The Altar Call That Never Took

Adapted from the opening chapter, "The Altar Call That Never Took," of The Altar Call, the Anxious Bench, and the Empty Pew: A Former Atheist's Case for the Rest Outside You — forthcoming from Ordinary Means.

You know how it went, because you were there.

Maybe you were nine, or fourteen, or nineteen. Maybe it was a gymnasium that smelled of floor wax and nervous adolescence, or a sanctuary with the lights dimmed and a worship band holding a single chord under the preacher's voice, or a tent in July with the sides rolled up and moths batting the strung bulbs. The details differ. The shape does not. The message had been preached—Christ crucified, your sin, your need—and then, at the end, came the moment the whole evening had been built toward. Every head bowed. Every eye closed. No one looking around. And the invitation.

If you want to give your life to Jesus tonight. If you want to be sure. If you've never really settled it. Just slip up your hand where I can see it. Yes, I see that hand. And that one. Now, while the music plays, I want you to come. Don't wait. Come.

And you went.

You remember the walk—the impossible length of an aisle you had crossed a hundred times without a thought, now grown long as a runway. You remember the counselor who met you, kind-faced, a little too eager, who knelt with you and led you through the words. Dear Jesus. I know that I am a sinner. I believe you died for me. Come into my heart. I accept you as my Lord and Savior. Amen. You remember that you meant it. You remember the flood of relief afterward, warm and total, the certainty that something had happened, that heaven had shifted an inch to make room, that you were—finally, actually—in.

And then, at some point you could not have named, the certainty leaked out.

It never happens all at once. That is the cruelty of it. If it collapsed in a night you might have caught it and known something was wrong. Instead it goes slowly, like air from a tire you cannot hear hissing. A week after the camp, a month after the revival, a year into the ordinary weather of your life, and the question is back, sitting on the edge of your bed at eleven at night with the light off.

Did I really mean it?

You turn it over. You inspect the memory of that night the way you would inspect a receipt you are not sure will be honored. You felt something—but was the feeling the Holy Spirit, or was it the music, or was it just the relief of finally doing the thing everyone had been waiting for you to do? You said the words—but did you understand them? Did you have enough faith, or only enough to say the prayer, which is not the same thing? And underneath all of it, the question with teeth:

If I really got saved that night, why do I still feel like this?

So you go looking for evidence. You examine your life for fruit and find a mixed harvest, which is to say you find yourself. You examine your feelings and discover that feelings are weather. You remember that you sinned again last Tuesday, badly and on purpose, and a truly saved person surely would not have—so maybe it did not take. Maybe the prayer at nine did not take and you needed the one at fourteen. Maybe the one at fourteen did not take and that is what the rededication at camp was for. Maybe none of them took, and you have been walking around for years with a testimony you are no longer sure is true.

And so, the next time the closing hymn plays and the preacher says come, you go again. Not because anyone made you. Because you have to be sure—and you were sure, for about three weeks, the last time. This time, maybe, it will hold.

I want to say something to you before we go a single step further, because I know how this is landing if you are the reader I am writing for. You are reading it with a low hum of shame, because you think the anxiety I am describing is a defect in you. You think the real Christians, the ones whose testimonies actually took, do not lie awake auditing a prayer they prayed a decade ago. You think you are the broken one.

You are not. Hear me: the anxiety you have carried is not a sign that you failed the system. It is a sign that the system was working exactly as designed—and that you, unlike a great many people around you, were paying honest attention to what it asked of you.

Because here is what almost nobody says out loud: the most earnest ones always had it worst. The people who could shrug it off, who prayed the prayer and never thought about it again, were not the ones who understood the transaction best. They were the ones who understood it least. If your salvation really does rest on the sincerity of a decision you made, then the honest thing—the rational thing—is to lie awake wondering whether the decision was sincere enough. The scrupulous conscience is not malfunctioning. It has simply done the math. You were told the ground of your assurance was inside you, in the quality of your choice and the depth of your meaning it, and then you went and looked inside yourself for something solid to stand on, and you found sand. Of course you did. There is nothing else in there.

