands of churches now accept anything and everything in the church because it will reach or entertain or possibly draw in SOMEBODY. Pragmatism has become a stronger influence in the PRACTICE of the church than scripture itself. It matters little to evangelicals today that prayer and scripture reading are specifically and repeatedly endorsed in the Bible as part of worship. The question is “What will the seekers think?” Unbelievably, many evangelicals want no real scripture reading or public prayer in their services. In other words, pragmatism now reigns supreme, and the public invitation was the beginning.

The public invitation has excused an increasing collection of excesses.

The public invitation has allowed any number of unnecessary excesses into many churches. Invitational excesses are almost always excused under the all-purpose excuse “You never know what God may be doing.” I have been in the unenviable position of attempting to correct excesses during the invitation at the ministry where I serve, and I can testify that no matter what a distressed, disturbed or purely selfish person may do during the invitation, there will be support for overlooking it. Some have even concluded that the more bizarre the excess, the more likely it is a “God thing.”

Recent events in evangelicalism have shown the powerful influence of the invitation on the thinking of evangelicals. Laughing, drunkenness, animal sounds, vomiting, screaming, falling over- all these activities now have a lobby urging their acceptance into Christian worship because they represent responses seen at the “altar.” The invitation itself is morphing into an independent arena of its own in many churches. At the altar, “prayer ministers” conduct “ministry time,” often taking over a service for hours.

Each of these matters should be considered scripturally. I am simply contending that it is the continuing impact of invitationalism that has brought churches to the point of being so confused about what are obviously excessive manifestations of human emotionalism.

The public invitation has promoted a false spirituality that replaces faith with works.

My own greatest concern about the invitation is the most simple observation that I can make. Christian spirituality is a matter of the Holy Spirit and the response of faith. Invitationalism has birthed an entire spirituality of works.

Who is the most spiritual person? Why the person most often down the aisle and at the altar. Who is the person most in tune with the Holy Spirit? Who is the most evangelistic? The most prayerful? The most zealous? Invitationalism provides an easy way to answer these questions. Just look down front.

I attended a Promise Keepers meeting this year, and at the conclusion of the meeting, a cross was brought down to the floor and an elaborate invitation was offered with the stated goal of getting everyone down to the floor to touch the cross. Those of us who refused to participate in the pre-announced Holy Spirit inspired commitment to bring five lost men to a PK meeting next year were looked at as if we were the Taliban, or at least unconverted ourselves.

This sort of thing is a false spirituality. It is the spirituality that says wearing a Christian t-shirt, listening to Christian music, going to Christian concerts, eating Christian cereal is somehow an expression of faith. But anyone familiar with medieval Roman Catholicism would quickly spot what evangelicalism is turning into by going this road.

Faith is not a fleshly proposition. The public invitation was the major breach in Protestantism’s resistance to the works oriented salvation of Rome. The Old School Presbyterians who resisted Charles Finney’s “New Measures” knew that if Finney was able to say that faith was simply a decision to raise a hand, or stand up or walk forward, the resulting infusion of works into the response to the Gospel would be a road back to Rome. Finney won, and his critics were right.

Evangelicalism is now at a crisis point, where the crosswinds of entertainment, entrepreneurism, marketability and numerical success are pulling it in many dangerous directions. The anchor of scriptural authority has been abandoned, and the sails of pragmatism have been set. The various crews and passengers may find these to be exciting times, but more experienced sailors know what the future holds. This is a gathering storm, and there will be no escaping disaster if the mistakes of the past are not admitted and forsaken.

The call for a second reformation is nothing less than a call to save evangelicalism from destruction. My critique of the public invitation isn’t just tilting at windmills. It is a call to repentance, reformation and revival.

