Tag: evangelicalism

Some thoughts on purpose and evangelicalism

Most evangelical churches communicate their purpose in terms of a cycle: usually a salvation component, a discipleship component, and an envangelization component, like grow, serve, reach… win, equip, share… glorify God by making fully devoted disciples… etc. Other churches communicate it through their ethos in oft-repeated statements like, “We are blessed so that we can bless.”

There is one sort of organism which seems to possess this kind of cyclical process: a virus. They seem to exist only in order to spread. Biologists question whether to regard viruses as fully living organisms or not.

I do not deny that the purpose of God for man always includes a desire that he would go out, that he would bless others by his blessing. There is indeed something utterly outpouring, something outwardly oriented and abundant, in the nature of God’s love within the trinity. The most natural thing, the inevitable thing, when filled with this love is to move outward, to want to tell it and give it and dance in the streets with it.

But I wish this kind of love were articulated more often in terms of sonship and family, of abundant life rather than replicating machine. What I mean is: as a father I certainly and deeply want my daughter to bless others, and I want her to become the bearer of the truth and love that I am bestowing on her, in a world that will be hers after I am gone. I want her life shine for the glory of God. But I hesitate to frame this great desire as “her purpose” or the reason that I brought her into being. There is something much deeper, more ontological about her purpose–I want her to be simply because I love her and want her to be, because being is good (after all, God is pure being). She is a living being who, to the extent that she comes alive, will radiate life; but her purpose is not to spread life, so much as to be alive. She is an end in herself, because she is, in her very being, the expression of my joy and love. And that is the way I think that it is our purpose to evangelize: to use (hopefully correctly) Thomist language: it is an accidental, rather than substantial purpose, and thus not the most fundamentally descriptive of what our purpose is.

Keeping this distinction makes all the difference, because it is the difference between our approaching the modus operandi of our Christian life as fundamentally doers for God, or receivers of God. The Incarnation of Christ compels us to rejoice that we are indeed the means of God on the earth, but that is only because we are first and forever his ends.

Altar calls

These will not be the most refined thoughts but I think it behooves me to get some of them out of my system in whatever form, and hopefully refine them later.

I believe that God can transform a heart in a single instant. I believe that many people have been changed by the power of the Holy Spirit of Jesus within a worship service. In fact, I believe that worship services are especially fertile environments where God’s spirit works on human hearts. However, I think altar calls are often not a part of that work.

By altar call, I mean the climactic moment where the people are asked to and given the chance to make an individual, subjective response to the truth that has been presented in the service (whether by the sermon or by other means as well). As we discussed when I was on an internal review team at that church, worship is focus + response. The sermon brings the focus, and then there is the opportunity of response. Traditionally, this opportunity includes an invitation to come down to the front and pray with an elder or kneel and pray. In Baptist churches like mine growing up, it begins with “every head bowed, every eye closed” and includes a period where you can silently repeat a prayer after the pastor and then raise your hand to show him that you prayed it, after which point he assures you that your life has been changed today, and to come talk to an elder afterwards. I also include in my definition of altar call the adaptations of many new-generation evangelical churches that are softening these formulations out, just offering an open time to respond with multiple options–you can come down front and pray with an elder, or pray a free-style prayer.

Here’s the thing about altar calls: to the extent that they are overt, they are focused on conversion, and to the extent to which they are not (just “creating a space”), they are subjective and provide no guidance or protection from error.

An overt altar call is always focused on conversion, whether it be new or a “rededication” or some partial rededication of one area or issue in one’s life. The problem with this is that it leaves nothing to do for people who have already converted and devoted their lives to God. I cannot tell you the number of times I have tuned out during the climax of the worship service, saying to myself, “Believer? Check. This doesn’t apply to me.”

Even as many churches move away from such overt altar calls, perhaps sensing the awkwardness of having a gathering comprised mostly of Christians who have already performed the act that is the climax and purpose of the gathering, there are still issues with modified “space for personal response” times. The problem is that they subjectivize the response to God, legitimizing any interpretation of the truth that is presented in the sermon. They turn the whole service into something that is focused on us. It begins with something about God, and then looks at us and asks us to finish off the service by the powers of our own sincerity. The Holy Spirit is beseeched to move on the people, but there is no anchor for the Spirit in Truth. Rather the Truth (the scriptures in the sermon) are a means to the end of an experience in which the Spirit’s movement is located in the unprovable, irrefutable castle of personal conviction. The worship service thus becomes the corporate equivalent of the evangelical private “quiet time” and even the typical small group study: that which is objective truth (the Bible) is subjected to private interpretation and application in each person’s individual mind. Thus Human Reason sits as lord over the Sacred Scriptures.

The problem with this is that it leads to all sorts of misguidedness and error on the part of church members. The only way to avoid this is to guide the people objectively through response as we do through focus–to help them respond in truth as they receive truth. But how can a response be objective? It must have a physical reality, an object outside the human mind. Such an object is not available within Evangelical theology. It is, however, available within the theology of  Catholicism, in the Eucharist. This objective act is both receiving and responding to God in a way that is at once both spiritual and physical. This act, and the faith associated with it, roots the faith of the believer in something outside himself and makes the act of worship as Incarnational as the Gospel it professes. The Eucharist is the proper climax of worship and the proper act around which Christians who have already received the waters of Baptism should gather. Instead of being perpetual altar-going converts, plumbing the depths of their personal sincerity for Jesus, they take of his Body and Blood and find his Real Presence before them.