Whether in the Southern Baptist Convention or the American evangelical movement more broadly, the past 10 years have been rife with political and cultural controversy. Broader shifts in the direction of extreme polarization have infected the church perhaps more than any other social institution. But Caleb Morell’s A Light on the Hill takes the long view. This history of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., reminds us that the work is no less God’s work when we’re arguing about pandemic church closures, prohibition, or integration. And it’s still God’s work when we’re arguing about real estate purchases, appropriate church polity, and multisite vs. church-planting approaches to church growth. Like any marriage worth its salt, a church body will be a messy affair, its members duking it out among themselves but also loving, drawing boundaries, forgiving, and reconciling.
I had no idea before reading the book that this church had hosted Billy Sunday rallies, was the D.C. anchor for the Billy Graham crusades, or that it’s current pastor, Mark Dever, is the source of the 9Marks movement and the TG4 (Together for the Gospel) Conference. It apparently accomplished all this while conducting itself in a significantly less self-important way than some of today’s megachurches. The power of the local church, with the quiet self-sacrifice of its committed members and the constant, unseen prayers holding up its efforts, seems to be Morell’s central theme. While I’m neither familiar with this particular church nor a Reformed Baptist, I found the book entrancing. Morell skillfully ties the doctrinal and strategic decisions of the church in different phases to the major historical concerns it had to face, making this biography of a church feel as much like a concise tour through the past 150 years of American history as it is a tour through 150 years of evangelical American culture.
An Antebellum Church
The book opens with a prayer meeting in 1867. This gathering of faithful Baptists had a very specific purpose, though: to ask God to create a church on Capitol Hill. And one of the attendees just happened to be the architect of the Capitol dome, Thomas Ustick Walter. This makes for an auspicious beginning, not because of Walter’s stature but rather his position on slavery. Initially decrying abolitionism and blaming Lincoln for the evils of national upset, Walter’s experience in the war brought him to his knees. Two of his sons fought for the Union, but his eldest fought for the Confederacy. Thomas Jr.’s words upon embarking chilled me; he claimed that on the “field of blood” he would know “neither kith not kin.” I couldn’t help but reflect on our grief over the political tensions at Thanksgiving Dinner or even on our college campuses. These are difficult times, but we certainly are not “more divided than ever.” Walter changed positions, denounced the Southern secessionists, and declared that slavery needed to go—“the quicker the better!”
Prayer and planning for the project took many years and included other local Baptist churches— even ones embroiled in various rivalries over the years but that nevertheless reached out in a spirit of reconciliation and mission. One of the church’s earliest pastors, Joseph W. Parker, took a keen interest in supporting nearby Black faith institutions: Berean Baptist Church and Wayland Seminary. In a striking passage, Morell recounts Parker’s experience prior to the war as a plantation missionary. Initially enthusiastic, the planter he was working with began to resist his efforts after noticing the way growth in discipleship made the enslaved “feel [themselves].” The planter went on to explain that the enslaved began to see themselves as “accountable to God,” which might come into competition with his own commands for them. Surprisingly candid, the planter admitted that if they learned Jesus’s teaching about “doing unto others what you would have them do unto you,” they might start asking whether the planter was doing to them as he would have them do unto him. Finally, he admitted to Parker that he didn’t want to think about the final judgment when it came to slavery, so he sent Parker away. It was then that Parker saw clearly what a profound violation of the rights of man slavery really was.
After an illustrious career, Parker surprised everyone with his late-in-life willingness to take on the pastorate for this tiny, new, poor church, then called Metropolitan Baptist. It would be only the first among several surprising— might we say providential?—choices to invest in this church by those who had plenty of other, apparently more impressive, opportunities.
The Church Responds to Crisis
As Morell walks the reader through the major eras of the D.C. church, we come to the event that inspired his research in the first place: the 1918 Spanish flu. In 2020, Morell, as assistant pastor at Capitol Hill Baptist, was charged by lead pastor Mark Dever to look into the church’s historical response to a pandemic. He found an especially instructive circumstance: Just prior to the rise of the flu, the D.C. area experienced a fuel crisis, smack in the middle of a campaign by Billy Sunday! It was almost amusing to read how the churches took offense at being ordered to close while theaters and other more trivial endeavors remained open. They filed formal letters of protest to the D.C. government and met in the cold in an act of defiance against this violation of their religious liberty, with Black congregations often the most outspoken of the group.
The D.C. leaders learned their lesson when the Spanish flu hit the very same year. Instead of ordering closings, they made suggestions based on public health recommendations. Churches were far more cooperative with these requests than they had been with the earlier orders during the fuel crisis. However, as the pandemic subsided, the city still banned gatherings, claiming that the return to normalcy was premature. Once again, the churches objected, arguing that civic leaders “were motivated purely on “materialistic grounds” and had no regard for the power of prayer or the comfort that religious gatherings could provide.”
