Altar Call Punch Card

Post-Baptist therapy, part one

She kneels at the front of the sanctuary with tears streaming down her face. On either side of her are the familiar red carpeted stairs. In front of her, beyond the twisted metal railing, the piano and organ both shake the floor with the heavy chords of “I Surrender All”. A deaconess lays a comforting hand on her shoulder shaking with sobs.

She is fourteen. She has been attending church since birth. And this is her tenth time up here in the past six months.

Yes, that was me. Sensitive, dramatic, teenage me, in agony every week — and being commended at least once, by someone I respected, for being so “responsive to God”. Truthfully, I was responsive to anything and everything at that point. And here is what my church culture gave me to respond to.

Crisis Model

Beginning way back at the time of the “Second Great Awakening”, revivals and revivalism swept their way through American Christianity. When I was born in 1989, the echoes of Billy Graham’s crusades were still reverberating around the relatively new evangelical movement. As cultural trends gave rise to nominal Christianity and teenage rebel atheists, the church reached out to them with a message of pure “come-to-Jesus”. Dissatisfied with life and searching for meaning, many did.

It was a simple narrative: life sucks, you become convinced of the truth of the gospel, you believe in Jesus/surrender your life to Him, and life doesn’t suck anymore. The key is the moment of crisis. Like flipping a switch, you’re suddenly free. Your life changes so dramatically that the watching world can’t help but be impressed.

This narrative was celebrated everywhere, from sermons to Sunday School to the radio programs we listened to every week. It was in all the stories we told ourselves and each other. In fact, we were urged to tell our own stories, our “testimonies” of before and after, of the dramatic change God had made in our own lives since the moment we were saved. If we ever doubted our salvation, we were directed to that moment of crisis. Did you pray the prayer/raise the hand/come forward? Write the date in your Bible. Celebrate it every year as a second birthday. Look to that moment and be secure.

Church Kids

This model might have worked okay for those who came to faith as adults, or came back to it after a period of significant rebellion. But how to deal with their children? For a kid raised in the church, there really isn’t any “before”. Parents and Sunday School teachers, even down to the nursery workers, work hard to ensure that the Bible is part of the children’s lives from before they can remember. So what kind of “testimony” can we possibly have?

See, the crisis model still held. It was drilled into us very severely that going to church or having Christian parents didn’t make you a Christian. It had to be your own decision. And in order to really make a valid decision, you had to really know what you were doing. You had to demonstrate that you grasped the essential elements of the gospel, and that you wanted it for your own. And not just to please your parents, or because it was what everyone else was doing. No, it had to be your own decision and you had to really mean it, or else it was no good. You were only fooling yourself and heading for hell.

This is where the “age of accountability” came into play. Some claimed it was 12 or 13, the age where Jewish children officially became adults. Others claimed it was different for each child. But almost everyone would set it somewhere around adolescence. This was the time to “make your faith your own”. Because now, see, you really knew what you were doing. You had the cognitive ability to understand the deep truths of the gospel, and the self-will to choose it. If you already “got saved” as a child (and once saved, always saved), the crisis at this point might manifest as a “re-dedication” or “complete surrender” to God, a kind of second tier of salvation. Often, it took the form of a “call” to professional ministry, as a pastor or missionary or some such thing. Summer camp was rife with these kinds of decisions.

Prosperity Gospel

The material or financial prosperity gospel, promoted by sleazy televangelists, is easy to spot and ridicule. But in some ways, this crisis model was similar. That was the “after” portion of the testimony: because I gave my life to Jesus, I can now have peace in any circumstances, forgive my enemies, and do all kinds of other impossible things. And while we gave lip service to the idea of growth, the unspoken assumption was that all this miraculous character change would be ours almost immediately. Growth would mean just going from good to better to amazing. If we struggled, then our very salvation was suspect. Wasn’t God a God of miracles? So if the miracle wasn’t happening, we must have messed up our previous crisis somehow. A dramatic re-dedication was in order. Once completely surrendered to God, we couldn’t go wrong anymore.

Reasons Why

I can see what they were trying to avoid. In many mainline denominations that practiced infant baptism, there was a great deal of nominalism and presumption. People assumed their baptism or church membership made them eternally secure, meaning they could proceed to live however they wanted and still claim to be Christians. No good Baptist wanted that.

Besides, the crisis model seemed to work. Revivals and evangelistic meetings showed dramatic results. This was the way the church grew. And many stories and verses from the Bible seemed to back it up. From the burning bush of Moses to the Damascus road of Paul, God met people in the dramatic and sudden, changing their lives in an instant.