“Leave Your Seat. Leave Your Sin” Part II
It’s all good? Hardly. How the invitation has corrupted evangelicalism.
by Michael Spencer

When I say that the public invitation isn’t in the Bible, my fellow Christians look as me as if I have just evidenced severe dementia. How could something that is so much a part of the life and worship of evangelicals not be in the Bible? Am I just so blindly opposed to the invitation that I can’t see all the Biblical support for calling people to get right with God? How are you supposed to preach the Gospel if you don’t give people an opportunity to publicly declare their faith in Christ? Without the invitation, aren’t we denying people the opportunity to come to Christ?

If you consider the language used by many evangelical practitioners of inviatationalism, it’s not surprising that people would conclude that the public invitation is the way to Christ. Rick Gage’s invitation was reported in our Baptist State newspaper as “Leave your seat. Leave your sin. Come to Christ.” If one doesn’t leave his or her seat, one doesn’t get to Christ. I have heard youth evangelists say that Christ was at the front of the room, and you were invited to come down and receive him. The similarity of this type of instruction to the Roman Catholic Mass is remarkable.

My own experience of invitationalism comes from a tradition that did not hesitate to say that those who failed to come forward had failed to receive Christ. Invitation hymns pleaded with the lost to come forward. Preachers and evangelists used every bit of their skill to persuade you to let go of that pew and come to the front. With no less conviction than Tetzel these preachers were convinced that if you walked that aisle you were coming to Christ. The whole atmosphere of invitationalism is full of language adapted to express that the trip down the aisle is the saving response to Christ. “Hey guess what? I went forward last Sunday!”

Of course, the Bible is abundantly clear that we are saved by faith alone. And I doubt if any of my altar-calling friends would take any issue with that at all. Many would even say that the altar call is not synonymous with faith, but is a profession of faith. I could peacefully live with this distinction if the advocates of the altar call could do the same, and shape the altar call in that format. Most of them cannot and will not.

Most evangelicals advocate believer’s baptism. If there is an external act that is Biblically required in order to credibly profess faith in Christ, it would be baptism. But the altar call is rarely a call to baptism. Instead, the altar call is the call to Christ, and to receive Christ by coming forward and praying. In other words, advocates of the altar call add one or two physical actions as requirements for either salvation or a credible profession of faith. Since scripture does not add these requirements, we have no warrant to do so.

Advocates of the invitation may want to protest this observation, but it is undeniable. Attend any evangelistic event long enough to hear what is said after the invitation. It is more than normal to hear an applause line built around the news that a certain number came forward and are now saved as a result. People who walk aisles are people who were lost before they left their seat and saved when they came forward.

Let’s now turn to some of the passages commonly cited as supporting the public invitation.

Luke 12:8-9 “And I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God, but the one who denies me before men will be denied before the angels of God.

This scripture (and many similar passages) is probably the first one that is cited as a defense for the public invitation, but its weakness is readily apparent. The context has to do with encouraging the disciples to live fearless, faithful lives in a hostile world. Jesus is saying that his disciples must publicly acknowledge him if their faith is to be honored on the day of judgment. It is easy to see the passage talking about what a Christian ought to do when persecuted or in the ordinary course of a Christian witness. To make the passage apply to an altar call is not completely inappropriate, but it is clearly not what the passage is talking about. If anything, the best understood context for the early Christians would have been baptism or the pressures to deny Christ when brought before hostile magistrates.

Romans 10:8-9 8 But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim); 9 because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

Of course, the altar call is not mentioned here either and one has to impose it on the verse to imagine that an altar call is envisioned. Here, faith and public confession are held together. It is unlikely that the early Christians would have viewed a person as a believer if they had not confessed Christ in and at baptism. This isn’t to say that they did not understand a distinction between faith and baptism or that they believed in baptisimal regeneration in a literal sense. It is to say that the call to faith and the call to obedient confession- most likely in baptism- were not separated. That is why the closest thing to a public invitation you will find in the New Testament are passages urging persons to declare their faith through baptism.

Acts 2:37-41 37 Now when they heard this they were cut to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?” 38 And Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself.” 40 And with many other words he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.” 41 So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about three thousand souls.

Acts 8:35-36 35 Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus. 36 And as they were going along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?”

