Sinner's Prayers, Alter Calls, and Animal Sacrifices

Read an excerpt from my parenting memoir's faith chapter

I’m currently writing a parenting memoir about all of the interesting, difficult, and uncomfortable conversations or scenarios we’ve faced together as a family. It includes topics like death, faith, racism, and mental health, among others. For a little while, I’m using this newsletter to help me focus on finishing the first draft. You can read other posts about writing my book HERE, or subscribe to stay updated:

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Hi, it’s me.

My memoir begins on the topic of faith because my parenting journey can’t be separated from my faith journey. Even though my relationship to Jesus and the evangelical church has evolved over the years, it’s the lens through which I see everything, whether I want to or not. 

I’ve been a card carrying member of the evangelical church since the day I was born. It’s the legacy of my parents and grandparents that I have a relationship with Jesus, and I’ve never known a life not connected to the church. And I mean deeply connected.

While my parents socialized, worked, or attended meetings, I spent hours wandering around the building, exploring dark rooms and off-limit areas behind the stage. Anytime the church doors were open, we were there — Sunday morning service, Sunday evening service (yes, we went to church twice on Sundays), Wednesday night youth group while my mom practiced with the choir, occasional Friday night youth group events.

Graduation photo from the preschool class at church, probably around 1975 or 1976. I’m the blondie in the upper left corner! I can name at least six people in this photo, four that I still talk to occasionally.

Bryan didn’t grow up going to church with his family but started attending as a teenager to get out of cutting the grass on Sundays. Church turned out to be a safe place for him. He felt loved by the ladies who taught Sunday school, so he kept going.

He and I met at church when we were in our twenties. When we started talking about having kids, our differing relationships to church informed our perspectives. I didn’t want our lives to revolve around being in the building or force our kids to be hyper involved. Bryan valued exposing our non-existing kids to the gospel, our community, and our faith, giving them an opportunity to accept or deny Jesus with full understanding of their decision. 

I’ve never held an expectation about our kids’ faith with a tightly closed fist. I personally experienced a cultural Christianity while growing up and still ended up questioning everything in my twenties, so I’ve always held this issue with an open hand. Not surprisingly, the kids have a different perspective on how this went, which I’ll get into in the book (not here).

[In] any major religion they ask you sometime between the age of 8 and 14 – they would like you to publicly double down to say, ‘I’m all in on this extremely complicated set of ideas! I cannot read a bus schedule, but sign me up for the duration!’

- Maria Bamford, Comedian and author of Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult! -

Anyway, I begin the book here because I think this part of my story will help you understand everything that comes after it — and I think I’m doing an okay job of writing about my faith without making you feel weird about it if you don’t share the same beliefs.

What you are about to read is the first 900ish words of the faith chapter. It is a raw v1 draft, extremely unedited, and I am watching you read it through my fingers.

During the summer of 2010 when the kids were five and seven years old, I hosted a thing called Backyard Bible Camp. Or Club. Or maybe it was Vacation Bible School? It’s a whole thing where a couple of teenage volunteers show up with a week’s worth of activities and entertain the neighborhood kids everyday for a couple hours while the moms hang out inside and drink margaritas. 

(The margaritas part wasn’t advertised in the official camp literature – that was my value add.)

I remember going to Vacation Bible School when I was a little kid in the 1970s. In fact, it might have been in Patti Kopesky’s backyard that I first said the sinner’s prayer as I sat on her very lush green lawn, my eyes dramatically pinched closed and head bowed into my tightly clenched hands. Growing up in the church, I understood the sinner’s prayer to be magical words that when spoken, would instantly wipe the slate clean on all the bad things I’d done so I could go to heaven when I died. 

The extent to which I was steeped in this evangelical black-and-white culture peaked in my twenties when I loved a boy who numbed his pain with things he could drink, sniff, or inject. My mission, as I chose to accept it, was to get him to say the sinner’s prayer. If I could get him to jump through this bureaucratic hoop, he’d be “saved,” and it would be acceptable that I, a Good Christian Girl, could date him without guilt. To his credit, he was never willing to cast a magical spell upon himself that he didn’t actually believe in. And I, unwilling to break up with him for being a non-Christian, stayed in the relationship because I was the only Christian he knew and God had obviously brought him into my life for a reason. Who else was going to “witness” to him? 

(Raise your hand if you grew up in the church and dated bad boys as a witness for the gospel? 👋)

The sinner’s prayer isn’t a set script, but it does require certain non-negotiable elements in order to be effective. First, you have to admit you’re a sinner, then you have to acknowledge Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead, and finally – and this is the most important part! – you have to invite Jesus into your heart. Not into your life, your mind, your liver, or your soul – it has to be your heart. Here’s an example of an effective sinner’s prayer:

Dear Lord Jesus, I know that I am a sinner, and I ask for Your forgiveness. I believe You died for my sins and rose from the dead. I turn from my sins and invite You to come into my heart and life. I want to trust and follow You as my Lord and Savior.

Growing up, I lived and died by the altar call, which is the part at the end of a church service when dramatic music is played and the speaker invites you to come forward for prayer. Depending on the context, the call to action might be for you to accept Christ into your heart, or rededicate your life to Christ. Whether it was Wednesday night youth group, a weekend retreat, or summer camp, a good sermon by a goofy, relatable guy who called me to recommit my life to Jesus never failed to bring me to my literal knees. The message was particularly effective if I’d just been making out in the bushes with the boy from a church across town who had dark brown hair and freckles. Even though he was a Good Christian Boy, thereby passing the sinner’s prayer test, we still failed by giving in to lust. But not to worry, one altar call at the end of the week reset any spiritual consequences I might face in the afterlife!

So when I had my own kids and the Salvation Army around the corner from our house advertised their opportunity to host a Vacation Bible School in my own home, I signed up out of a nostalgia that remembers only the fun parts from our past experiences, not the tricky complicated parts I would later spend years unraveling.

The house we lived in at the time was on the edge of a commercial area with shopping, restaurants, and a public transit hub – all which produced a significant amount of foot traffic around our house. Outside the back door we had a small deck with a fire pit and a high privacy fence around it, which is where the kids hung out for Bible lesson time and where they sang songs about Jesus during the free babysitting Bible club. 

On day two as I sat in the house, I heard some chanting from the back deck area and squinted, trying to make out what they were saying. To my horror, ten kids and four teenagers were chanting Hebrews 9:22 over and over again: “WITHOUT THE SHEDDING OF BLOOD THERE IS NO FORGIVENESS OF SIN!” – their volume rising with each repetition until they were shouting. 

Oh Christian subculture. I know you mean well, but what the actual fuck?

“WITHOUT THE SHEDDING OF BLOOD THERE IS NO FORGIVENESS OF SIN!”

To the surrounding neighborhood on the other side of our high privacy fence, it sounded like a bunch of first and second graders were about to sacrifice cats in our fire pit.

“WITHOUT THE SHEDDING OF BLOOD THERE IS NO FORGIVENESS OF SIN!” 

I burst through the back door, walking with my legs crossed to avoid peeing as I laughed, and declared, “I think that’s enough scripture memorization for today!” 

It was the last time I ever hosted Vacation Bible School.

An AI generated image of me teaching my children how to perform animal sacrifices in the name of our Lord Jeezus.

Thanks for reading!

I hope you laughed in all the right places. Is this somehow relatable even if you didn’t grow up in the church or raise your kids in the church? Is the story engaging? I’m working on setting scenes versus describing things that happen. The more I write, the more worried I am that I don’t know how to do that! 😂

I appreciate you and would love to hear from you in the comments.

Until next time,

Jen