The Walls of Clinton’s Christendom Continue to Crumble

The other week I sat down with my grandma and listened to her reminisce about living in Clinton as a little girl. She grew up in South Clinton; under the subway as she called it. In those days South Clinton was its own little community. It had handsome working class houses, a well kept park, and was filled with young families. Her father, like many other Clinton fathers, worked for Clinton Corn. She recounted how he would walk the tracks home after working the night shift, and how anxious she would be waiting for him to get home safe.

The house, the neighborhood, everything she knew in South Clinton is gone. The place she grew up in only exists in her mind. It can only be revisited by looking at scraps of photographs or by piecing together fragments of stories drawn from her fading memory. 

Wendell Berry wrote this in his book Jayber Crow: “This is one of the things I can tell you that I have learned: our life here is in some way marginal to our own doings, and our doings are marginal to the greater forces that are always at work. Our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself” (35).

The Psalmist says it like this,

[3] You return man to dust

and say, “Return, O children of man!”

[4] For a thousand years in your sight

are but as yesterday when it is past,

or as a watch in the night. (Psalm 90:3-4)

And as Psalm 102 says, all created things will wear out like a garment. 

A greater force was at work in South Clinton. And it eventually reshaped its landscape. Changing economics, transportation habits, and other cultural shifts led to the disappearance of that neighborhood.  Likewise, there are forces at work reshaping the Christian landscape here in the Gateway. Churches are wearing out and transforming before our eyes. The walls of our grandparents' Christendom are crumbling. Fairly soon the old Christian culture of the Gateway will become like South Clinton—unrecognizable 

We are living through the most radical disruption the church in the Gateway has ever gone through. Don’t believe me. Look around. Things are happening that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.  Church buildings are being turned into event venues, a bar, and people's private homes. But most are underutilized, hulking monuments to a bygone era when there was broad community wide church participation.

Oak tree congregations are aging and disbanding. Neighborhood churches have become like neighborhood grocery stores, a thing of the past. Historic denominations are splintering and membership is bleeding. Ministers of dying denominations are living off diminishing endowments like captains at the helm of sinking ships. 

This is not pessimism. Nor is it alarmism. It is reality. These are simply observations that any person with eyes to see can make. People will look back at this period of religious change in our community like we look back at when the malls were built. We will look back like Sally from Cars looked at how the interstate rerouted traffic away from Radiator Springs.  Or the way we look at how modern farming methods have transformed rural communities. Entire landscapes of church history and Christian culture are being completely reshaped before our eyes. We are living through an inflection point in our communities' religious history. So what do we make of this observation?

Sometimes broad changes in our culture are hard to pinpoint. The undercurrents of cultural change are often invisible to the naked eye. But then sometimes something pops up from the current and bobs like a bright orange buoy, letting us know which way the current is flowing.

A good specific example of a broader cultural trend is the new brewery here in town that has gone into the old St. John’s Episcopal church building. This is a big change. And like all big changes, it brings mixed emotions.

I have no mixed emotions about supporting the brewery itself. Alcohol can be a good gift from the Lord, if used wisely, as Jesus’ first miracle demonstrated. As far as I can tell the Great Revivalist Brew Lab is a good brewery, led by good people. They did an unbelievably good job restoring the old church building and transforming it into one of the coolest spaces in our town.  I’d rather have a restored church building turned into a brewery, than an abandoned church building turned into a parking lot. There’s no doubt about that. 

But it is a sign of the times. And the times are what you would call “post-Christian.”

A writer named Mark Sayers defines post-Christian culture as “an attempt to move beyond Christianity while simultaneously feasting upon its fruit.” Over the past 200 years Christian families, rooted in Christian faith communities, driven by distinctly Christian convictions, built stuff in our town. The brick and mortar they built and the institutions they established were a reflection of what they believed about God. In particular, their gathering halls were consecrated and set apart for distinctly Christian worship. And now many of these historic Christian communities have faded away and yet their artifacts remain. And some of these artifacts are being picked up by new enterprising folks who are putting them to uses completely unthinkable to their original makers. 

Let’s back up for a second. What do I mean by culture? I prefer Henry Van Til’s definition. He wrote that “culture is religion externalized.” Everyone is religious in this sense. Everyone is driven by a desire to live the good life and so they build toward it. Everyone is driven by a desire to find meaning and fulfillment and so they build toward it. In other words, we are all worshipers and what we build is a reflection of what we worship. 

