Sunday Morning Church Bells

My family has about a fifteen minute drive to church. It’s a scenic drive that includes farm fields contoured to the rolling hillsides, thick woodlands, and a small town. Often as my family loads into our car, the bells of a nearby church sound out through the southern Pennsylvania countryside. It’s not our church, but I still enjoy hearing those bells—the ancient call for the community to worship their Creator, Lord, and Savior.

A little while back, I wrote about the historical aspects of time and how it relates to the gatherings of Christians (“Time is of the Essence”). Bells were one of the ways Christians knew when to gather, but today they’re almost like a link back to old America.

A half mile from our home, my family passes by the church with the bells. It’s sad, though. Normally there are four or five cars parked in its lot. Instead of a banner proclaiming the name of Christ or a biblical truth, their sign simply says “Open and Affirming” with a rainbow flag beside it.

This church has become entirely different from what it was historically. It might be the same century-old building, but it’s not the same church. At one time, they probably preached the gospel. The congregation—likely made up of German immigrants—would sing, pray, read scripture, and listen to the sermon. The church prayed for their boys and their country through two world wars; they helped each other through the Great Depression. Several generations of families were formed there, and as evidenced by the expansive graveyard, they’re buried there too.

True, I wouldn’t agree with many practices of this church, even a hundred years ago, but they still have a heritage of truth. What happened?

There are a few events the reader could look back on, but the one that comes to my mind is the Fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early 20th century. It’s easy to forget that this controversy didn’t affect the average church until many years after the contention in Protestant colleges and universities. Though many Protestant academics were teaching naturalistic evolution, higher criticism, et. al, the big denominations (Presbyterian, Congregational, Lutheran, Methodist) were still pretty conservative in their views of the Bible. The compromises in the 1920’s and 1930’s weren’t forcing Darwinism and liberalism onto churches; instead they were simply allowing the few churches that taught those things to remain in the denomination.

It’s been a very slow erosion but also a very predictable one. With heavy hearts, men like Princeton scholar J. Gresham Machen (who also wrote my Beginning New Testament Greek text book from college) predicted the modern state of denominational Christianity. At first the vast majority were still orthodox in their beliefs, but slowly the liberals became the majority. Yet how did little country churches far away from the liberal universities begin their downward spiral? These are churches that had vacation Bible schools, Sunday schools, and foreign missions; they taught the basic biblical truths that at one time most Americans knew.

This is a question that’s been answered by many others more qualified than I am, but I would say it’s a mixture of the dependent denominational structure, unwillingness to separate, lack of doctrinal teaching, and prayerlessness; this creates a positive feedback loop that leads to the rejection of the gospel.

Much like the nation itself, the bells might still toll, yet the tolling is only the echo of a forgotten past. It’s not quite in the realm of dystopia yet, but it’s on that path.

Bible-believing churches are far from exempt. Compromise, immorality, lack of personal evangelism, and all the areas I mentioned above eat away at the foundations and eventually disintegrate once vibrant churches.

So as I drive by that old Protestant church building, I don’t relish in their demise. I can’t laugh and say, “Told you so.” It’s a tragedy, and one I pray God sees fit to revive. No, those tolling bells every Sunday remind me to be vigilant and obedient to Christ—for the sake of my family, for the sake of my church, and for the sake of the gospel.

• Church
• Liberalism