The call to be baptized is not a call to the evangelical altar, and no matter how we may view the relationship of faith and baptism, the duty of resting on Christ and the proclamation of faith in baptism do not constitute an endorsement of the sacramentalizing of the altar call. If anything, we might rightly criticize the public invitation for de-emphasizing baptism as public confession and inventing a new sacrament.

What about passages that mention an invitation? Don’t these substantiate an altar call?

Isaiah 55:1 “Come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and he who has no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.

Matthew 11:28 28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

Isn’t the best way to use these scriptural invitations to actually have an invitation to the altar in a worship service or evangelistic setting? Well….no. These are invitations from God Himself and their beauty is that those addressed are urged to come to Christ. This is a spiritual call. It is not a physical call. Listen to Jesus in John 6 and Paul in Galatians 3:

John 6:63 63 It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is of no avail. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.

Galatians 3:2-3 2 Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? 3 Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?

These are passages with remarkable importance in the matter of using public invitations. Walking the aisle is a work of the flesh. Unlike baptism, which is commanded, altar calls are not commanded. What we have is a spiritual invitation to come to Christ; an invitation that cannot be fulfilled by a physical response. We cannot leave our sin by leaving our seat. We cannot come to Christ by walking forward. Faith in Christ is a spiritual response and there is great danger- GREAT DANGER!- in leading someone to conclude that their physical response automatically entailed a spiritual reality.

At this point there may be some agreement that the invitation is not explicitly taught in scripture, but now the pragmatic argument will be heard. I often say that we are living in the “Dictatorship of the Pragmatariat” in evangelicalism these days! Whatever works, whatever “helps,” whatever makes things easier, is automatically endorsed as approved by God and, if not taught in scripture, approved by passages such as

1 Corinthians 9:22b-23 I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. 23 I do it all for the sake of the gospel, that I may share with them in its blessings.

When pragmatists use this verse, I marvel that they do not see how its simple meaning escapes them. In I Corinthians 9, Paul isn’t celebrating pragmatism, but Christian freedom. To whatever audience he brought the Gospel, he was free to identify with them as much as was possible to communicate the Gospel without compromise. If Paul was saying he would employ any method that worked, he certainly had changed his mind from I Corinthians 1, where he stubbornly says that he knew nothing (methodologically and pragmatically) among the Corinthians but preaching Christ crucified. Paul was flexible missionary, removing many obstacles so that all might hear. Calling him a full blown pragmatist doing whatever got a crowd to respond doesn’t seem to fit the facts.

Look at Acts 17. In Athens, Paul came to the philosophers to preach Christ on their turf and in answer to some of their own questions. it’s a great example of missiological and evangelistic flexibility, but not much of an example of “doing whatever seems to work.”

So what about the pragmatic contention that the public invitation works? It gets people to leave their seat and come to Christ. It helps people make a solid, public commitment that they will always remember. By walking forward, they are not only confessing Christ but publicly professing Christ in a way that makes the decision meaningful? Does it really help people leave their sin and come to Christ?

I gotta tell you, if this were the case, I would probably not be writing this article. I am pragmatic enough to be pulled in if I actually saw that this were the case. As strongly as I believe scripture speaks, if you could show me the Holy Spirit pragmatically honoring the altar call, I would be able to come up with some kind of an endorsement.

The problem is, this is NOT what happens. The public invitation has become the ecclesiastical equivalent of a dog chasing his tail until he passes out. It starts out slow, gets faster, looks even more ridiculous, and the poor mutt is determined to catch the thing, but just can’t do it. The invitationalists just can’t quit playing with the altar call. Their pragmatic creed dictates that if we just can add a little this or that we will get even more results. The feeling of riding in a vehicle without brakes may be familiar to anyone observing this phenomenon.

