It’s something I can’t quite come to terms with.  Is it a source of shame?  No, I don’t think so.  And yet, I’ve been cautious about sharing this particular tale of a holy experience.  You see, I, a life-long Lutheran, encountered the Holy Spirit at an altar call.

Not very Lutheran, I know.  Growing up, I’d never seen one before.  I have no specific memories of even hearing about altar calls as a young confirmand, though I feel they were placed in the same category as speaking in tongues or snake handling.  That is, altar calls belonged to a collection of weird practices in “other churches.”

So what was I to do after finding an altar call meaningful?  Who could I talk to?  I worried about what would happen if my Lutheran friends found out.  Would they disown me?  Would I have to make new friends, friends who only listened to Christian radio and thought Communion was either symbolic or idolatrous?

To those Lutherans who would disown me, I offer these hasty, emotional defenses:

It was a crazy time!  Don’t judge me too harshly.  I was in college, after all, ready to experience new things.  I was free from my parents, ready to go a little crazy.  So when a friend offered me a ride to a church he’d heard about, I figured, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

Fellow Lutherans, heed my words: there are consequences to accepting rides from friends you don’t fully know.  You may end up in a converted gymnasium, filled with people speaking in tongues and falling to the floor.

It was the Sunday after September 11^th, 2001.  I was two weeks into my freshman year at Roanoke College and the world was falling apart.  The prosperous and secure 1990’s, the only world I had ever known, were over.  I sat in my folding chair listening to a sermon about which I remember two things:

First, the preacher spoke about Islam as an evil religion with which Christians must engage in a holy war.

Second, the preacher looked out in my direction and said, “I can see some of you (meaning me), don’t believe what I’m saying (I didn’t).  You’re smirking (I was).  Well, you should know that if you can’t see the truth it’s because Satan’s got a hold on you (I can’t argue with that!).”

As I made up my mind not to return to a church where disagreeing with inanity was considered a work of the devil, a curious thing happened.  The sermon never ended.  Instead, soft music began to play and the preacher invited us all to stand.  He asked us to lift our hands and pray with him.  He invited forward anyone who had never accepted Christ into their heart, and a sizable number went up, maybe twenty or so.

We prayed with the preacher for these people who stepped forward, and then the preacher invited anyone who had fallen away from Christ.  Maybe they had accepted Christ at one point, but had failed to be a good follower.  “If you feel you aren’t right with the Lord and would like to rededicate yourself to Him, come forward now,” the preacher offered.

That invitation cut me.  It wounded me the way these words always have: “We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.”  I stood in that gym, awkwardly keeping my hands higher than they had ever been in a church service before, while any pretension of being a Good Christian crumbled to dust within a half-second of reflection and self-examination.

Taking a deep breath, this life-long Lutheran left his spot next to his friends and answered that altar call.  Those steps were steps were steps of shame.  I felt embarrassed as I noticed that the pews weren’t emptying—the people who weren’t coming forward must be better Christians than me.  Would they think I had done something especially bad?

I don’t know how long I stood up there while that jackass of a preacher prayed over the fifty or so of us who’d answered his call, but I do know that that the Holy Spirit was moving through our crowd.  It is a blurry memory now, like a dream.  There was a palpable warmth, a feeling of closeness to God.  I remember a man falling to the ground as the preacher commanded Satan to leave us.  But mostly, I remember feeling loved.

I walked back to my seat, numb.

We left the church when the service ended, and I barely spoke in the car.  Since that day, I stayed true to my word; I never did go back.  I knew that whatever had happened there was not the work of the preacher.

I continued to visit many churches during my time at Roanoke, and whenever I ran into an altar call, I remained seated if the preacher invited people to accept Christ into their heart for the first time.  I knew from Confirmation that Christ had accepted me in Baptism, before I had any cognitive ability to either protest or accept him.  But if the preacher invited forward anyone who had fallen away, the generations of Lutheran blood in my veins began to quicken until my guilty conscience would no longer let me remain in my seat.  I knew from Confirmation that I could not by my own works maintain a life perfectly in step with the path to which Christ called me.

There is a weight to my experiences with altar calls that I continue to unpack and attempt to understand.  I am a Lutheran, and yet, one of the most moving experiences in my faith life took place in a church not my own.  Worse yet, I am not sure there is room for this experience in my church—either for it to happen, or for me to even talk about it.

Part of the problem is that I brought my Lutheran understanding to that church.  In other words, I can defend how I heard the altar call, but I cannot defend the way it is understood in that church.  The majority of that congregation stood still when the preacher invited repentant sinners forward, meaning that community lacked an ethos of simul justus et peccator.

To this day, I regularly examine this holy experience.  I try to look at it from different angles.  I wonder if it was real, or if I was caught up in a collective frenzy.  I look at my overall life of faith, and I see that my first altar call, in all of its weirdness, remains a significant watermark for me.  I’ve felt changed ever since: more confident in the promises of our faith and more assured of the lengths to which Christ will go to save me.

In all of this unpacking, three points regularly surface:

The First Point, or, On Kryptonite.  It is possible to develop airtight systematic theologies that adhere to every letter of the Book of Concord.  Heresies and non-Lutheran perspectives bounce off such constructs like bullets off Superman.  Yet, I think it is healthy for any way of thinking to retain a weakness for the work of the Holy Spirit.  Kryptonite nullifies Superman’s defenses and reminds him that he is vulnerable and not a god.  I stood before that altar call, knowing that it presented so many theological and philosophical problems, and still it nullified my defenses and became a means to realize my weakened state in the presence of a God who loves me.

The Second, or, What’s the Deal with Altar Calls?  In my best Seinfeld impression, I can only ask: “I hear the call, but where’s the altar?”  This is a tangential point, but I remain puzzled that the word “altar” is connected to these calls.  Churches that utilize altar calls, I assume, are not inclined to have altars.  If anything, they would have a table.  So what’s the deal?

The Third, or, An Encounter with Lewis’ Lion.  It’s become a cliché in my generation to reference The Chronicles of Narnia, but as I’ve struggled over the years to understand what happened to me, I’ve found helpful the words of Aslan to the children in The Silver Chair: “You would not have called to me if I had not been calling to you.”

I remain bothered by sneers in our high church settings that view altar calls as works of the low church.  Superman’s only defense against kryptonite is to wear a heavy lead suit that restricts his vision.  I sense a defensiveness in how we civilized churches often speak of those who whoop in angelic tongues and talk about dedicating their lives to Christ.  Does our lack of regard for their practices restrict our vision?  From where does this defensiveness come?  Are we afraid that the Holy Spirit really is encountering these Christians so different from us?

And yet, these Christians need to hear Aslan’s admonishment to the children who insist it was their doing that brought them to Aslan’s Country Beyond the Sea.  The altar call, at its worst, appeals to our own sinful desires to justify ourselves—to make our lives of faith all about our own efforts.  I have claimed Christ as my own personal savior, and I have accepted Jesus into my heart. 

Worse still, those pews do not empty when the preacher invites forward the people whose lives of faith remain incomplete.  The assumption is that there are two kinds of Christians: those who need to repent of their fallen behavior, and those who are getting along okay with their Lord.

If those two groups exist, which I doubt, I know which Christian I am.  It’s why I confess my sins every week, why I tremble at Communion, and why, when I visit churches not my own, I will always answer that call to the fallen Christian.

David C. Drebes currently serves as the vicar at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Glen Rock, N.J.  He completed his M.Div at Princeton Theological Seminary in 2008, where he also served as interim Lutheran Chaplain at Princeton University.  He is a candidate for ordained ministry in the VA Synod, ELCA.