Alter Call: The Evangelical Agenda

Someone asked me about altars and the Evangelicals, reminding me how often that word is misspelled in my religion classes.

The apostates of 19th century Lutheranism featured altar calls, following the Evangelicals. Those Lutherans also looked down on the liturgy. The first Lutheran to teach at Yale Divinity came from the General Synod, where that was common.

Billy Graham featured altar calls in his crusades, but he did not have an altar.

A Roman Catholic Church is often all altar with almost no pulpit. They have little preaching, very weak preaching if they do.

Traditional Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians have prominent pulpits and altars reduced to card tables in some instances. They do not like the words Holy Communion so they have the Lord's Supper as infrequently as possible (another hallmark of Lutheran Pietists - three times a year).

A traditional Lutheran church has a balance between the altar and the pulpit, emphasizing the Means of Grace: the invisible Word of preaching and teaching, the visible Word of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion.

The Shrinker churches of Lutheran apostasy do not have a pulpit and also lack an altar. They have movies screens (The CORE, Victory) and performance stages (The CORE).

Church and Chicanery franchises--like all the followers of Driscoll, Stanley, Beeson, Groeschel, and Sweet--promise to alter lives, to transform people by being real, relational, and relevant. Ski is saying that all the WELS congregations in Fox Valley are unreal, not relational, and irrelevant. Perhaps St. Peter in Freedom is not, because Glende "gets it" and goes to Stanley and Driscoll conferences.

The Evangelicals are touchy about altars because they reject the Sacraments. When Lutherans are ashamed of the Sacraments, they also put away the altar. Someone who goes regularly to conferences led by an anti-infant baptism preacher would hardly feature a baptismal font in his movie theater.

One's theology of worship informs the architecture of the congregation.

Our family loves the old WELS churches with the ornate altars and prominent pulpits.

The glory has departed.