Shake the preacher’s hand. Come tell the preacher about your decision. Come make your decision. Come get saved. Rededicate. Get saved again. Make a commitment to full-time Christian service. Pray at the altar. Fill out the card. Prayer this prayer after me. Prayer counselors. Prayer teams. Come with a friend. Raise your hand, stand up, get prayed for, THEN come forward. Come to the altar and hang around. Get slain in the Spirit. Come and tell us about your healing. Come and get healed. Come and get delivered. Come and get prophesied over. Come and get anointed. Come and get knocked over. Come every week. Come and pray for someone else. Come and pray with someone else. Come and testify. Come, run around a couple of laps, then return to your seat. Come and then go back to a room. Jesus is down here. Angels are down here. Come down here and touch the cross. Everyone who is a real Christian come down here. Sing another verse. Come without singing. Let go of that seat and come. Take someone’s hand and ask them to go with you.

I’ll stop there, but there is plenty more where that came from.

What have we concluded? First, there is no plain endorsement or example of the altar call in scripture. Second, the scripture passages used to endorse or concoct the altar call don’t do either. Third, a pragmatic endorsement of the invitation runs aground on both a lack of scriptural endorsement of pragmatism in general or the altar call in particular. Fourth, there is good evidence that the public invitation isn’t just an ever-enlarging circus of a mess, but a corrupting disease within evangelicalism.

For a look at what invitationalism has done to evangelical spirituality and church health, read part III. Until then, I’m stayin’ in my seat.

“Leave Your Seat. Leave Your Sin”
How the public invitation has corrupted evangelical Christianity
Part 1: A view from the aisle seat.
by Michael Spencer

Our state Baptist newspaper arrived this morning, with a familiar picture dominating the front page. An evangelist- in this instance Rick Gage- is standing on a stage with hundreds of people- mostly teenagers- at his feet. They have responded to the public invitation given moments before at the conclusion of Gage’s message. I’ve had Gage in my chapel, and know that he is a zealous, sincere, powerful and persuasive speaker. At the bottom of the picture is a summary of Gage’s invitation to those who heard his message.

“Leave your seat. Leave your sin. Come to the cross.”

Those who know me know that I am not bashful in my opposition to the use of the public invitation in worship or as an evangelistic tool. In my ministry as a campus minister, I am not required to use the invitation, and in the majority of sermons that I preach I do not use an “altar call.” In those services where I am expected to use one, I either find a way to avoid it or I probably offer the most modest, low profile public invitation in history. I will talk the ears off of anyone who engages me about my feelings about the appropriateness of the invitation, as my friends in the Boar’s Head Tavern know all too well. I have been told subtly and none-too-subtly that this is no hill to die on, but I am not deterred. I plan to keep kicking at this wall till I make a dent in it.

My qualifications to speak on this subject are solid. I grew up in an atmosphere where intense, pleading, manipulative invitations were considered the heart and soul of religion. Sure, preachers were expected to know how to be fishers of men, but they were also expected to know all the ways to get the fish into the boat. I watched some classic practitioners of the art of Southern Baptist invitationalism, and I accepted the Biblical endorsement of all I saw on the reputation of people I trusted as elders in the faith. I had no doubt that at the end of the sermon on the mount, Jesus offered an invitation and they sang ten verses of “Just As I Am.”

During twenty-six years of youth ministry, I have seen the public invitation from another angle: its effect on young people and their faith journeys. I have seen the invitation used at youth camps, concerts, youth revivals, evangelistic crusades, worship services and dozens of other settings where the goal was to get young people to profess their commitment to Jesus Christ. In the vast majority of these settings, the invitation was straight-forward and Gospel based. of course, I’ve seen the other side of that coin as well.

I made my own profession of faith in an invitational context, as did my wife and children. I have preached the Gospel, offered invitations to come forward and seen people make their own professions of faith in Christ in response. Nearly every evangelical Christian I know responded to an altar call somewhere at the outset of their faith journey. People I respect greatly use the invitation today. Many of those who preach to my congregation of students and adults use the invitation. Just two days ago an 83 year-old local pastor offered an old-fashioned gospel invitation in my chapel, and several young people responded. He is as saintly and as sincere a soul-winner as I have ever seen. Do not take my critique as an expression of disrespect.