Reasons Why Not

For starters, a huge contradiction shows up right away. The decision has to be really your decision of your own free will in order to count; and yet, you have to choose exactly this, for exactly these reasons, or else suffer a fate worse than death. It’s impossible without a good deal of cognitive dissonance.

Second, when the proof of positive change has to be dramatic and impressive, the small and gradual is devalued and ignored. This wreaks havoc on anyone whose life doesn’t seem to match the narrative. If you don’t have a dramatic conversion story or sudden behavior change to lean on, your very salvation is suspect. So I made up for that by doing other dramatic gestures: volunteering for every VBS, becoming the star of verse memorization at AWANA, declaring my intention to be a full-time missionary, etc. Children are especially vulnerable, since they are by nature small and all of their growth is gradual. Just picture a room of second-graders singing, “The things I used to do, don’t do them anymore” and other songs that spurn the past self. Their past self is a child, hardly different from who they are now. They’re being taught to blame and shame themselves for not knowing, understanding, or accepting truths that they didn’t have the cognitive capacity for at the time. Whatever simple, inarticulate form of faith and love for God they had before, it’s not good enough. In order to be “real”, their faith has to be adult-like. How did we stray so far from “Let the little children come to Me…for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:14)?

Third, the crisis model (with spiritual/emotional prosperity gospel) offered its own version of presumption. After the switch is flipped, assuming you’ve flipped it in the right way, everything is hunky dory. Supposedly, you stop making bad decisions and start making good ones; meaning that any decisions made after the switch-flipping are automatically assumed to be good. This is a reductio ad absurdem, but it is nevertheless the case that many a selfish desire was reinterpreted as a move of the Holy Spirit, just because the person feeling it had prayed the prayer or switched sides in a dramatic way. “I was baptized as a baby” and “Say 10 Hail Marys and 20 Our Fathers” were replaced with “I prayed a prayer when I was 12” and “I’ll have another crisis and God will forgive me.” No one is supposed to use such things as a license to sin, but such is human nature that we can twist just about anything into an excuse to do whatever we want. We were super hard on it in other traditions and blind to it in our own. (What?! Baptists had a tradition?? The horror…)

Finally and most importantly, the grace of God was swallowed up in dependence on our own faith. Now, there’s no denying that faith is essential. Without faith, it is impossible to please God. But what we were after wasn’t really faith; it was certainty. Dramatic conversions and requiring full understanding were ways that we tried to make absolutely sure that there weren’t any false or nominal Christians in our churches, and absolutely sure that we were really, truly saved ourselves. “Assurance” of salvation was a huge deal, something we had and those poor benighted Catholics (for instance) didn’t have. But assurance, as I described above, rested on the firmness of our own decisions. And such decisions were always liable to suspicion. Even if God did 99% of the work, that 1% left over was the weight of eternity resting on frail human shoulders. Because after all, 1% of infinity is still infinity.

Conclusion

There are two related words in Hebrew that are translated as “truth” in the Bible: ‘emeth and ‘emuwnah. Both mean “literally firmness” or “stability”, with a connotation of securely holding up something or someone. In fact, ‘emuwnah is used in Exodus 17:12 to describe how, when Aaron and Hur held up his arms, Moses’ hands were “steady” until sundown. In the Old Testament way of thinking , truth is something that can hold you up. It’s dependable, reliable. When you push on it, it pushes back. When you fall, it catches you. When you try to smash it, you get smashed. It’s not subject to your own whims or desires.

And this is exactly what we need! If the floor fell out from under us whenever we ceased to will it into place; if gravity were a matter of believing strongly enough; if molecular bonds, electricity, and the rest of the forces holding the world together were placed in the control of our tiny, finite brains, we couldn’t move. We could barely exist without losing grip and helplessly watching everything fall apart. In order for us to depend on anything, it has to not depend on us.

Now imagine someone coming to that weeping teenager from before, only now she’s a twenty-something college student, unsure of her future and often paralyzed by anxiety. Someone tells her, and even proves to her from the Bible, that she doesn’t even hold 1% of the weight of eternity. God holds it all. Whatever good she knows, or wills, or does, it is a gift from the Amen, the Faithful and True Witness, the Rock who is a Refuge for His people. Long before she could want Him, when she was a helpless infant unaware even of herself, He wanted her and made her His. He is the ‘emeth and ‘emuwnah that she could never be. For the first time, she truly rests and is at peace.

Well, you don’t have to imagine it. That’s what happened. Thank God.

(Next time on Post-Baptist therapy: Bring Your Imaginary Friends to Church!)