A Presbyterian Historical Snippet from 1926
This newspaper clipping has it all for presby nerds!
The religious announcements page of a St. Louis newspaper in early 1926 reminds us of how things change and how things stay the same. Mainline (Northern Baptist) theologian Shailer Mathews1 was one of the leading proponents of the Social Gospel after Walter Rauschenbusch. Along with theological liberalism, the Social Gospel helped doom the mainline churches. Thus, it’s notable that he and J. Gresham Machen, the leading early 20th-century advocate of “the great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity,” would be speaking at the same time in the same city.
As Machen would see it, the titles of his three sermons or talks were opposed to the “modern non-redemptive religion…called ‘modernism’ or ‘liberalism,’” as he put it in Christianity and Liberalism. Liberalism could not give an unequivocal answer to the question, “Do we need Christianity?” Being unbiblical, liberalism was injurious to Christian liberty, according to Machen. And “What is Christianity?” was certainly a vexing question for many, both inside and outside the mainline churches in the 1920s. The definitions that famed liberals Harry Emerson Fosdick and Mathews (both Baptists, by the way) gave differed greatly from the definitions provided by Machen and the Reformed...and even of the Fundamentalists, a few of whom might have attended the afternoon “union mass meeting,” sometimes called a rally in those days.
And notice a few other things:
Both churches had evening services, which are increasingly rare a century later.
The publicity for Machen’s talks was aggressive: with ALL CAPS sermon titles and “YOU MUST HEAR THIS MAN’S MESSAGE.”
Machen’s hosts appealed to crisis, while the church hosting Mathews touted respectability, with a picture of the baptist church’s stately tower and “Founded January 6, 1833.”
Some things have remained the same—the battle for the Gospel is still ongoing. Some things have changed, however: The mainline churches, which once seemed to run the country, are shrinking to a near-vanishing point. The fumes of orthodoxy and respectability barely carried them to the end of the 20th century; they will not survive to the end of the 21st.
One last nugget: The Washington and Compton Avenue Presbyterian Church moved later that year and changed its when it moved to a new building almost as grand as Second Baptist’s. The new name is well known to those who follow events in the Presbyterian Church in America in the last several years or, lately, in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church—Memorial Presbyterian Church of St. Louis.
WATCH a bonus show on this very article:
POSTSCRIPT - Second Baptist Church has been defunct for more than a decade, and the tower is gone: Fire damages historic church that may house gospel music center
Mathews may have died a Unitarian, which is to say nothing much at all. “His ashes are interred in the crypt of First Unitarian Church of Chicago.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shailer_Mathews
Second Baptist Church has been abandoned for a long time: https://preservemo.org/second-baptist-church/