About Those Altar Calls…

Matt Broomfield’s sad piece about British Charismatic preacher Mike Pilavachi has many issues which need to be unpacked. I won’t get to them all, but let’s start with this: Anglicans don’t need to be smug about this for the following reasons:

• Pilavachi is in fact an Anglican minister; Broomfield notes this and addresses him as the “Rev. Canon.” When the Charismatic Renewal hit more than fifty years ago, many classical Pentecostals had serious reservations about these inhabitants of “nominal” churches. Some were doctrinal, but many were cultural (different socio-economic levels and secular cultures) and some were based on the fact that the Charismatics has received the gifts without going through the legalism that Pentecostals considered de rigeur. In this case Pilavachi and many like him had ignored the pastoral lessons classical Pentecostals had learned in the previous half century. Additionally, had the Church of England enforced the “three strikes and you’re out” approach to worshipping according to the BCP, they could have put a stop to Pilavachi’s activities early.
• Pilavachi isn’t unique in his being drawn to kinky sex practices; the Anglican Evangelicals have had their woes with John Smyth, Jonathan Fletcher and the Iwerne Camp fiasco. What is wrong with these people?

I’d like to spend most of this post on one topic which Broomfield spends a lot of time on: the altar call. I think I can claim some special consideration because I actually wrote the book on this subject (for the Church of God, at least.) The altar call as it is currently practiced has its origins in the early nineteenth century with people like Charles Finney. It’s interesting to see how Broomfield equates this with Paul’s “Road to Damascus experience” because, for many, the altar’s only purpose is salvation, or another major spiritual experience. For many churches this is it, as they (explicitly or implicitly) believe in unconditional perseverance, irrespective of whether they accept the rest of TULIP or not. Most notorious of these are the Southern Baptists; Billy Graham was one of them, his altar calls were centered on salvation. But that was his ministry.

In Pentecostal churches altar calls are a much more varied business. In addition to “saved/sanctified/baptised in the Holy Ghost” we pray for healing, finance matters, and many other life issues. To do that effectively requires altar workers who have some training and Scriptural knowledge they can share, and the purpose of Ministering at the Altar was to train (mostly lay) people in how to do that. That in turn implies that trips to the altar can be multiple, and that is certainly the case. An altar experience can be a major experience or an incremental one. I’m not sure if the mistake of thnking otherwise is Pilavachi’s or Broomfield’s, but it’s definitely a serious one.

As far as Broomfield’s loss of faith through all of this, all I can say is this: I worked for our denomination for 13 1/2 years, saw and experienced many things, some good, some bad. Losing my faith? Forget about it, what I have from God came from God, not from one of these preachers. That simple fact helped me to avoid turning my experience during the Catholic Charismatic Renewal into a covenant disaster and many other life rescues.

Today I get to remind my church of where it came from and hope to continue that influence in the Advent Series I’m working on. There is life in God beyond people like Mike Pilavachi, you just have to be willing to find it.