#invitation system

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NEW Features

*NEW* Holiday Frames - Our Founder Julia Baritz was feeling festive and designed a new set of frames to celebrate the holiday season. Head over to your Account Settings to check them out. (Note: the avatar frame selection widget now displays the default user avatar inside each frame as an example to make it more apparent how the frame will look when applied. The widget now also scrolls vertically.

Claimed Registration Key Notice - We’re taking the guesswork out of figuring out if a registration key has already been claimed or not. If someone tries to use a registration link that has already been used, the page will display an error message.

“IntroduceYourself” Community - Beginning today, all newly registered users will be added to the IntroduceYourself Community upon completing registration, to help new users find people to follow.

Bug Fixes/Misc Improvements

Alt text has been fixed for images added via the rich text editor.  (Note: In our continued effort to improve accessibility on Pillowfort, we plan to add the ability to add alt text to images using the photo grid uploader as well in a future update.)

Fixed a bug where banning a user from a Community via the community flag system didn’t work as intended.

The Community Flags Page will no longer refresh after every flag decision submission, so managing Community Flags will be much faster & more efficient now. Submitting a decision on a flag will also auto-dismiss any copies of that flagged item in the flag queue.

The checkbox for whether to delete existing reblogs of a post when changing its privacy level was accidentally removed during the recent UI update. It has now been restored.

Updated the Rules, Watch, Unwatch, and Join button icons in Community headers to be more relevant to their function.

Changed the icon for showing a user’s blog sidebar on mobile to be more relevant.

Improved the wording on Notifications for Replies.

Fixed a bug where some users were unable to successfully save changes to their account settings.

Early in the 1970s Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones was the speaker at a ministers’ conference in the United States and at a question session was asked the following question:

Q. During recent years, especially in England, among evangelicals of the Reformed faith, there has been a rising criticism of the invitation system as used by Billy Graham and others. Does Scripture justify the use of such public invitations or not?

A. Well, it is difficult to answer this in a brief compass without being misunderstood. Let me answer it like this: The history of this invitation system is one with which you people ought to be more familiar than anyone else, because it began in America. It began in the 1820s; the real originator of it was Charles G. Finney. It led to a great controversy. Asahel Nettleton, a great Calvinist and successful evangelist, never issued an “altar call” nor asked people to come to the “anxious seat.” These new methods in the 1820s were condemned for many reasons by all who took the Reformed position.

One reason is that there is no evidence that this was done in New Testament times, because then they trusted to the power of the Spirit. Peter preaching on the Day of Pentecost under the power of the Spirit, for instance, had no need to call people forward in decision because, as you remember, the people were so moved and affected by the power of the Word and Spirit that they actually interrupted the preacher, crying out, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” That has been the traditional Reformed attitude towards this particular matter. The moment you begin to introduce this other element, you are bringing a psychological element. The invitation should be in the message. We believe the Spirit applies the message, so we trust in the power of the Spirit. I personally agree with what has been said in the question. I have never called people forward at the end for this reason; there is a grave danger of people coming forward before they are ready to come forward. We do believe in the work of the Spirit, that He convicts and converts, and He will do His work. There is a danger in bringing people to a “birth,” as it were, before they are ready for it.

The Puritans in particular were afraid of what they would call “a temporary faith” or “a false profession.” There was a great Puritan, Thomas Shepard, who published a famous series of sermons on The Ten Virgins. The great point of that book was to deal with this problem of a false profession. The foolish virgins thought they were all right. This is a very great danger.