history of the altar call...

"The Anxious Bench - Charles Finney"

What we have today is a form of evangelism that was really stylized and popularized by Charles G. Finney who developed the invitational system as we know it today, right about the same time that Eliott was writing Just as I am, the mid 1830's.

Charles G. Finney was an Upstate New York lawyer with no formal theological training of any kind. He had a skilled logical mind. He was converted in 1821. He became a popular evangelist and revivalist. He believed completely that salvation was a result of a human choice. He believed that man could make that human choice because he was not by nature depraved. He had a certain bent toward sin, but it was not his constitution and so he had the ability within him to choose what is right. And so Finney determined that since man could do what is right, since he was not innately depraved, that what you had to do was work on the will of man. And if you could activate the will of man, or motivate the will of man, he would make the right choice. And you could use almost any legitimate or even illegitimate means, including manipulation and emotion. He developed what came to be known as the "anxious bench" and began to call people forward. This is brand new. In the time before that, in the years of the great awakening of George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards, no such thing was ever done. But Finney began to call people forward to what he called the "anxious bench." It later became known in Methodism as the "altar," and people then became the objective. And as the preacher came to the conclusion, he began to call people forward because people wanted to see something visible since the invisible work of regeneration could not be seen.

The response to his ministry and his persuasive and logical powers was great. People came to the anxious bench. He was outwardly successful in getting them there. In fact he was so successful that people were reluctant to say anything against him fearing they might be saying something against the Holy Spirit of God. But as you went behind the scenes to check into what was left after Finney did his work, his fellow workers couldn't help realize the small number of converts who ever remained faithful. In a letter to Finney dated December 25, 1834, James Boyle asked these questions:
"Let us look over the fields where you and others and myself have labored as revival ministers and what is now their moral state? What was their state within three months after we left them? I have visited and revisited many of these fields and groaned in spirit to see the sad frigid carnal contentious state into which the churches had fallen and fallen very soon after we first departed from among them."

In fact, many who evaluated the ministry of Finney were convinced that sinners emotionally but not spiritually awakened became hardened and skeptical. The sinner, for example, who made an objective commitment to Christ in some emotional experience but soon found out that contrary to the revivalists' or the evangelists` promise, nothing changed, his heart was the same. And the wave of emotional release that he experienced made no change. That discovery that didn't solve anything in his life made the sinner more hardened in his sin, more skeptical of the gospel, more skeptical of other people's Christian profession, believing that he who had been deceived was a member of a group of others who had been and were being likewise deceived.

I don't want to discount totally the ministry of Finney. I'm sure people were saved. But coming to the end of his life himself and looking back over, he said if he had to do it all over again, he never would have preached the doctrine of salvation without the doctrines of sanctification.