The Gospel Coalition has no shortage of bad takes, and in a recent article, a pastor complains about Nashville, Tennessee being a more difficult mission field than London in what is a baseless and tone deaf excuse for compromised doctrine and approach.
In “Bible-Belt Christianity Is a Harder Mission Field than Secularism” Thomas West broad brushes the Bible Belt as Sardis because of his recent experience in Nashville.
I spent five years planting a church in London, a city that had largely forgotten the faith that forged it. Then I accepted a call to pastor a 205-year-old congregation in downtown Nashville. And when I left London, I carried something I’m still not comfortable naming.
Shame.
I felt I was leaving the most needed place, a city full of people still to reach, the infinite game of a church that was planted but needed more work, for the easier road; stepping off the front line and into the rear, so it seemed.
I was wrong. Revitalizing a church in the South has been harder than planting one in London. That isn’t a complaint, and it’s not personal. I just didn’t see coming. I want to offer fellow pastors the lesson these two cities taught me, one starved of the faith, and one so stuffed with it that it had lost the taste, a diagnosis I had no words for until I’d lived in both places.
The shame of the matter is, he’s probably right. In a church plant environment, as long as he was funded, he had the freedom to establish systems his way. In a 205 year old church, he does not have carte blanche to do what would be necessary to revitalize. However, the specific church in question is highly suspect.
First Baptist Church of Nashville is an old church that has seen much history, and it was not difficult to see why this church might be struggling. Thomas West’s predecessor, Pastor Frank, was a woke liberal who hosted a struggle session as a Sunday message in honor of George Floyd. Additionally, he used manipulative language to encourage masking as loving one’s neighbor. So it’s easy to see how a church that did everything wrong in 2020 is in need of “revitalization” six years later. It could easily be that FBC Nashville’s reputation precedes it in ways that make it difficult for Pastor West to overcome. So, Thomas West can either cope or seethe, and he chose to cope.
In London, the gospel met resistance, and I will not soften it now into mere indifference. We planted into strong headwinds. Our family faced opposition. Our church faced pushback, and at times something sharper. To name the name of Christ on that island was to feel the steady pressure of a culture that had decided the question of God was settled and shut.
In Nashville, the question is not whether God exists but what the church will do for me. The church here is commonly understood as an amenity to be chosen. We have built, in this corner of the Bible Belt, the Baskin-Robins of church. Thirty-one flavors on a single street, each turned to your taste in music, your length of sermon, your politics, your season of life, and the moment one stops suiting you, another waits a block away. Beneath the shopping is a real ache in the heart, the longing to belong somewhere that finally feels like home, and that desire isn’t the problem. But like every counterfeit, the marketplace under-promises and over-demands. It cannot give you a people who are simply yours, and it asks, in return, that you never stop shopping. Both the sheep and the shepherds are allured into a false vision of church where it becomes more about what we can get from it than what we have to give to it.
Honestly, this comes across as frustration with failure rather than a clear view of the situation. The broad brushing of the Bible Belt is only getting started, but Nashville, one of its hottest cities and certainly a candidate for the “Christian capital” of America, but at the end of the day, Nashville is still a blue city filled to the brim with hicklibs and hoodrats. So how representative of the Bible Belt can it be.
The risen Christ has a word for churches like this, and it’s not gentle comfort. To Sardis, he says, “You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead” (Rev. 3:1).
That sentence is the definition of nominalism: a reputation outliving the reality it once described, a name for life attached to a body that has quietly stopped breathing. Sardis was busy. It had programs, a past, a standing in its city. But none of it was an ongoing life. As I once put it from my own pulpit, that church had grown content with a comfortable, convenient Christianity until its faith became nearly invisible, and the watching world did not trouble to oppose it. It simply ignored it, certain it was of no consequence.
This article was poorly received as being anti-Christian culture, and it’s because Thomas West calls the Bible Belt Sardis because he was hired to catch a falling knife at his church.
The opposite of Sardis was never anxiety, and it was never effort. It is Paul in chains, content and unstoppable, not because he was comfortable but because he was Christ’s. And the same Christ who walks among the lampstands and finds them dim does not leave them dark. To a church with a reputation for being alive, he comes not as a coroner but as the resurrection. This is the hope no nominal religion can counterfeit and no comfortable city can kill: God raises the dead. I have watched him do it. I came to a congregation that history had nearly put to sleep and found Jesus already at work.
The problem with labeling his Nashville experience as representative of the Bible Belt is that the data does not support the comparison whole cloth. The most churched states in the US are primarily in the South. And New England and Hawaii are the least churched states, unsurprisingly. Tennessee is the state with the highest percentage increase in church attendance which would make West’s experience far from representative.
Whereas The Gospel Coalition is complaining about Christian culture creating nominalism, we are seeing Reddit Atheists like Asmondgold express a desire for a Christian nation. We are seeing a Bro Revival. Perhaps the woke churches are not, but that sounds more like God removing His lampstand than it does a judgment on the people for comfort. The Christian culture of the Bible Belt is still provably pointing people to God and Christ, even if The Gospel Coalition is not.
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