I pray through to vic-trah, with Phil's hand on my....

 

When I was growing up in the Nazarene Church,  most church services ended with an altar call: an invitation (or exhortation) to come down to the front of the sanctuary, kneel at the long, low wooden rail, and Pray Through to Victory (all preachers had a Southern accent, so they said "Vic-trah"). 

 It was similar to Catholic confession, with no priest: you asked God to forgive all the sins you could think of, and if He decided to, you became a Christian or got saved (from an eternity in hell).

Praying through to Vic-trah  wasn't easy -- God wasn't really keen on forgiveness, so you had to work, sobbing and begging and moaning, for at least ten minutes, until He consented.  And afterwards, the most trivial of sins -- an angry word, a lustful thought, a glance at the Sunday newspaper -- would negate your salvation, so you'd have to start all over again.  It was not unusual to go down several times a year, and some especially sensitive types went down at almost every service.

Usually just adults went down -- kids were excused, and teens had regular invitations to "bow your head right here and ask God to forgive you" in Sunday School (just before the morning service) and NYPS (just before the evening service), so we were usually saved by the time the altar call came around.

But in ninth grade, the first year that I was officially a teenager, I discovered a benefit to going down to the altar (other than the not going to hell thing).

Praying Through to Vic-trah was such hard work that you needed someone by your side, entreating God on your behalf.  So whenever you went to the altar, Christians (people who were saved) rushed down to help.  Only the same sex.  Two, three, or even more, depending on your popularity. 

They pressed against you, hugging and holding, arms around waists and shoulders, even pressed on your butt as if trying to push you into heaven (don’t worry, only other teens did the butt pushing, I guess because we also pushed butts at jump quiz practice). And when you successfully Prayed Through, you became a single mass, bear-hugging and back-slapping and pressing together.  During those moments, I felt a lifetime's worth of hard muscle, and sometimes even private parts pressed surreptitiously against me.

Going down to the altar allowed me to get hugged, held, and caressed by the preacher, the preacher's son, my Sunday school teacher  and lots of other cute boys and men.

And the next service, if I was still saved, I had carte blanche to go down and touch, hold, hug, and fondle any guy I liked.

But never the guy I wanted most: Phil, a 12th grader, president of the Nazarene Young People's Society, and Captain of the Jump Quiz Team, tall and broad-shouldered, with black wavy hair and round professors' glasses. And planning to become a preacher!  I would not figure "it" out for three years, but I already knew that I had a special interest in preachers, preachers' kids, seminarians, even the Catholic priests and rabbis on tv.

Phil was not only hunky, he was the coolest guy I had ever met: he and his parents lived in an apartment (how cool was that?), he worked at the Country Style ice cream shop, and could get us free milkshakes; he had actually read The Hobbit instead of dismissing it as Satanic; and he wasn't afraid to make friends with Catholics -- "if you don't talk to them, how will you ever win them for Christ?"

More Phil fondling after the break

The Nazarene Teen Idol

When I was growing up in the Nazarene Church, twice a year, in the fall and the spring, we had a "revival": a full week of screeching, foot-stomping, Bible-thumping sermons by an evangelist who made his living going from revival to revival, getting people saved and sanctified.

You were encouraged to bring your friends who went to other churches, and thus might not be amenable to visiting on a Sunday morning.  But on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday night, they were free, right?

We did get a few converts during every revival, but not nearly enough for the evangelist, who stomped and shouted with more and more urgency as the week wore on and nearly everyone who needed to get saved was already saved and only a few people went down. Or no one.

The only bright spot of the whole ordeal was the gospel group that accompanied the evangelist. During the fall revival in my junior year in high school, the evangelist was the young, muscular but bellowing Brother Jonathan, and the musical group was the Smith Family (not to be confused with the punk rock group the Smiths, which I have several times).

They sang fast, upbeat songs which I assumed they wrote -- there were records for sale in the lobby.  Church oldsters used to old Salvation Army-style ballads like "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" were scandalized by their country-inflected lyrics, not to mention their guitars, drums, and tambourines.  One of their songs goes through my head intermittently to this day:

I've got confidence, God is going to see me through
Whatever the case may be, I know He's gonna fix it for me.

(I just discovered that "I've Got Confidence" was not a Smith Family original: it was composed by Andre Crouch and popularized by Elvis Presley.)

I haven't been able to find any photos -- too much interference from other Smiths on the internet -- but they looked something like this: middle-aged husband and young-adult daughter as the lead singers (baritone and soprano), teenage son on the guitar, preteen son on the drums, and wife on the tambourine, piano, or organ.

 Scott, the teenage son, was a year younger than me, tall and buffed with big hands, a round face, short blond hair, and dreamy blue eyes.  The Nazarene equivalent of a teen idol, our own Shaun Cassidy!  I was desperate to become his friend, or at least feel a warm strong handshake, but I didn't have a chance.  He was mobbed.

Girls were swooning, batting their eyes at him, writing him love notes under the guise of prayer requests.  Old people (anyone over 30) were pushing to tell him what a "fine Christian boy" he was and getting him to autograph any piece of paper they could find, even the "notes" page of their study Bibles.  Boys were rushing to kneel at the altar in the hopes that Scott would come down from the podium and put his arm around them as they moaned and cried and "prayed through to victory."

Unfortunately, I couldn't join them at the altar, because I had made a major tactical error.  You could go down only to get saved (forgiven of the sins you had committed), sanctified (made holy, so you would be incapable of future sins), or to help someone else pray through.   And, not knowing that Scott would be there, I got sanctified just a few weeks ago!

Going down again so soon would be admitting that I had never been sanctified at all -- that I had been deceived by Satan into rising from the altar without praying through. Or that I was lying to get the praise and prestige.  A major faux pas. a major humiliation!

Every night I sat in my pew during Brother Jonathan's altar call, counting the teenage boys who went down, calculating whether the chance of Scott choosing me to pray with was worth a public humiliation. Every night I decided against it.

More after the break