The Fundamentalist-Modernist Debates
I imagine it would be impossible to write a book about a Baptist church in the early 20th century without discussing the fundamentalist-modernist debates. Taking for granted the reader’s familiarity with the general historical phenomenon, Morell dives into how its development in the life of the church demonstrates how theological debates evolve and shape church practice.
For instance, Amy Lee Stockton was an early fundamentalist evangelist. Immensely popular, Stockton took to the pulpit at Metropolitan Baptist over a dozen times between 1930 and 1942. But Metropolitan wasn’t a liberalizing church. In fact, it was a stalwart in the Northern Baptist Convention, fighting for the adoption of a confession that would objectively define the boundaries of official fellowship. When the Convention failed to pass the conservatives’ agenda, many churches left the Convention. In 1947, Metropolitan joined the Southern Baptist Convention, which had adopted the Baptist Faith and Message in 1925. While there was still some debate even in the SBC, the overwhelming majority of leaders opposed female preachers. With 13 million members in the SBC today—second in size only to the Catholic church in America—it’s easy to forget that theologically conservative traditions with women preachers exist.
Two quick examples: 8,000 Methodist congregations recently split from the United Methodist Church over gay marriage, whose tradition of female preaching stretches back hundreds of years. The Assemblies of God are three million strong in the United States and employ female preachers with no influence from secular feminism that I’m aware of. Both defy the stereotype that female preaching is necessarily the product of liberal theology, just as Amy Lee Stockton did. Morell argues that new issues in the church usher in a period of exploration, employing practices that may later be deemed inappropriate, and that this explains the phenomenon of Amy Lee Stockton. A complementarian himself, Morell is careful to give credit to the passionate female prayer warriors and Sunday school teachers whose service protected the church in pivotal moments, even if from behind the scenes.
A Leader, Not a Celebrity
As population changes created inevitable shifts for this urban church, concerns over dwindling numbers and inflated membership rolls became the order of the day. At a particularly low point in the 1990s, both in terms of numbers and hope, I could feel my shoulders relax with the hiring of Mark Dever, still the lead pastor today. The chapters describing the church’s struggle amid demographic shifts created a feeling of tension and panic around recruitment. I almost wanted to yell at the book: “It’s not how many you have! It’s who you have!,” a sentiment easy enough for me to express when I don’t have building costs, staff, programs, and all the other concerns of an active church in the nation’s capitol. I was nominally aware of Dever as that one guy who argued (in a very calm way) against Mark Driscoll on the topic of multisite campuses. Morell reminds us of this episode, which went viral online, as Driscoll almost accuses Dever of being stupid for accepting the natural limitations of size and space. Here Morell captures Dever’s unusual approach—unhurried, methodical, humble—in a word, relaxed.
Dever spent the first five years at Capitol Hill Baptist just cleaning up the membership rolls and selecting a plurality of elders. The way he did these things demonstrates his particular approach. When he found almost 300 members who did not attend or respond to outreach, he insisted that the church vote on whether to remove each individual person from the rolls, calling it a “kind of water torture” that teaches the church the importance of membership.
And when none of the men he put forward for elder received the necessary 75% vote in the congregation, Dever prayed for a few weeks and then put the exact same men up for a vote again. One gets the impression of a deep inner strength. Dever was never relaxed in his convictions; he was relaxed about outcomes. If he was supposed to be at that church, they would vote in the only five men he felt were qualified for the positions. All five passed the second vote. Once again, it’s easy to describe this kind of faith in God, but Dever gave up two other attractive positions as a professor to take the call at Capitol Hill Baptist, a choice that surprised his friends and possibly even himself. Little did anyone know then what quiet but deep influence Dever would have among Reformed Baptists—first through the eventual exponential growth of the church that overflowed into a church-planting movement in contrast to a multisite ministry, and then through his 9Marks and Together for the Gospel conferences.
I’ve skipped several more fascinating episodes in Capitol Hill Baptist’s history that I wish I had time for here. But I was genuinely struck by the themes of local ministry and cooperation between churches, even those early in the book that were the product of church splits or divided by race. I was reminded of Dallas Willard’s response when someone asked him about the most important spiritual discipline for a pastor to practice. After a moment of reflection, he responded, “Praying for the success of other people’s churches.” This account of the long faithfulness of one church and its commitment to theological orthodoxy amid the constant flux of D.C. residents reminded me to rejoice in the good that the Lord is always accomplishing, even if it’s through somebody else’s church or somebody else’s denomination.
