A New Birth in New England
Published on November 2nd, 2009.
New England is home to America’s oldest churches, or at least America’s oldest church buildings.
According to recent surveys, New England is now the least churched region in the country with a percentage of gospel believing Christians low enough to qualify as an unreached people group.
In an article published on Wednesday, Evangelists Target Spiritually Cold New England, the Associated Press reported on some encouraging developments in New England. This report focuses on a recent church plant, Redeemer Fellowship, in the Boston area which is part of an exciting network of churches supported by New England Theological Seminary.
It’s hard to tell in the quiet of a color-splashed autumn morning, but Redeemer Fellowship Church is trying to set roots in a rough neighborhood. For churches, anyway.
Until this new church opened last month, its 19th-century Congregational church building in suburban Watertown was empty for nearly two years. Just across the street, a closed Baptist church is filled with condos. So is a former Catholic church a half mile away.
…In a Gallup poll this year, all six New England states were in the Top 10 least religious in the country, with Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts claiming the top four spots.
New England’s religious apathy has developed over decades, but it’s striking where the Pilgrims landed seeking religious freedom and the great 18th-century preacher Jonathan Edwards helped spark the First Great Awakening. Stately churches near town centers all over the region are reminders of the central importance religion once held.
The article also addressed the question of how Christianity vanished from the northeast.
The Rev. Wes Pastor, head of the NETS Institute for Church Planting in Williston, Vt., said New England’s liberal mainline denominations, such as the United Church of Christ and the Episcopal Church, have been practicing a ”different religion.”
”I’m not saying it to be snooty, but they have a different belief system and that belief system … is a profound departure from historic Christianity,” said Pastor, whose group trained Bass and supports his Baptist church.
Rev. Pastor is absolutely correct and he is saying what Bible believing, gospel embracing Christians have said about such departures since the arrival of so called liberal “Christianity” on the scene.
In his book, Christanity and Liberalism, J. Greshman Machen expressed this conviction well; “In the sphere of religion, in particular, the present time is a time of conflict; the great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religous belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christain faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology.” Writing of this liberal Christianity which denied the supernatural, and thus the Bible’s divine inspiration, Machen continued, “It may appear that what the liberal theologian has retained after abandoning to the enemy one Christain doctrine after another is not Christianity at all, but a religion whch is so entirely different from Christainty as to belong in a distinct category.”
Eighty six years after Machen wrote these words the trajectory of this religion has met its logical end. Today, New England is sprinkled with vacant buildings where once faithful gospel congregations met to sing, to read Scripture, to sit under the Word of God and to go out with the gospel.
Let’s pray that many in New England will come to know the new birth as gospel congregations fill these old buildings.
I encourage you to read about this work of God in the northeast and to pray for these churches and the NETS church planting network.
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