So where did I go wrong?

I think my first deviance from the norm came as a very lost young man. I was 11 years old, and an evangelist came to our church and met just with my Sunday School department. There were three rows of us children lined up, and the guest evangelist gave a twenty minute appeal just for us, complete with an invitation to come forward and be saved. Everyone went forward- except little Mike Spencer (the preacher’s nephew.) I can still, 35 years later, feel that moment of isolation and determination to not be manipulated. My best friend Perry was up there. All the other kids were up there, and would be up in the baptistery in a couple of weeks. But not me. Maybe I was stubborn. Maybe I had my dad’s Eastern Kentucky Mountain recalcitrance. Whatever it was, I would not go up front, and I didn’t like the tactics that were used to get me there.

I also remember feeling that some of what I saw was manipulation. One evangelist brought a picture of a flaming automobile. He said this was what hell was like. Even as a kid, I thought that was somehow not playing fair. Another evangelist vividly acted out the brutal beating of a retarded boy and said the resulting feeling in our stomach was the Holy Spirit. I was taken to some evangelistic meetings where we were in “invitation” mode for an hour or more. Often these meetings were full of appeals that fell somewhere just short of commands to come forward or be sent to hell before bedtime. I heard bizarre appeals, emotional appeals, irrational appeals, mystical appeals, pragmatic appeals and brazenly manipulative appeals. I was turned off by them all, and increasingly started to say so.

As a youth minister, I also began to see the invitation differently. At first, it was with a kind of cynical humor that laughed at the laughable. Youth camps where college preachers could literally say or do anything and get an altar full of crying kids. The invitation seemed to attract religious neurotics like moths to a light bulb, and I couldn’t help myself. It was often ridiculous. But during those same years I became aware of the unethical and psychologically manipulative side of all that was going on. I’ve always loved the kids I work with, and I treated them with respect. I didn’t believe in arm-twisting, bribery, scare tactics or crass emotional manipulation. Many of the preachers, speakers, musicians and youth evangelists my kids heard during those years didn’t have the same approach.

The real problem was that I knew- I absolutely knew- that many of my aisle walkers were not saved. I knew that some of them responded to every invitation and bragged about it. I knew that some had made “first time professions” five times. I saw gallons of emotion that meant nothing. I watched the group psychology evident in many of the settings where I took my kids and it dawned on me that going down front was simply participating. Doing what was expected. Having the full experience. Worthless? I couldn’t say that with total confidence, but I concluded that “almost worthless” was not an exaggeration.

I quickly got my fill of it, and I didn’t hesitate to say so. The straw that broke the camel’s back was two-fold. The first occurred while I was pastoring, and the wife of a staff member was leading small children in vacation Bible school. At the end of the week, she stood on one side of the room, placed the kids on the other, and said “Now all of you children who want to go to heaven with Mrs. _________, come stand by me.” They all did, and she presented them all for baptism. It wasn’t right, and that became obvious in conversations with each of the children, who proved to know virtually nothing of their need or the savior.

The second straw was a tiny article in our state Baptist paper giving some evangelism statistics for out state. The first column was for children “Four and under.” There were several professions of faith listed. (I have since learned that toddler professions of faith are not all unusual in invitational contexts, and churches have received and baptized three year old aisle walkers for years.) I know that a whole debate could detour at that point, but at the time, Baptist that I was, it hit me squarely as about as wrong as could be. And the invitation was obviously to blame for luring children into the trap of believing that if you could walk forward and touch the preacher, you could go to heaven.

Then I met the Calvinists. I was ruined.

