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Finney developed the idea of the "anxiety bench." A small bench was placed up front where a "seeker" could kneel and pray anxiously for whatever need. In Finney's services the need was often salvation.
I'm kind of thrown off by some of the ways we do things today. If the song service is really good- people will start to line up at the altar for all types of prayer. This causes an "interuption" to the service at times and delays or even cancels the preaching. This can be either good or bad, depending on how your pastor is doing at the time. I've seen it where the song leader will actually try and get the preaching cancelled by giving repeated altar calls during the song service.
At other times, perhaps the "early altar call" sows faith into the hearts of visitors- kind of like they're being shown what behaviors are expected of them.
We all claim that we are "following the Spirit" but at the end of the day there is often little evidence that we actually did "follow." It seems more like guesswork until a couple of old ladies get mad and tell the pastor off. Then there's a "house cleaning" and whatever revival there was is now gone. That's the way we usually did things.
The ideal way is to of course have mature Christians meet with "seekers" and develop relationships whereby genuine trust is cultivated and the mature Christians end up caring very much about their "seekers."
Then when the old ladies rise up against the pastor again about the "new converts" and their "baggy jams," the mature Christians can support both pastor and the new saints.
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