I have a deep, deep desire to see every one of my students make a decision to follow Christ. I have a deep, deep desire to see every student in our community make a decision for Christ. I support people who are trying to make this happen through all kinds of efforts, but sometimes I get uncomfortable. I get particularly uncomfortable at large, high energy events where a call to salvation is made and kids are encouraged to come down and get saved.
It has taken me a while to understand why I feel uncomfortable about having students go down and make a decision. A few of the reasons are:
- The events are often emotionally charged environments where the expectation for the students is that they would come down front. For younger students who want to comply with this cool new authority figure, the natural thing to do would be to repeat after them and go down. Also, it is so easy to make a student question their salvation, and we have to be incredibly careful when it comes to helping students understand the need for salvation versus the need for further sanctification.
- Coming down to the stage is often treated as the one and only step in becoming a Christian. Frequently the speaker says “now that you have repeated my prayer and come down, you are going to heaven.” That might be true for a percentage, but many of the kids who went down came with friends, misunderstood what they were doing, or were simply caught up in the moment. If anything, there still needs to be some confirmation that the student knows what they are doing and what they actually believe. Coming down is a fine first step to talk to someone, but it is not necessarily the only step. When a kid gets to the counseling room and cannot explain why he came down, he will still have heard the speaker say that because he came down he is a Christian.
- Too many students are getting re-saved all the time. There is no such thing as getting re-saved. I’m not convinced that there is actually such a thing as a decision to recommit your life given that you cannot de-commit your life to God, though I do understand that there are times when we find ourselves refocusing on our faith. When a student tells me that this is the third time that they have been saved, it makes my head explode. There is a fundamental failure on our part somewhere to explain salvation, justification, and sanctification.
- There is simply too much emphasis on numbers. It may just be my cynicism, but I do believe that sometimes we make things easy so that we can have more kids make decisions and have more numbers to report to our churches or financial backers. I do not think that anyone does this intentionally, but I do think that it is easier to just baptize a kid who came down rather than take a few months to ask questions and ensure that he or she actually has truly repented and believed.
I am not saying that I will never take my students to an evangelistic event, and I don’t want to come across as judgmental. I simply want to ensure that we are doing what is best for our students. I believe that evangelistic events can be great jumping off points for students who are becoming interested in the things of God. I am saying that I believe that debriefing these experiences is of prime importance. We need to be the best stewards possible when it comes to how we approach our student’s salvation. Perhaps we ourselves need a fuller understanding of salvation, justification, and sanctification. We want to be faithful to what the Bible teaches us about these things and many times this means taking a big picture view of our methods and our vocabulary.
Journey of Faith 