The “Anxious Bench” and Our Preoccupation with Numerical Growth

Reviewing the historic roots of modern evangelism

Photo by Jametlene Reskp on Unsplash

(Note: I’ve been working on this topic for quite a while. It’s a bit longer and “academic” at times, and perhaps geared more toward those with familiarity with Christian approaches to evangelism. But it’s an important topic, I do believe—and one that I hopefully approach with grace and humility. I’d also like to thank my good friend, Pastor Nathan Stearman, for his feedback on it. Any mistakes or faults in logic are mine though—and have nothing to do with him!)

Back in the nineteenth century, Charles Finney perfected the art of evangelistic persuasion. Finney was easily the most famous and successful American evangelist of the century, the Billy Graham of his day, and was the architect and progenitor of modern evangelism.

He developed what he called “New Measures,” which he employed to achieve maximal numerical growth, resulting in hundreds of thousands of conversions and baptisms (some estimate that as a direct or indirect result of his efforts, half a million people were converted to Christianity). He was the talk of the nation.

Perhaps no “New Measure” was more notable, and also controversial, than what was known as the “anxious bench.” Though Finney didn’t invent it, he certainly utilized the “anxious bench” like no one who’d come before him.

Essentially, the anxious bench was a long wooden pew he’d place on the stage or leave empty at the front of the auditorium, to which he’d call people during his meetings who were in the valley of decision. He and the congregation would then begin earnestly praying for the person or persons, hoping they’d make a decision for Christ.

In his Memoirs, Finney described his thinking behind the practice this way (though he technically used the term “anxious seat”):

I had found also that something was needed, to make the impression on them that they were expected at once to give up their hearts; something that would call them to act, and act as publicly before the world, as they had in their sins; something that would commit them publicly to the service of Christ. When I had called them simply to stand up in the public congregation, I found that this had a very good effect; and so far as it went, it answered the purpose for which it was intended. But after all, I had felt for some time, that something more was necessary to bring them out from among the mass of the ungodly, to a public renunciation of their sinful ways, and a public committal of themselves to God.

After enjoying considerably more success than he anticipated the first time he tried this method, Finney was sold on its pragmatic benefits and began using the “anxious bench” widely.

What stood behind his “New Measures,” such as the anxious bench, was a relentless and innovative belief that mass conversion was actually a scientific enterprise that could be perfected.

Prior to Finney and other nineteenth-century figures, most preachers believed conversion couldn’t be explained or compelled. Spurned mostly by their Calvinist theology, with its emphasis on God’s sovereign and predestinating will, they demonstrated an heir of resignation, determining that only God could bring about revival and conversion.

Finney rejected such thinking, however, explaining that he didn’t believe conversion was a miracle at all. Instead, it could be produced and conjured up—if one just utilized the proper measures.

“The connection between the right use of means for a revival, and a revival” he thus explained in his famous Lectures on Revivals of Religion in 1835, “is as philosophically [scientifically] sure as between the right use of means to raise grain, and a crop of wheat.”

Indeed, Finney confidently proposed that the measures used to produce revival were even “more certain” than raising grain, as there were “fewer instances of failure.”

In so doing, as Mark Noll has pointed out, Finney was very much the product of the Enlightenment, with its unrelenting and optimistic belief that human beings could master their environment and control and conquer the world by simply figuring out the right objective measures.

After all, if one could perfect the science of producing wheat, or figure out how to harness electricity, why couldn’t he or she do the same with conversion? Why couldn’t a person, by simple trial and error, determine how to conjure up the right circumstances, rightly manipulating nature, to lead people into a decision for Christ?

Such thinking became pervasive among nineteenth-century revivalist preachers, and gained momentum in the generations that followed. Dwight L. Moody, Billy Sunday, and Billy Graham famously adopted and adapted such methods, with their altar calls and sawdust trails and revivalist music (with “Just As I Am” being the most famous ballad in this vein), which were all designed to produce maximal conversionist results.

My own faith community fully embraced this conviction as well, energetically experimenting with and perfecting different methods to produce maximal evangelistic results. Most of us preachers, if we’ve been through seminary, were heavily exposed to and trained in this approach.

There has also been a number of books written with the intent of teaching pastors and evangelists how to most effectively share the truths of the Bible, through preaching and personal interactions, in order to maximize the number of people choosing baptism and becoming members of the church.

