New Article: “Walk the Aisle”

I recently co-authored a brief article with Dr. Doug Sweeney (my doctoral supervisor) on the origins of the “altar call” for Christian History magazine.  Here is a bit:

This common evangelistic method, known as the altar call or the public invitation, has not always been around. Successful evangelists such as George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, and John Wesley never gave an altar call. In fact, they did not even know what it was. They invited their hearers passionately to come to Christ by faith and regularly counseled anxious sinners after their services. But they did not call sinners to make a public, physical response after evangelistic appeals. So where did the altar call come from? When did it begin?

At first, the altar call was used as an efficient way to gather spiritually interested people together for counseling after a sermon. Rather than searching out penitent seekers one by one, a preacher would call them up to the front, or into another room, for conversation and prayer. Some Anglo-American ministers used such altar calls at the end of the 1700s, but only during the camp meetings of the Second Great Awakening in America did they flourish. . . .

Read the whole thing.