Let Go and Let God: The Altar Call in the Passive Voice
A four-word slogan that sounds like grace, borrowed from the Higher Life movement and carried into both the sanctuary and the church basement. It is right about the problem and wrong about the cure.
Published
You have heard it in a hospital corridor, said quietly by someone who did not know what else to say. You have heard it in a church basement at seven in the evening, over bad coffee, from a man with twenty years of sobriety and a genuine desire to help you. You have seen it in cursive on a coffee mug, over a sunset, in a Facebook comment under a post about someone’s dying mother.
Let go and let God.
It is four words long. It is easy to remember. It sounds like the humblest thing a Christian could possibly say, because it appears to take every scrap of credit out of your hands and put it in the hands of God. And it has comforted a great many people who were, at that moment, entirely out of other options.
I want to take it seriously enough to argue with it.