The final church. It's hard to believe.
What a journey!
We have hit many points on the map as part of this journey. The American states we have worshiped in include New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Utah, Kansas and California. Outside the US, we worshiped in Egypt, Costa Rica and Peru.
And today we come to our 100th church.
Today we worshiped at Park Street Church in Boston. We hoped that this final church would say something to us that would apply to the entirety of the journey.
It definitely did.
Park Street Church is part of the Conservative Congregational Christian Conference. You can read more about Park Street Church on Wikipedia [link].
We had learned about Park Street Church toward the beginning of this journey, when we met people who attended Park Street while visiting New Hampshire two years ago [link].
If you have been there, you know that Boston is a beautiful and historical city. It is also increasingly a pocket of secularism. Because of this rising tide of secularism, it was especially gratifying to see a Christian community in the heart of the Boston that remains vital.
We first glimpsed Park Street Church when we were walking around Boston Common and Community Garden on Saturday. Like much of the rest of Boston, Park Street Church has been wonderfully preserved since its cornerstone was put down in 1809 (the church was completed that same year).
As you'll see, Park Street Church remains an elegant structure, both inside and out.
While touring around on Saturday, we had a chance to visit the cemetery next to the church, a place in which Ben Franklin's parents, Paul Revere, John Hancock and a variety of other American luminaries are buried.
Here are some pictures from our visit to the Granary Burial Ground.
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Before we write about the experience of visiting Park Street Church, let's have a quick analysis of what we saw in the spiritual ecosystem of Boston.
Historically, Boston has an important pedigree in the spiritual landscape of our country.
In colonial America, Boston was the cradle of American Puritanism. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts was a place deeply grounded in Christian faith. Pastors like Cotton Mather are still remembered from their time in Boston pulpits in the late 17th-century and early 18th-century.
In the 19th-century, the demographics of faith changed in Boston. Boston became heavily saturated with Catholicism, a change which led to the dominance of the religion through the 20th-century. This ascent of Catholicism was a direct result of Irish, Italian and Polish immigration into the area.
In the 21st-century, yet another spiritual shift is taking place in Boston. There is a pronounced rise of secular humanism. It would not be unfair to describe Boston as a place that is dominated by atheism, cultural Catholicism and heterodox Protestantism - in short, a place largely dominated by unbelief.
This article from Boston Magazine tells the story of this shift very well [link].
With all of that as background, we arrived in Boston and took in glimpses of the city's spiritual landscape. Many of the churches that we saw reflected the decline that is happening in most of Protestantism. This decline is not only characterized by plummeting membership, but also the evident decline in declaring anything that remotely looks like the Gospel.
See these signs on Church of the Covenant, in the Back Bay of Boston, as well as Cathedral Church, an Episcopal congregation in the same area:
On to our visit to Park Street Church...
We arrived at Park Street Church at 8:30 on Sunday morning. The church had a healthy bustle of humanity, with a good number of people showing up for the earliest service. We found that the outside and the inside of the church matched each other in terms of their beauty. One thing that was interesting was that we had to walk up a flight of stairs to enter the main sanctuary.
Some of these pictures were taken after the first service was let out:
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The service itself was in the format that is commonly known as High Church. While High Church is a declining style of worship, it is still relatively easy to encounter. Things that typify High Church include flowers at the front of the sanctuary, the ministers of the church wearing robes and stoles, hymnody for the music, as well as sermons that practice a rich form of messaging that includes scripture, quotes and references to literature. In short, High Church can be very beautiful.
Since Beth and I both grew up in High Church settings, we always enjoy it.
Singing the Gloria Patria and the Doxology was special for us, although the Doxology is sung differently that I have ever experienced it. Based on the fact that Beth sang right along with it, it is fair to say that Park Street Church uses the Methodist notation.
Here is the bulletin from our visit:
The imagery and themes in the sermon provided wonderful parallels with the church journey that we have been on. Thematically, the sermon touched on the ways that the Christian community is held together, and individual relationships in particular infuse our covenant.
From the inside, the global Christian community is known as the Body of Christ. This theme is affirmed in Scripture time and time again - having faith in Christ means that we are in community and that community can best be understood as having the attributes of a body. This fundamental emphasis on Christian community stems from the fact that we follow a God grounded in divine community, that of a co-eternal Trinity of Three Persons - Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
In summary, Divine Community gave rise to human community.
The Scriptures tell us about what it means to be in the Body.
Here is 1 Corinthians 12:12-27:
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body —Jews or Greeks, slaves or free —and all were made to drink of one Spirit.
For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body.
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.
Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
The sermon touched on these corporeal themes very clearly.
The sermon spoke to the aspects of the Body that hold together the constituent parts, the tendons and ligaments. In the Body of Christ tendons and ligaments are as vital as the head, or the hands, or the heart.
What Minister Damian was saying was that we need to be cognizant of the myriad connections that comprise our collective Christian life and to foster those same connections, so that Christian community can remain vital and grow.
Like a human body does, the Body of Christ is a collection of different parts that are meant to grow.
At one point, Minister Damian spoke about a time he met with a woman who was grieving a recent loss. As they walked through the Granary Cemetery next to the church, the woman talked in pained tones about that recent loss. She had been accompanied to Boston by a couple friends. Minister Damian referred to those friends as her "hold togetherers," which caused the woman to weep. She flowed profound gratitude for those friendships with the women who helped her walk that difficult valley.