Most books about this stop right here, with you, the anxious believer, and offer you some comfort and send you back to the pew. I am not going to stop here. I want to follow this machine all the way down—past the anxiety, past the rededication treadmill, to where it actually ends. Because the same engine that keeps you awake auditing your prayer has a second exit, one the anxious believer rarely lets herself look at.

I know it is there because I took it.

For seven years I was not an anxious Christian. I was not a Christian at all.

I was a card-carrying member of American Atheists, and I do not mean that I had drifted or grown cold. I mean that I had thought it through and come out the other side, and I argued the case—in public, in writing, to anyone who would engage me—that the Bible was a book of contradictions, that its God was a human invention, and that the whole edifice of the faith was a comfort men had built against the dark. I was good at it. I did my reading. I could take the resurrection apart on a Tuesday and never lose sleep.

I am going to tell you why I left, because the reason I left is the same reason you cannot sleep.

I did not leave in rebellion. I did not storm out to chase some sin the church was keeping from me. I left because I did the honest thing with the terms I had been handed. I had been taught—every earnest, well-meaning voice of my upbringing had taught me—that if this were real, I would feel it. That a living relationship with Jesus meant his presence, his leading, a voice, a nearness, a warmth you could locate in your chest and a sense of being guided through your days. And so I prayed for it. I studied for it. I worshiped and waited and strained toward it for a long time. And it did not come. No presence. No leading. No voice. No feedback of any kind whatsoever.

And I concluded, reasonably, that a God I could not feel was a God who was not there.

Do you see it? I did not reason my way out of the faith against its own logic. I reasoned my way out on the very map the faith had handed me. If God is something you feel, and you have honestly sought the feeling and it will not come, then the man of integrity does not fake it for another forty years. He packs his bags. My atheism was not a failure to take the faith seriously. It was the result of taking it too seriously to pretend.

You and I were handed the same map. Yours has kept you awake for a decade, auditing whether your decision was sincere enough, whether the warmth that night was really the Spirit or just the band. Mine, followed all the way to its end, walked me out the door and locked it behind me. Same machine. Two exits. And here is the thing I need you to sit with, because it is the hidden center of the whole matter: the anxious believer and the honest unbeliever are not opposites. We are two people obeying the same broken instruction—look inside yourself for God, and stake everything on what you find there. One of us finds sand and keeps clawing at it, night after night, sure the problem is that she has not clawed hard enough. The other finds nothing and leaves. Neither of us was ever going to find rest, because rest was never in there to be found.

Here is what I most want you to know about how I came back, because it is the hinge on which all of this turns.

I did not come back because I finally worked up the feeling. There was no night when the presence I had waited twenty years for finally descended and settled the matter. I did not walk an aisle. Nobody got me to decide. I came back because someone—patiently, and over a long argument I fully expected to win—put in front of me a case for something that was true outside of me. Not "just feel it." Not "just believe, and the doubts will quiet down." A claim about what had actually happened, in history, in a tomb, on a cross—true or false regardless of whether I felt a single thing about it. And when I could no longer get around it, the faith that finally took hold of me was not built on my experience at all.

It rested on something extra nos.

That is Latin, and it means outside us—outside ourselves. It is the phrase everything else turns on, so let me set it down plainly, because the rest depends on it. Extra nos names where your salvation actually is, and therefore where your assurance is finally allowed to live. Not inside you. Not in the sincerity of your decision, not in the warmth of a feeling, not in the durability of your commitment, not in the evidence of a changed life or the strength of a spiritual experience you can summon on command. Outside you. In Christ. In what he did, entirely apart from you, before you were born and without asking your permission. In a word spoken to you and over you and for you, that does what it says because of who says it, and not because of how you manage to feel about it.

