Crawford Gribben, a conservative Presbyterian (Calvinist), wrote the following critique of the “Sinner’s Prayer,” a common evangelistic tool, and its unbiblical and theologically problematic nature:
The efficacy of the Sinner’s Prayer is one of the most cherished myths in contemporary evangelical church life. Advocates of its merit have included many of the most famous evangelists of the twentieth century. The Sinner’s Prayer can find support from many of the most significant leaders across the evangelical world.
But that does not mean that it is right . . . the methodology of the Sinner’s Prayer is entirely without biblical foundation . . . the Bible never teaches us that we are saved through a prayer. Neither do the apostles ever instruct their hearers that praying a prayer with these specified components will guarantee salvation . . . for we are saved by faith, not the utterance of a prayer, and it is only too possible that the mechanistic idea of salvation [of the Sinner’s Prayer] will encourage people without saving faith to believe that have been saved because they have recited a set form of words. The Sinner’s Prayer is a myth that has made possible the corruption of the modern evangelical church, channelling many who have never known the saving grace of God into membership of his churches. It provides its own word of assurance: ‘Thank you for helping me and saving me, and I pledge the rest of my life to you.’ Tragically, it convinces people that they are Christians when too often they are not . . .The Sinner’s Prayer provides an unstable and uncertain foundation for assurance and raises more difficulties than it solves . . . Far from providing true assurance, it often completely undermines it.
The great danger of this traditional evangelical method is that the prayer of faith becomes the object of faith, and the Sinner’s Prayer becomes the sinner’s hope. In spiritual crises, the anxious soul looks back to words that were prayed, and the assurance of these words were believed to guarantee. Yet these words cannot bring salvation – only faith can do that. Our words cannot generate assurance – that springs from the secret working of the Holy Spirit, sowing in believers the graces that John describes in his first epistle. There is false assurance as well as true – note Jesus’ insistence that ‘those Jews which believed on him’ were actually ‘of [there] father the devil’ (John 8:31, 44) . . . Instead of leading their repentant listeners through a prayer, the apostles exhorted them to faith and repentance and insisted their conversion be immediately sealed in baptism and church fellowship: ‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved? And they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house’ (Acts 16:30-31). (Crawford Gribben, Rapture Fiction And the Evangelical Crisis [Webster, N.Y.: Evangelical Press, 2006], 72-73, 74 first comment in square bracket added for clarification)
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