Perhaps it sounds like my recounting of this history is a bit cynical, with an underlying tone of condescension toward such measures and motives. But I think Finney and his heirs were appropriately reacting to a theological paradigm and method, stemming from its Calvinist roots, which not only diminished the reality of humanity’s freedom, but had little motivation to therefore passionately invite people to accept Christ—since it was completely the work of God’s sovereign will anyway.

Yet I think this Revivalist approach also instilled patterns of behavior that were fraught with unhealthiness that have had far-reaching effects to this day.

Missional concerns

For one, it seemingly treated people as a “product,” essentially using them as a means to an end. It subtly stripped them of their humanity, viewing them not as people to serve but as products to manipulate.

It’s very common in my faith community, for example, to refer to people as “Bible studies” or “interests”—as in, “I have five Bible studies going right now,” or, “Our church is working with ten interests.” Such single-dimension classifications, it seems to me, are dehumanizing—albeit inadvertently. Referencing individuals in this manner essentially reduces a person’s value to their proximity to and acceptance of the religious ideas we’re trying to convince them of.

This is not even to mention the ways in which we develop cookie-cutter strategies and schedules that fail to account for the unique situation and circumstances of each individual. We use a “one-size-fits-all” method, failing to make accommodations for the varying circumstances of each person’s life, and then conclude they simply aren’t serious about faith if they don’t progress along the prepackaged timeline we’ve created.

Perhaps most troubling, within this framework, our “investment” in people is often based on their willingness to accept the religious ideas we’re trying to convert them to, rather than a sincere desire to see them genuinely flourish—regardless of whether they embrace our convictions or not.

I’ve heard it said many times before, for example, that if a person refuses to embrace theological truths we’re presenting to them, we should just move on to the next person.

This is the practice of the most successful “soul-winners” after all (a term I think has its own challenges, for reasons I won’t go into). These “soul-winners” are strategically trying to find the most receptive individuals in as short a timeframe as possible, in order to rapidly achieve evangelistic success.

But, again, people are not products—objects of our conquest who are only worthy of our love, attention, and service in proportion to their receptiveness to our ideas.

Perhaps most damagingly—as British theologian and missiologist Lesslie Newbigin points out—when we’re preoccupied with growth, and relate to people primarily as targets to convert, we actually contradict the gospel itself by embodying a message which communicates we’re more concerned with our own growth, rather than being self-sacrificingly committed to others’ growth (as Jesus was).

“A church that exists only . . . for its own enlargement,” he thus notes, “is a witness against the gospel.”

This dehumanizing “product” or “industrial” mindset is exactly what we open ourselves up to, however, when we embrace nineteenth-century, Enlightenment-influenced evangelistic methods and assumptions wholesale.

Similarly, as a result of this nineteenth-century revivalist turn, quality was exchanged for quantity, leading ministers to be measured by their numerical output.

Though perhaps an extreme example, Malachi Tresler points out how some Revivalist preachers in the nineteenth century were actually paid per convert, essentially earning their living based on how many people they baptized and brought into the fold.

As I said, this is an extreme example, but I’ve definitely encountered the widespread existence of more subtle versions of this approach—remembering, for example, the rumors I heard while in seminary about different regions of the world church where pastors were known to regularly submit the names of deceased people into their baptismal reports, having simply copied their names from tombstones of local cemeteries.

Feeling the pressure to reach baptismal benchmarks, they resorted to such tactics.

This is what happens when we prioritize, celebrate, and reward numerical growth—implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, believing that the most important measure of a minister is the degree to which she or he can gather a crowd and add more names to the church rolls, implicitly communicating that a minister’s value is based on their numerical productivity.

In embracing this paradigm, however, we open ourselves up to the “cult of personality,” essentially communicating that we prioritize charisma over everything else. In many ways the industrialization of “soul-winning” becomes a popularity contest, leaving the impression that if you don’t have the personality to achieve those membership numbers, then ministry isn’t for you—no matter how faithful you are to the mission of Jesus.

I get it, on the one hand. Like any other occupation in life, there has to be some measure—some metric—to determine a person’s  effectiveness to both calling and mission.

But we should hasten to remember that some of the most important and impactful people throughout religious history haven’t always produced the most numerical fruit, with Jesus himself seemingly looking quite unsuccessful when his ministry reached its highest point at the cross (and he was virtually abandoned by all his followers).

There’s simply no way to count this as “success” from the “industrial evangelism” paradigm.

