How Important is the Sinner’s Prayer?
I often look at various beliefs and topics through the lens of my various church experiences. While I am a Baptist now, I was raised an Anglican and was later a Pentecostal.
This is helpful when looking at the “sinner’s prayer.”
In the Anglican church, I never heard of the sinner’s prayer. There were prayers of repentance in the liturgy but nothing like what we know of as the sinner’s prayer.
Things were much different when I started attending a Pentecostal church. Not only was the sinner’s prayer important, it was essential. It was the means by which someone became a Christian. If you didn’t pray a version of this prayer, you likely weren’t a Christian. If you had prayed it, it was a good idea to pray it again, just to make sure it took.
My Pentecostal friends from twenty-five years ago would have been shocked by a recent Twitter poll that I did.
Only 15% of the people thought it was essential. Very interesting.
The change for me was when I realized that the sinner’s prayer is a fairly recent innovation. It came about with the revivalism that started a couple of centuries back.
That doesn’t make it bad. I have both prayed this prayer and have led others in this prayer. It is one means that God can use to bring people into relationship with him.
But the words are not magic and someone doesn’t need to pray a sinner’s prayer, except in the widest definition of all of us being sinners.
While I believe that Jesus is the only way to God, there are many ways to Jesus. I don’t think that the risen Jesus led Saul of Tarsus in the sinner’s prayer on the road to Damascus.
What about you? How important is the sinner’s prayer to your tradition?