Christian culture is produced when Christians cultivate a life that is rooted in Christian hope. For example, Christians believe bodies matter to God. They matter so much that Jesus resurrected his own body and said that in the end we will all be given resurrected bodies like his. In heaven we will have restored bodies. And since Jesus taught that we ought to labor here and now to make earth look more like heaven, we ought to care about restoring bodies. Therefore Christains have historically been the forerunners of building hospitals.  

God also cares deeply about the mind. Because in the end God says that the knowledge of his glory will spread like the waters covering the sea. (Habakkuk 2:14). And it is through the mind that Christian teaching is transmitted to the next generation. And so Christains have always started schools to spread the knowledge of God. 

And one more example. God cares about his family. In the end God will gather his family to live together in one place to live in peace and wholeness in the New Creation. Therefore Christains have made gathering places where we meet together weekly to practice this gathering together with God to do what we will do forever in the New Creation.  This is why Christains build church buildings. 

The point of what I’m saying is that Christians built Christian culture. And that CHristian culture is cracking and crumbling like loose mortar in a limestone wall. 

Christian culture was the dominant cultural force in the Gateway up until very recently. But in other places of the world Christian culture has already lost its dominance decades ago. Looking to places like Europe, Canada, and our own Coasts, we catch a glimpse of the future. And the future is post-Christian. Cathedrals are empty, church participation is way down, and the administrative state has almost completely replaced the church in nearly every arena including education, healthcare, and social services.

And yet one interesting feature of a post-Christian culture is that it still retains the symbols and words of old Christendom. But they are being incorporated and swept into an entirely different cultural building project. That cultural project is called secularism. Which simply means building a culture untethered to the explicit worship of the God of the Bible and His law.

In many places it has become hip to repurpose old Christian words and symbols into secular building projects. Many church buildings have been converted into pubs and secular event venues across the west. Again, no problem with the pubs or the venues. I’m merely pointing out the conversion of these buildings from sacred to secular, reflects a broader shift in the religious landscape of the west. 

This is happening in Clinton. You can see it clearly. 

Now you might say, Nick, this is fine. It’s simply a crab walking out of its shell. The Christains are just reimagining their worship practices and leaving their old buildings for newer buildings. They are just leaving the old forms in favor of new forms. Well, that’s not entirely true.

As this Christianity today article points out, church growth has been a zero sum game in America as of late. Mainline protestant churches have hemorrhaged members over the past several decades while evangelical churches have grown. But the overall church membership across denominations is down. So essentially some of the crabs walked away from the shell and never found another one.

One of the things that have been going on in mainline protestant churches such as the Episcopalians, the Methodists, the Lutherans, and the Presbyterians is that many of these denominations have abandoned historic biblical christianity and are dying as a result. For example the Episcopalians have recently adopted resolutions to affirm gender transition surgeries and hormone treatments for minors with gender dysphoria. This would have been unthinkable to even Episcoplaians just a couple decades ago. But so would have been the ordination of gay clergy, the abandonment of the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, and many other forms of biblical apostasy that happens in “progressive” mainline protestant churches. One of the trends we see is that the more liberal a church becomes in its theology the more members that church loses. 

This is because when churches lose their biblical backbone they cease to have any shape or definition. They become like a bowl of jelly. And it is the nature of jelly to take on the shape of its container. And progressive churches with no biblical backbone take the shape of the broader secular culture. And when a church takes the shape of the culture it loses its distinctive Christaian identity. So in other words, people have left the shell of biblical Chrisitanity and have abandoned building Christian culture altogether.

So the shells of Christendom sit here in the Gateway. More shells will be abandoned over the years. More shells will be picked up and converted into secular projects and for secular purposes. Old Christendom is dead, the walls are coming down here in the Gateway, and the living members of this community have a front row seat to the demolition. 

The inevitable question is why. Why is this happening? 

In one sense it’s not for us to know exactly. In general this is life under the sun in a fallen world. Bricks crumble, metal rusts, and institutions decline and fade away. Or as Gandalf said to Frodo, It “is not for [us] to [know]. All we have to [know] is what to do with the time that is given us.”

