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, y
ou 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