And that—not a feeling, not a decision—is exactly why it held, where two decades of trying to feel God never had. You cannot lose your grip on something that was never being held up by your grip in the first place.

Assurance that lives inside you will follow you inside, wherever you go. For you it followed you into the eleven-o'clock audit and would not let you sleep. For me it followed the logic all the way out into unbelief. But assurance that lives outside you can be pointed to. You can turn your back on it and it stays put. You can doubt it and it does not move. You can wake at eleven at night with the old question rising in the dark—did I mean it, am I saved, do I need to go forward again—and instead of climbing back onto the treadmill, you can say a different sentence entirely—one you can learn to say and mean and rest in—and the question will have nowhere to land, because the thing it was attacking is not inside you for it to reach.

I have given you the ending on purpose. You have been kept in suspense about your own soul for long enough, and I will not do it to you for one paragraph more. The rest of the book—the one this essay is drawn from—is simply the showing: that this is true, and a careful, contempt-free taking apart of the machine that told you otherwise.

Which brings me to the one thing I most need you to understand before we go further, because if you miss this you will misread everything else.

This is not a book against the people who led you to that altar. It is not a book against the ones who taught me to go looking inside myself for a God I was supposed to feel. They are not the villains here, and I will not let you make them into villains, because they were not mine and they will not be yours. The Sunday school teacher who wept when you came forward. The youth pastor who stayed up past midnight praying you through. The grandmother who wore out the binding of a Bible on your behalf and never once let you doubt that Jesus was real and that he loved you. The evangelist under the tent who, whatever else was tangled up in his method, told you about Christ crucified—and you would not know the name of your Savior tonight if he had not.

They gave you Jesus. Understand that. In many cases they handed you the living Christ himself with one hand while handing you a broken instrument for holding onto him with the other, and the second thing does not cancel the first. God is not so fragile that a bad theology of the decision can keep him out of a room, and he is not so weak that seven years of a man's confident atheism can drive him off. He came to me in the end through the very argument I had picked to destroy him. He kept you—restless, exhausted, unsure, walking the aisle again and again—he kept you the whole while, and that keeping is itself the first quiet proof of everything I am about to argue. You did not keep yourself. Look at the last twenty years. You could not even convince yourself you were saved. And you are still here, still reaching, still unwilling to let go of a Christ you were half-sure had already let go of you. That reaching is not your achievement. It is his grip, not yours, and it has been his grip the entire time.

So we are not going to burn anything down. We are going to be more careful than that, and more grateful. We are going to honor what was true—and there was so much that was true—while being honest, finally, about the one thing that was breaking you, and breaking others clean out of the faith. We are going to critique a theology, the theology of the decision, and we are going to leave every sincere believer who ever held it standing exactly where the grace of God has them: in his hand.

But we are going to tell the truth about the theology. Because it cost you something. It cost you years of a peace you were promised and never given. It cost me seven years in the dark. And it is still costing the people in the chairs behind you—the ones bowing their heads right now while the music plays, waiting to be told, one more time, that if they can only mean it enough, this time it will finally take.

The altar call never took.

For you it failed quietly, again and again, and you blamed yourself each time. For me it did worse: the whole thing emptied out, and I walked, and I stayed gone for the better part of a decade. It never took, and not because you did not mean it—you meant it more than most. It never took because it was never yours to make take. A decision, however sincere, is sand, and you cannot build a certainty on sand no matter how hard you press down, and a feeling, however warm, is weather, and you cannot build a life on the forecast. The wonder is not that our altars kept failing us. The wonder is that under all of it—unfelt, unaudited, asking nothing of our sincerity at all—Someone had already decided for us, and would not be moved.

That is the different question—the one nobody asked you at the altar.

Not: Have you made your decision for Jesus?

But: Has Jesus made his decision for you?

Let me show you where your own decision came from, so you can stop trusting it. And then let me show you his, so you can finally rest.

—Larry