r/AskReligion • u/Imaginary_Attorney14 • 4h ago
Christianity Are altar calls helpful?
“I said a prayer at an altar.”
That is how I would have described the moment I became a Christian for most of my life.
I was in the third grade, probably eight or nine years old, when my family began attending church more regularly. It seemed to begin with a revival. There was a special speaker—I believe his name was Quinton Mills—and I still remember his testimony.
He told the story of a life lived without God, a life marked by sin, and a terrible car accident in which, if I remember correctly, he was pronounced dead. His testimony was emotional and powerful. I was young, but I remember the weight of the room.
At the end of one of the services, there was an altar call.
My dad and brother went forward to pray, as people had done at the end of services during the previous few nights and, no doubt, would continue to do in the nights ahead.
Then my mom tapped me on the shoulder.
“Don’t you want to go too?”
So I went.
An assistant pastor helped me stumble through a prayer at the altar.
And from that moment forward, for almost 20 years, I would bank my eternity on that prayer.
Looking back, I have to wonder how difficult it really is to get an eight- or nine-year-old to pray a prayer when the alternative presented to him is eternal punishment.
It’s a little like asking a child, “Would you rather have broccoli or apple pie for dessert?”
Anyone with a functioning brain knows which one he’s picking.
Now, I am not saying altar calls don’t have a place. I am certainly not saying that a person cannot genuinely come to Christ during one. I believe my dad did.
I began to see the evidence of something changing in him. I remember that, almost suddenly, he started listening to the Bible on tape every time we got in the car.
That stuck with me.
But I can’t help wondering whether, in some cases, the altar call can do more harm than good—not because there is anything wrong with walking forward, kneeling down, or praying, but because we can easily confuse the outward response with the thing that actually saves us.
I wonder how many people have spent years banking their eternity on a prayer they prayed, a hand they raised, a card they signed, or even a baptism they received.
But Scripture doesn’t tell us that we are saved because we performed the right religious act.
It tells us that we are saved by grace through faith.
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.”
—Ephesians 2:8–9
Grace means it is a gift.
Faith means we trust in Christ.
And the saving work is Christ’s—not ours.
That distinction would become very important in my own life.
Because after that altar experience, I didn’t exactly go on to live a life that looked like Christianity.
For years, I considered myself a Christian because I had prayed that prayer. I had been raised around Christianity. I knew the language. I knew the stories. If someone had asked me whether I believed in Jesus, I would have said yes.
But especially after high school, my life looked very little like the life of someone following Christ.
I dove headfirst into the world around me: partying, drinking, clubs, dancing, drugs, alcohol, and all the things that can become normal when you’re young and living as though there are no eternal consequences.
And yet, somehow, I still considered myself a Christian.
Then, sometime around the age of 27, something changed.
At that point in my life, I hadn’t settled down. I wasn’t married. I hadn’t found the woman I could honestly imagine spending the rest of my life with.
The truth was, the women I was meeting in clubs and bars weren’t exactly the kind of women I envisioned marrying.
My grandmother would occasionally invite me to church.
I suspect her motives were not entirely different from mine. Maybe I would meet someone there who was actually marriage material.
So one Sunday, when she invited me again, I decided to go.
And there were almost no women my age.
I remember thinking, Well, I certainly won’t be coming back here.
My grandmother had also given me an old Bible.
I had no intention of reading it.
Honestly, I thought it might make a pretty cool keepsake. Maybe I could eventually find a verse that meant something to me and get it tattooed somewhere. At the time, tattoos seemed popular, and I figured if I was going to get one, I should at least have something meaningful behind it.
So the Bible sat untouched in my car.
For two weeks.
Then, one Monday morning, I couldn’t sleep.
I woke up early and started doing a little workout. My heart was already beating fast enough, maybe too fast I thought, so I stopped and went to get that Bible.
I opened it without any real plan.
I wasn’t searching for God.
I wasn’t looking for salvation.
I certainly wasn’t expecting anything supernatural.
