The Altar Call and the Invitation

What you may hear

The Sunday school hour ends and a teacher says:

“With every head bowed and every eye closed — if you want to give your heart to Jesus this morning, I want you to slip your hand up. I see that hand. Now, if you raised your hand, come on up here and we’ll pray together.”

Or in a children’s class, gentler and harder to name: “Who wants to ask Jesus into their heart today? Come stand up here with me.”

Why it matters

The altar call is not a neutral method with a theological problem attached. The method is the theology. Everything in it — the bowed heads, the raised hand, the walk to the front — teaches that the decisive moment is a movement the person makes toward God, in public, under mild pressure, on a schedule set by the teacher.

That is a claim about how the Holy Spirit works, and the Confession rejects it by name. It also does something the teacher never intends: it makes salvation an event with witnesses, and a child who did not raise his hand now knows something about himself that his baptism flatly contradicts.

The pressure matters, too, and should be said plainly. Children comply. A nine-year-old in a room where hands are going up will raise his hand because the adults want him to, and the teacher will read that as fruit. It is not fruit. It is a child being agreeable.

What to do instead

The invitation is not wrong; the direction is. God does the coming, and he does it through means. So invite them to the means.

1. End the hour with a promise, not a summons. “Jesus died for you. You were baptized into him. That is settled, and it was settled before you got here.”
2. If a child does want to talk, talk with him — gladly, and without the room watching. Never make a spiritual conversation a public performance for other children.
3. Point to what recurs, not to what happened once. He will hear the Word next Sunday, and the Sunday after. The Christian life is a life of receiving, not a moment of deciding.
4. Never ask a child to make a public spiritual commitment in front of peers. If a teacher is doing this, it goes to the pastor or the deacon board promptly. This one is not a matter of taste.
5. If hands have already gone up, do not shame anyone. Tell them the better news: God’s hand was up first.

One line you can actually use

“You don’t have to come to the front. Christ already came to you — and he’ll be here next week, doing the same thing.”

If the student asks

“But how do I come to Jesus? Don’t I have to do something?”

The question is honest and deserves a straight answer rather than a lecture on synergism.

“You do — you’re doing it. You came to hear his Word. That’s not a small thing, and it isn’t nothing. But you didn’t get yourself here first; he came and got you at the font, and he keeps coming every time you hear this. Coming to Jesus mostly looks like showing up where he’s promised to be.”

An adult version arrives as: “So Lutherans don’t believe in conversion?” Answer that we believe in it so strongly that we will not credit it to the convert.

The confessional citation

Binding:

• Small Catechism, the Creed, Third Article — I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ my Lord or come to him, but the Holy Spirit has called me by the gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, and kept me in the true faith. This is the entry’s decisive citation, and it is the one a Sunday school teacher is most likely to have memorized as a child. Use that.
• Augsburg Confession V — the Spirit is given through the Word and sacraments as instruments; those who hold that the Spirit comes without the external Word, through our own preparations and works, are rejected.
• Nicene Creed — the Holy Spirit is the Lord and giver of life. The giving is his.

Supplementary, not binding under the AFLC standard: Formula of Concord II on the bound will develops this at length and is the best further reading for a teacher who wants it.

Scripture: John 6:44; John 15:16; 1 Corinthians 12:3.

What not to do

• Do not make refusing the altar call into the badge. A congregation that mostly defines itself by what it does not do at the end of a service has traded one performance for another.
• Do not treat a child’s interest as a symptom. A child who wants to talk about Jesus is not infected with evangelicalism. Talk with him.
• Do not correct this in front of the children. Especially not this one — the children in the room raised their hands, and a public correction tells them the thing they did was shameful.
• Do not assume bad faith in the teacher. Most teachers who give invitations were given one, and it is the only shape of caring for souls they have ever been shown.