Understanding our true mission

But more than anything else, adopting nineteenth-century evangelistic assumptions and methodologies has led us to fundamentally misunderstand what our missional task is to begin with.

I think this misunderstanding shows up in most faith communities who have roots in nineteenth-century Revivalism, but I’ll speak particularly of my own, since I know it the best.

I get the impression that many of us believe our sole missional task is to get as much biblical information into as many minds as possible, as quickly as possible—in the hopes that we’ll get as many of them as possible to accept that information and join our church, all in the shortest time possible.

After all, we happen to believe Christ is returning very soon—so we have no time to waste. People must hear the information and make a decision about that information STAT.

Thus, the more we can employ approaches that speed this “industrialized” process up, the better.

In 1901, the leadership of my denomination, while debating whether we should reorganize the church, placed this question within the framework of that goal. “The one great object in all our deliberations,” the president of the General Conference, G. I. Irwin, declared, “should be the rapid dissemination of the third angel’s message. ‘Tis for this alone that we exist as an organization.”

The message was simple and clear: Adventists had a singular reason to exist—to spread as quickly and rapidly as possible the message of Christ’s soon return and what people had to do, which included the truths they had to accept, in order to be prepared for that return.

Disseminating this message was very much a propositional, intellectual exercise. The task was to spread this information as widely and rapidly as possible via every available medium—a task which Finney’s Enlightenment-influenced methods greatly aided, and which dramatically accelerated with the advent of radio, TV and now the internet.

But is this our ultimate task—simply getting propositional ideas published as quickly as possible, while hoping that a mass of people will quickly agree with our ideas, and rapidly join our churches?

I won’t go into all the arguments, but I’d simply say: no. That’s not our ultimate goal. We’re not looking for people to accept intellectual arguments as quickly as possible, checking off the doctrinal boxes.

Indeed, we’re not looking for them to rapidly accept information—which can be easily achieved using Finney’s methods. Instead, we’re seeking to help them experience all-of-life transformation.

And that takes time. It takes all of life for people to be discipled in ­all-of-life transformation. And that can’t be done simply by beaming a radio signal into their country or luring them into the baptismal tank based on our predetermined timelines.

I realize many will argue it doesn’t have to be one or the other. We can have both Finney’s cake and eat it too. We can go all-in on modern evangelistic techniques and still seek all-of-life transformation.

Yet, in my experience, these two objectives are very rarely pursued simultaneously. And, perhaps even more significantly, since the Finney techniques mentioned above inherently objectify people, stripping them of their humanity, they actually counter-work the very all-of-life disciple-making journey the mission of Jesus requires.

Further, at the end of the day, I don’t think such techniques are very effective in twenty-first century, post-Christian contexts anyway. In societies with a growing suspicion of religious manipulation, and increasingly less likelihood of showing up to religious buildings and events, the so-called “New Measurers” are a ship that’s largely sailed.

To be clear: such methods are still pretty effective in contexts that are not post-Christian and largely unaffected by postmodern assumptions.

So if we want to keep using such “industrial” methods of evangelism, we shouldn’t be surprised if we appeal only to people from this modern worldview—which is not at all the vast majority of people in the West, especially those living in the highly secular northeastern United States, where I live and minister (this is not even to mention much more secularized areas like Europe and parts of Asia).

Simply put, we will largely not move the needle at all among people who make up the majority of the United States and the West if we continue to use nineteenth-century, Finney-inspired methods.

The bottom line: I hope we come to recognize the degree to which we have historically relied upon nineteenth-century assumptions in our pursuit of the evangelistic task—assumptions which may or may not even derive from Scripture but were more the product of the time.

Influenced by the Enlightenment, nineteenth-century evangelists largely viewed human beings as one-dimensional, disembodied “minds” who could be manipulated by conjuring up the right “objective” techniques, focusing on numerical growth at the expense of deep-rooted, all-of-life transformation.

But we have a much more glorious task: we’re called to live out a radically self-emptying, other-centered love, pursuing the wellbeing of our communities for their own sake—rather than our own success or numerical growth (while not diminishing the very important and appropriate desire to see other people come to know, commit to, and be transformed by God’s love).

What’s more, we’re trying to share life with people—not just propositional ideas—seeking to lead them into multi-dimensional, all-of-life healing and wholeness.

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Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil student at the University of Oxford (what they call a PhD), focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram and Twitter, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.