On Sunday mornings at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Enid, Oklahoma, we have three worship services. Two are in our main auditorium and the third one (Refuge) is in our multi-purpose facility (picture left). In all three respective services we have various worship styles in terms of music (either a band, orchestra and choir, ensemble, etc...) and an expositional message based on a text of Scripture. We will regularly schedule public testimonies of people whose lives have been changed by God's power, show videos that are either purchased or created by our own ministry staff which are designed to enhance our understanding of God's word, and we will spend some time in prayer for our various mission efforts around the world and in our own community. The one thing that we don't have in any of our services is what Southern Baptists traditionally called "an altar call."
There are verbal invitations for people to receive Christ as Lord and Savior, as well as encouragement for those who have come to personal faith in Christ to publicly profess their trust in Him through baptism; but there are no public "altar calls." At the conclusion of the teaching of Scripture we may worship, or we may pray, or we may minister to people through both worship and prayer, but we don't have people "come forward to an altar" and make some type of "decision." The reason we do not practice this kind of Southern Baptist ritualism is because we believe altars were used in the Old Covenant for the offerings of sacrifices that were designed to visually remind the Israelites of the coming of the Messiah and what He would accomplish for God's people through His death. Churches don't have altars. Christ has come, He has died, and He has risen from the grave. We proclaim Him. We preach Christ and Him crucified and we verbally encourage people to look to Him in faith. To ask them to "walk an aisle" smacks of some kind of religious ritualism that puts a person's faith in the steps they take rather than in the sacrifice Christ made.
When someone makes known to us that he/she has come to faith in Christ, then we encourage them to tell others of their faith through being baptized in a public forum. Last Sunday night we had a baptismal service in the backyard pool of a man who has just recently begun attending our church. The lot was very large and we had a large number of people come out for the fellowship and celebration service. We brought in a public address system and those who were baptized wrote out their personal testimonies to be read prior to their baptism. My wife told me that the testimonies she heard Sunday night were some of the most gripping, most powerful statements of what it means to have a life transformed by the power of Christ that she has ever heard. I think her opinion was echoed by some of the lost people who were there to observe their loved ones being baptized . They heard what Christ had done in the life of their loved one, and were moved by their testimonies. A husband heard his wife''s words and knew he needed Christ as well. A grandfather heard his grandson's testimony and wept. Our church members were deeply moved as they heard testimony after testimony from former drug addicts, alcoholics, adulterers, etc... who shared how they came to faith in Christ through the love and kindness of Emmanuel's church members who had invited them to worship with them on Sunday, and then modeled Christianity for them throughout the week. Some baptized that night had been believers for a few weeks, others for a few months, and a couple had been believers for over a year.
Emmanuel will have another baptismal service in September at our local lake. At various times we will observe a believer being baptized in one of our three Sunday morning worship services. During the past five years we have baptized nearly 500 people who have come to faith in Jesus Christ. But all of them have come to faith in Christ through various ways and by diverse means. Were you to ask any of them about their conversion, they would tell you a unique, gripping story of God's grace. None of them would ever say, "I walked the aisle to the altar." They don't know what that means. They know Christ, they know what it means to believe in Him, and they know what it means to publicly profess their faith in him through baptism.
I sometimes wonder if we Southern Baptists lose sight that God graces and converts sinner in unique and various ways because we have substituted our southern cookie cutter church rituals for relational Biblical Christianity. I'm not necessarily saying that having an "altar call" is wrong. I am saying real Christianity is best measured by changed lives. Causing people to trust in a walk down an aisle to "an altar" is dangerously close to creating an idol out of a church ritual. We prefer to trust the Chief Shepherd and watch Him call His people by name in His time.
In His Grace,
Wade Burleson