Long before I read Iain Murray’s The Invitation System or any other Reformed critique of the invitation, I had some clues to what was going on. I had heard my pastor talk about churches that didn’t have an invitation and how they weren’t really churches. (I grew up among the Landmark Baptists, so this wasn’t a hard statement to make.) But one of my best friends was an Episcopalian, and his family were wonderful Christians. I was already reading solid non-invitational Bible teachers like J.I. Packer, John Stott and Francis Schaefer as a high school and college student. I’d visited the LCMS church in town and knew they preached the Gospel. I had a suspicion that everyone who passed on the altar call wasn’t an apostate.

It was my introduction to Reformed men like Charles Spurgeon, Al Martin and John Macarthur that helped me to see that not only was the public invitation not historically required, it was not Biblically endorsed or pragmatically necessary. I discovered that for thousands (not hundreds!) of years, Christianity had operated entirely without the invitation system. The Reformers didn’t use the invitation. The great missionaries didn’t use it. Whitefield. Wesley. Spurgeon. Edwards. Nettleton. The early Southern Baptists. None of them used the altar call as we know it. The first Great Awakening happened without it. Much of the Second Great Awakening happened without it. Spurgeon built the largest church in the English speaking world without using the altar call. D. James Kennedy invented Evangelism Explosion, but he doesn’t use a public invitation. I’d been lied to, and now the evidence was in.

Today, I know of many wonderful, evangelical, growing churches that do not use any form of an altar call or public invitation. I also know many young pastors who have traveled the same road I have and come to similar conclusions. I find that, among evangelicals working for reformation, the abuse of the public invitation is a significant factor for many of them. (Capital Hill Baptist in D.C., College Park Baptist in Indianapolis and Heritage Baptist in Owensboro, Kentucky are three excellent examples of all these trends.)

With my seminary church history classes under Dr. Timothy George, I learned the actual history of the public invitation. Its controversial importation into evangelicalism by way of Finney’s new measures and the unsuccessful opposition of the Presbyterians whom Finney used to gain credibility. The use of the invitation by D.L. Moody, giving it broad acceptance in evangelicalism, silencing the objections of Spurgeon. The common use of the altar call in the emotion-laden meetings of the Second Great Awakening in the South and the West. Its acceptance and amplification by Pentecostals. Its refinement and acceptance into the denominational establishment by Southern Baptists like L.R. Scarborough. Its final perfection under revivalists from Sunday to Graham. Under all these influences, the invitation system came part of the life-blood of evangelicalism. Eventually, invitationalism and conservative, Bible-believing Christianity became synonymous in many minds.

By the time I left seminary, I was a full fledged opponent of the public invitation. My resolve has never decreased since that time, and while I could still belong to a church where the invitation is practiced, I would consider it my duty to direct the elders of the church to consider the origin and fruit of the practice, and to further consider the utter lack of a Biblical endorsement or employment of the practice. I am grateful that my children have grown up in a church that says Christ offers the great invitation and that is all that needs to be said. I intend to use whatever means I have to point out the folly of its use and its corruption of evangelicalism.

Before I close, I feel it is important to note that my opposition to the invitation is probably not entirely objective. I don’t like pressure tactics. I loathe being targeted as a potential customer and subjected to sales tactics. (Don’t try to sell me anything.) I have never been more miserable than being in any meeting where either the teaching or the tactics endorsed the idea that people can be “lead” to do something by a person who knows the right method. I am sure my congregations have noted my lack of enthusiasm for adopting the requisition methods for getting people down the aisle. I frequently preach the impotence of aisle-walking to affect spiritual results. I often preach that people should get alone with God. I believe and practice the maxim that “the message IS the invitation” and nothing added to the message can rightly be called the invitation.

Is it because I am a spoiled brat only child who doesn’t like to be told what to do? Am I just enamored with my own objections and unable to see the obvious fact that God uses the invitation? Do I refuse to play because I am not good at the game? Am I pouting? Making a mountain out of a mole hill? Have I lost perspective on what really matters? Am I just another hyper-Calvinistic, missions-killing, evangelism-loathing Reformed, Spurgeon- wannabe?

Possibly. But what do the scriptures say? What did Jesus and the apostles do? For that, join me for part II.