And so it is with the church. We are to be in connection and in community. We are to be each other's "hold togetherers."
The sermon gave us profound food for thought.
As Beth and I reflected on the sermon later, it linked to an additional theme for us.
The Body of Christ itself is a collection of traditions, denominations, communities and cultures that represent every demographic group under the sun. The Body of Christ has been growing for two thousand years and the myriad of expressions of faith that have come from it reflect both the astounding breadth and ancient tenure of the process.
One aspect that must remain at the core of our connectivity across this common Body is being Bible-based. Where Biblical revelation is abandoned in favor of other messages, we can reasonably assume that some churches have left the Body of Christ.
At the front end of the journey in 2020, my middle son Aidan and I visited Camp Brookwoods. The Camp had shut down to campers due to the pandemic, but they opened the camp to smaller gatherings during what they called Winnipesaukee Weekends. At the end of that Winnipesaukee Weekend, I found myself talking to a couple from Boston. We stood on the camp's front lawn and talked about the one-hundred church journey that I was embarking on.
(Side note - Jason, the husband, greeted us at Park Street Church during our visit.)
The couple asked me what the parameters were around what kinds of churches that would be part of this journey. I made clear that I was looking to see where people were gathering who had encountered Christ and been fundamentally changed by that encounter. I wanted to see healthy churches that were welcoming the Holy Spirit into their midst. I mentioned that, obviously, groups like Jehovah's Witnesses were out of scope.
Then the wife said, "So, you essentially plan to visit Bible-believing churches."
I said that that phrase captured it very well.
Finding Bible-believing churches was what we were up to.
That phrase really struck me then and it sticks with me now.
All churches by their very definition exist to glorify God and proclaim the Gospel. The Body of Christ exists to be different from the world. And we are different from the world because we are Bible-believing.
That we have a distinction between Bible-believing churches and those that are... not Bible-believing... says a great deal about where we are in the world. What we saw in Boston reiterates the validity of this distinction.
Some churches are clearly outside the pale of orthodoxy as never before, like Church of the Covenant. Others, like Park Street Church, are carrying the mantle of Truth forward into the 21st-century.
It's incumbent on Christians to ensure that the Body of Christ declares the Truth, and that Truth should not overlap with the messages of the world. We need the boldness to say the hard things and even to be unpopular.
As my Aunt Sara encapsulates in the title of her book - If You're a Christian and Everyone Likes You, Something's Wrong [link].
Because we are Bible-believing, the Body of Christ must be made up of people who have had their lives regenerated through the power of the Gospel.
Which raises the question - What is the Gospel?
It starts with the idea that God created humanity out of an extension of His infinite love, expanding the circle of eternal community that is rooted in the Trinity.
So God created man in His own image
in the image of God, He created him;
male and female He created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good. Genesis 1:27-31
For by Him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through Him and for Him. Colossians 1:16
Then we rebelled. We chose the one thing that God had forbidden in a place that provided us with everything we could need and want. By so choosing, we invited a spiritual calamity on ourselves that haunts every human heart until this day. That choice was sin - which roughly translates to "missing the mark."
And sin is extremely serious, because it kills us.
...but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. James 1:14-15
For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Romans 6:29
The Word came into this world to live a sinless life, so that He could become a living sacrifice in our place and pay our penalty for our sin. Jesus was tempted by every sin under the sun, but never gave in to any of those temptations. As such, He was the sacrifice that took the wages of sin (death) onto Himself. He paid our fine and assumed the wrath that is due to each of us... because sin is that serious, a perfect God cannot be in the presence of it.
For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Corinthians 5:21
...knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot. 1 Peter 1:18-19
Jesus's last words before His death on the cross were, "It is finished." That means that the remission of sins had been paid and the way to salvation had been opened up for us. Three days later, Jesus arose, establishing the sole way to achieve a reunited state with God and avoid the wrath that is Hell.
...because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. Romans 10:9-10
When you acknowledge that you are a person bearing the crushing weight of sin and cannot get out of it yourself, you can be saved, changed, transformed and regenerated by the Lord of all, Yeshua of Nazareth.
That is the Gospel.
The tendons and ligaments that bind the Body of Christ together are found in God's Word, the Bible. In the Bible, we have the privilege of learning the timeless message that we are so loved that God gave His only Son to die in our place, that we can achieve joy and redemption and peace and deliverance and, ultimately, eternal life through Him.
Each stop along this journey has fed some aspect of our deeper understanding of the Gospel. We are filled with a clarified confidence that the Body of Christ is vital and is still changing lives each and every day.
A journey like this was but a glimpse of what is to come, when the New Heaven and the New Earth will be consummated and we will spend time and eternity declaring the words of the four living creatures - "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!"
That's what we saw as we finished this journey, a Jerusalem cross on the side of Park Street Church with the likenesses of the four living creature around the four quadrants.
It evoked for us some verses that describe that eschatological future (Revelation 5:11-14):
Then I looked, and I heard around the throne and the living creatures and the elders the voice of many angels, numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice,
“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain,
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might
and honor and glory and blessing!”
And I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, saying,
“To Him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb
be blessing and honor and glory and might forever and ever!”
And the four living creatures said, “Amen!” and the elders fell down and worshiped.
This journey has been a pleasure and privilege for both of us. We hope it has been edifying for you, as well.
Maranatha!
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