Hold your ammo, there, Bubba. I give an invitation every Sunday. I give people an opportunity to respond and to come talk to me about spiritual issues. No pressure or manipulation is used. But I think it is a good thing to offer people a chance to make a public profession. It is not a biblical mandate and I realize that there are other ways to accomplish the same goal. But, at my church, we close our service with a hymn and give people an opportunity to respond.
But there is one thing I don’t like about the invitation – it’s not really the invitation but the way people view it. I’ve noticed this problem in some of our pre-service prayer times. One of the dear men of God who join me to ask God’s blessing on our worship will ask God to move on the hearts of those who need to respond so that they might make the decision they need to make and move to the front.
I would never rebuke that prayer. Every time we meet, there are lost people who need to choose to respond in faith to the gospel message. There are Christians walking in the flesh who need to repent. There are people to need to make the move to join our church or to follow Christ in baptism. I am not quarreling with prayer or the motive behind it. Who would NOT want to see the lost come to Christ or the straying return?
But that prayer also surfaces the problem I have with invitations. When the word of God is preached, it is never a few people who need to respond. When the Word is brought forth, EVERY person needs to respond. The Bible doesn’t call for a response from a few people who need to be saved, or to repent, or to join the church or whatever. The Word calls each of us to respond, to bring our lives in line with its teachings and to seek to be conformed to the image of Christ (by the Spirit’s work). We worship and we confront the Word not just so one or two might walk an aisle and respond, but so that every person who is present would respond in obedience to what is preached.
This is not a problem sufficient, in my mind, to toss out the invitation at the close of the service. Calling people to a specific act of public profession has sufficient biblically and the invitation is an acceptable way of accomplishing that purpose. But it also has some drawbacks, and in my mind, the tendency to focus the service on a few who “need to respond” is one of the biggest.
May I cite an additional problem with the “invitation system’!
The text says all men everywhere are COMMANDED to repent. Matt. 11:29 expresses the call by Jesus in imperative verbs (apate & matheite – take & learn). This is vastly different than an invitation. The most ludicrous words in any language are “No LORD!”
What would you say if He asked you “Are you ever going to leave me?”
I, too have problems with the system, albeit I a not a preacher.
But let’s face it: I doesn’t work. Not if you’re serious about the Great Commission, which is to make disciples .. pupils .. learners. According to the stats I have, for instance, in the 6 largest population centers in Alabama, attendance in SBC church is 33.28% of membership. And attendance includes lots of folks that aren’t counted as members. Most children, visitors, etc.
The system we’ve had is what produced the church we have. If it might be true that people who join churches view the response to the invitation as “the event” .. that something special has happened because of their walking the aisle, it might produce what we see today. And I think that’s the case.
One SBC church of which I am aware that doesn’t use an invitation, baptizes about 100 converts a year, has 2,800 members and 2,000 attendance. They’re doing something righter than most.
I’m not a preacher, either, and I hear what you’re saying. But disciples must first be converted by the event of the new birth. Either the Spirit of Christ is in you, or you are none of His—and the Holy Spirit does not indwell by gradual means but by an event. If the gospel we preach and teach is faulty by causing many disingenuous conversions, then putting these false converts through a discipleship program will not fix their problem. The real problem with disingenuous converts is the gospel presentation and not the discipleship program.
Neither is the problem to be found in walking the aisle. I don’t see how being converted privately rather than publicly is supposed to keep down false conversions. The theme of the invitation system is public confession of faith. You may think that you’re willing to forsake sin, self, and your pride and give your all to Christ; but if you’re unwilling to undergo the humility of going forward, then maybe you’re fooling yourself. Disingenuous conversions can happen just as often in those who get saved in their seat (or at home) as in those who go forward. Again, the problem is in the gospel presentation and not anywhere else.
As for manipulation, if we know that God uses the foolishness of preaching to persuade men to come to Christ, then how can we be so sure that He does not also use the foolishness of the invitation, the foolishness of singing, and the foolishness of going forward to persuade men to come?
Dave,
Good post. We also continue to offer an invitation. I prefer to note the event of worship is a call that elicits a response from everyone. We tend to view the invitation in that framework – a time for a response from all who hear what God is getting done in the event of the sermon.
The history of the matter is that, for the most part, the invitation system began with Finney’s Anxious Bench and continued to the point of the coming forward with Sunday and others. All along there were those who continued to practice the matter as it had been for generations, no coming forward. One saw the minister or presented himself or herself for examination concerning his or her experience of salvation and demonstration of faith. What the problem with invitation is that it contributes to superficiality in conversions. It is also the cause for the use of unethical methods by ministers to get people to come forward like the evangelist in Georgia over 60 years ago, who told a lie in order to get people forward. I heard one preacher say, “Well, he got some forward, didn’t he?” As if the ends justify the use of means totally inappropriate to the message. God forbid.
Whoa is me. I am so undone when it comes to this cultic practice of the contemporary American church. Solemnity and prayer are needed when we worship and offer ourselves to God as living sacrifices. That is our continuing spiritual service.
In the early 18th century, many churches had no regular pastor/preacher but one would come maybe every month (circuit riders) or so and all of the people who had made decisions of various sorts would make a public admission of that during the preachers visit and alter call. Just a thought. But you knew that.
Many years ago in seminary, I studied churches, primarily in NC, in the 18th Century. There at least, people were admitted to the church only at the Annual Meeting, at which time “a door of opportunity was opened,” so that those who believed they were saved could come forward and share their experience. The congregation heard their testimony, and if they were not satisfied, the person was not admitted to membership. That rigorous process, however, does not seem to have prevented shallow and questionable “conversions” however, as evidenced by the fact that a good deal of the Annual Meeting was taken up with church discipline over various moral lapses including lack of church attendance.
That does not prevent me from giving an invitation, however.
In the early 19th Century,many rural Baptist churches, especially those in NC, were served by bivocational ministers who simultaneously served four or more churches. The complaint that many of those pastors had was that the churches would allow only the pastor to serve communion, and therefore they spent every Sunday leading communion services. That seems to imply that the Lord’s Supper was served monthly rather than quarterly, but I do not recall ever seeing that explicitly listed in those old records.
John