And yet history is not a random collection of accidents. We have arrived at this moment on purpose. There is a Lord of history. As Job chapter 12 says, “who among you does not know that the Lord has done this.” Like the rising and falling of nations, God is sovereign over the rise and fall of local churches and local Christian culture.

It has been a pattern in the history of God’s people. God saves people by his grace. God establishes his people in covenant with him. God’s people then build a society centered around God's word. But then people drift from God’s word, and break covenant with him, and what they built begins to break and decay.

God disciplines his people when they begin to drift from him. God often tears down our religious edifices to humble us back into right relationship with him, which is the main thing. God often disciplines his wayward children by tearing down their walls.

[12] Why then have you broken down its walls,

so that all who pass along the way pluck its fruit?

[13] The boar from the forest ravages it,

and all that move in the field feed on it. (Psalm 80:12-13)

We don’t fault the ones plucking Christendom’s fruit. We should instead recognize that spiritual complacency opens up the opportunity for the ax of the secularist to be laid to the trunk of Christendom.

Like a planter of a vineyard, the Lord establishes Christian congregations and expects them to bear fruit. And when they don’t he removes his protection. 

[5] And now I will tell you

what I will do to my vineyard.

I will remove its hedge,

and it shall be devoured;

I will break down its wall,

and it shall be trampled down.

[6] I will make it a waste;

it shall not be pruned or hoed,

and briers and thorns shall grow up;

I will also command the clouds

that they rain no rain upon it. (Isaiah 5:5-6)

This is ultimately what I’m most concerned with as a Christian pastor. I want people to look at the decaying walls of Christendom here in the Gateway and respond not with nostalgia, not with despair, not with anger. But with repentance.

It’s ok for you to respond as Nehemiah did and grieve the fact that the old city of our fathers graves lies in ruins. But we must also be like Nehemiah and do something about it. We ought to grab our hocks and trowels and lay some bricks. It’s right to desire the rebuilding of our walls. 

But what must come first is prayer and repentance. As Nehemia prayed, we have erred and strayed God has not. We have sinned and broken covenant, God has not. And our uprooting is a product of our uprooting from God’s word. 

So we must learn from Nehemia, and the whole history of God’s people. Now is a time for repentance, and a turning to God in humility. That is the only way our community will truly experience a great revival. 

God rebukes and corrects his children when they lose the main thing. It’s never been about the buildings, the programs, the outward stuff. The outward stuff is merely designed to reflect and demonstrate the inward worship of our hearts. The most important thing that God sees and judges is the heart (1 Sam 16:7).  It’s not how well we play our organs or our electric guitars. It's not how many people we pack into our auditoriums or sanctuaries. It’s not how well kept our property is. It's the heart that God sees. And it is the unseen posture of our hearts that God sees and judges.

And a true heart that God loves is a heart that is meek before the Lord. As Jesus taught, blessed are the meek (Matthew 5:5). The meek are those who have humbled themselves to God and have been trained by God to go wherever he leads. This includes the wilderness. And this is where God’s people get led to when the walls come down. We are driven into the wilderness.

God often disciplines spiritually lazy children by plucking them up from the familiar and leading them into the unfamiliar. God often does the deepest spiritual work in the most unrooted seasons of life. As the congregational life of the Gateway continues to be in flux, my prayer for us is that the church would depend on God alone. We would hear his voice and would be guided by his presence. And his presence would be enough. We don’t need the walls of Christendom as much as we need the Lord of Christendom. We need Christ. 

God promises that the meek will then be reestablished, and will flourish again. 

[11] But the meek shall inherit the land

and delight themselves in abundant peace. (Psalm 37:11). 

So take heart Christian. Even though the Christian church is headed into the wilderness, and in many ways is already there, take heart that God is training you to be meek. The question God is putting before you is this: Can you live without the stained glass. Can you live without the steeples? Can you live without the rock band or the charismatic preacher? Is the Lord enough? Can we live without our comfortable auditoriums, our hip branding, our endless pursuit of relevance. As the Lord takes the church’s cultural capital from us, will we humble ourselves before his face, and cry out for  clean hands and a pure heart. Or will we cling to our stuff like spoiled brat kids?

[23] Search me, O God, and know my heart!

Try me and know my thoughts!

[24] And see if there be any grievous way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting! (Psalm 139:23-24)

This is the posture of the hearts of a people God will use to build the new Christendom of the Gateway—meek and dependent on Jesus Christ, the King of kings.