I remember, as a boy, watching Billy Graham on our black and white television set. At the end of every broadcast, Graham would invite people to come forward to receive Christ, assuring them that "your friends will wait." And people would come forward, a lot of people. The invitation would go out to viewers to join in and call a phone number.

The times I went on occasion to church with the lady who picked kids up around the neighborhood, or sometimes with my family or, as a high schooler, when friends with cars would come by and pick me up, that something happened at church, toward the end of the service usually. Music would be playing, and over the music, a preacher or another person of power and influence would be speaking, praying.

With every head bowed and all eyes closed, if you want to raise your hand and say to God that you want to follow him, do that now.

Sometimes the music itself carried the day and then the preacher speaking softly through a microphone or in the churches with no amplified sound, loud and urgent, a strange kind of intimacy.

If you raised your hand, if you are ready, if God is speaking to you, if you want to surrender all, come down the aisle so that all can see that you are saying yes to Jesus. Come.

Sometimes friends I knew would go forward. People of all ages. Those dressed in suits. Women in silk dresses or suits with matching hats. A working-class man who didn’t wear a suit. The rebellious teenager who walked down at least once a month. A little girl, uncertainly letting loose the hand of her mother, stepping into the aisle and working forward to join the others, if there were others.

All of this while the rest of the congregation sang in unison, rejoicing and praying. We had sung the hymns. We listened to the choir. We passed the offering. We heard the sermon. God was at work. So this was how the service ended, people walking down the aisle for the altar call.

Lorraine tells me that in the church where she grew up, some people judged the strength of the service based on the number of times they sang the chorus before the service ended.

I think back on my experiences with this. In a church I began attending on a semi-regular basis, I noticed one lady going forward every week. A friend from high school went forward for the sins she had committed that week, a sort of Protestant confessional. I remember one guy joking that he went forward just so the service could end.

Thinking back on those journeys down the aisle, I found this from a Christian History article:

“Many people consider Charles Grandison Finney (1792-1875) to be the ‘father’ of the altar call. Ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1823, Finney did not begin giving public invitations until long after Methodists had made the altar call a regular part of their camp meetings. Finney, however, did more than anyone to establish altar calls as an accepted and popular practice in American evangelicalism. Finney regularly called anxious sinners to the front of the congregation to sit on an ‘anxious bench.’ There, they would receive prayer and often be preached to directly. The altar call was also one of Finney’s famous ‘new measures.’ He was convinced that ministers could produce revival by using the right methods, and that the altar call ‘was necessary to bring [sinners] out from among the mass of the ungodly to a public renunciation of their sinful ways.’”

And this from a Gospel Coalition article quoted a description of George Whitefield’s call for immediate decision in a sermon:

“Whitefield asked whether anyone wished ‘to take Christ for their husband.’ If they did, he extended an invitation: ‘Come and I’ll marry you to him just now.’ . . . A twenty-one-year old male convert said that when Whitefield ‘laid out the terms’ of the union with Christ, he found his ‘heart made sweetly to agree to those terms.’ Another convert ran to embrace a friend, exclaiming that the minister had ‘married my soul to Christ.’ . . . Whitefield wrote that many ‘were married to the Lord Jesus that night.’”

I don’t think Whitefield was calling people forward when he invited people to be married to Jesus. Something else was going on of which the physical movement was a symptom. It wasn’t really the beginning, but something happening in the middle of faith for a lot of folks.

The aisle doesn’t matter, but the heart does. We don’t do altar calls anymore, but there is a calling we must heed from God, the call to believe and receive and give our lives to God, not unlike marriage, a vow that lasts longer than marriage and earthly life. His promise to be faithful even when we fail.

How can we even breathe apart from his lungs? How can we clearly see apart from his eyes? Every day he washes my feet. Every day of life, even in my sins and failures, falling back into nail-scarred wrists and the hole in his side, the shoulders of the Shepherd, the Spouse who is always at my side, nearer still to feel his breath on my sin-weakened frame promising peace, falling, rising, holding on to him, receiving new life to face this day whatever it holds.

You still give me breath
in the valley of death.
In the pastures green you ever lead.
My raging waves you still.
You drink the cup
and do the Father’s will.
When I fall and want to hide
There you are, at my side
On the cross,
empty grave,
ascending the sky
Your love is my love,
I am still your bride
Your love is my love ever even now,
You conquer my sin,
it’s gone away
In my heart in your heart I hide,
Faithful eventide.