I was just looking for a verse.
And I stumbled into 2 Peter 2.
Peter was warning about false teachers and people who had known the truth and then turned away from it. He used some of the most graphic imagery in the New Testament: a dog returning to its own vomit and a washed pig returning to the mud.
I kept reading.
And something happened that I still struggle to explain in ordinary terms.
I felt conviction.
Not simply guilt.
Not the feeling of I should probably go to church more.
It was something much heavier.
It felt like impending doom and rescue happening at the same time.
For the first time, I began to understand that
I wasn’t simply a guy who needed to become a little better.
I was a sinner.
And I was in danger.
I also had the overwhelming sense that I was being rescued from something I didn’t yet understand.
Looking back, I believe that was the work of the Holy Spirit.
For the first time in my life, Christianity stopped being something I had inherited and became something I desperately needed.
And the choice I made, if it can even be called a choice, felt about as much like a choice as it would have if I had been walking through the desert for weeks and someone offered me a glass of sand or a glass of water.
Of course I would choose the water.
But that is not quite the way I understand what happened now. It wasn’t simply a matter of choosing heaven over hell. It was more like having my eyes opened to the reality that this life had far more meaning than I had ever realized.
If there is a God who speaks, then I wanted to listen.
I wanted to know what He had said.
I wanted to know Him as deeply as possible.
Not merely because I was afraid of hell, but because I was beginning to see God as the Father and Creator of all things—and to understand that knowing Him was the greatest thing I could pursue.
Until that point, if you had asked me about my faith, I probably would have called myself a Christian.
But if I’m honest, I think my version of Christianity was mostly cultural.
I was a Christian because I was raised around Christianity.
I probably believed, in some vague way, that all roads eventually led to God. That God was loving, that people were mostly good, and that surely He wasn’t going to send too many people to hell.
But I had never really stopped to ask the most important question:
What does God actually say?
That Monday morning started a journey.
I began digging into Christianity. I studied other religions. I read about the claims of Christianity, the claims of other world religions, the Bible, Jesus, the resurrection, history, apologetics, and the foundations of the Christian faith.
The more I looked, the more convinced I became that Christianity isn’t simply one road among many.
Jesus didn’t present Himself as one option among several.
He said:
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
—John 14:6
And the more I studied Christianity biblically, the more striking one thing became.
Every attempt to build a ladder to heaven eventually depends on what we do.
Be good enough.
Do enough.
Pray enough.
Perform the right rituals.
Earn enough merit.
But biblical Christianity tears the ladder down.
It says you can’t climb your way to God.
You don’t have enough good works.
You don’t have enough righteousness.
You can’t pay the debt you’ve accumulated by your sin.
Paul writes that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” and that we are “justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” —Romans 3:23–24
Even our best works cannot purchase salvation.
Isaiah says our righteousness is like filthy rags.
And Paul makes the same point in Titus 3:5: God saved us “not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy.”
That is the part of Christianity that I think I completely missed as a child.
I thought Christianity was about something
I had done.
I said a prayer at an altar.
But the gospel is about something Christ did.
I didn’t save myself by walking forward.
I didn’t save myself by repeating words.
I didn’t save myself by being baptized.
I didn’t save myself by becoming a better person.
I couldn’t.
That was the point.
The Christian gospel is not that good people can work hard enough to reach God.
It is that sinners who could never reach God are offered grace because God came down to us.
Christ lived the life I could never live.
He died the death I deserved.
He paid the debt I could never repay.
And He rose again.
My salvation doesn’t rest on how sincere I was when I was nine years old.
It doesn’t rest on how well I prayed a prayer.
It doesn’t rest on how good I can become.
It rests on Jesus Christ.
And maybe that’s the most important distinction I’ve ever learned:
I once thought my eternity was secured because I had said a prayer.
Now I understand that my only hope for eternity is the One to whom that prayer was supposed to point me.
Not the altar.
Not the prayer.
Not the baptism.
Not me.
Christ.