Restore Baptist Churches to Save the West
Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.
Building upon Aaron Renn’s suggestion that evangelicals adopt a “cultural insurgency” mindset for life in Negative World, Timon Cline and Clifford Humphrey offered a provocative essay calling Christians to a fortress-building strategy that does not merely seek survival in our current weak cultural position, but conquest. They aim not for détente, but a new Positive World, in which Christianity is the rule and norm. Seeing their essay as an initial volley, Cline and Humphrey invite further reflection and comment to prod evangelicals toward strategic and ambitious action. I’m eager to accept that invitation and offer one specific, concrete, limited, yet significant application of the strategy: Revitalize Baptist churches.
Thousands of Baptist churches are declining and at risk of closing their doors for good. Many of these churches are located in Christianity’s historical stronghold in America: Appalachia and the South. Revitalizing these churches presents an opportunity to employ the cultural insurgency mindset. Realizing that capturing cities or building towns may be too ambitious for our present cultural position, Cline and Humphrey urge evangelicals to “think smaller, at first,” organizing a network of antifragile institutions that possess the resolve and resilience necessary for Negative World.
Doug Wilson has often used another military metaphor to describe the Moscow project: the decisive point. In military strategy, the decisive point is a battle that is both feasible to win and worth winning. For example, making New York a Christian city would be strategic, but it’s not feasible right now. Likewise, as Wilson has often explained, taking some very small town in Idaho might be very attainable, but not very strategic. At first blush, it may seem like revitalizing small Baptist churches would fall into this latter category, but I believe dying Baptist churches as a category can qualify as a decisive point, being both feasible and strategic. The strategic significance of such a project can be seen in its potential for harnessing the principles of the insurgency mindset Renn identifies: owned space and shifting loyalties. Any one church may not meet the significance threshold to be a decisive point, but taken in aggregate and as part of a network of fortresses, the revitalization of Baptist churches is both feasible and strategic.
Owned Space
Many dying churches own their buildings outright. They may not have many people, but they have sanctuaries, education buildings, fellowship halls, and gymnasiums. New church plants often are forced to rent space from a school, theater, or other community organization, making them transient in the minds of the community and subject to the sensibilities of their landlords.
The church I pastor experienced several “heydays” in the 1960s, 80s, and 90s, but by the time I came in 2022, the attendance had dwindled to about forty people on any given Sunday. Yet, thanks to the kindness of God and the faithfulness and fruitfulness of prior generations, the church owns remarkable facilities in the heart of a recently revitalized small town, and has the type of financial resources that takes generations to build. In other words, our church isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. We aren’t going to be kicked out of our meeting space if my preaching runs afoul of the zeitgeist. Because of our owned space, we can weather some storms—and light a few fires of our own.
Of course, dying churches in need of revitalization are not unique among churches in having owned space. Healthy established churches often own their facilities, too. But the key to Cline and Humphrey’s argument is the need for a network of fortresses with owned space. In our current situation, we need all the aligned fortresses we can get and can ill afford to lose these chess pieces off the board.
Further adding to the network effect, revitalizing churches often do not yet have enough people to fully utilize their owned facilities, which presents some unique opportunities to partner with other aligned institutions by providing them space to operate without fear of reprisal from landlords or the need to raise massive funds upfront. For example, these churches can use their space to house newly formed Christian schools, sports leagues, or even food co-ops or farmers markets. Any one of these might only represent a small fortress or outpost on their own, but together they begin to form formidable culture-building potential in a given locale.
Capturing Loyalties
Cline and Humphrey also noted that one lesson for us is to:
“identify a population that is critical to your enemy and find a way to acquire their loyalty. In our situation, this means the Normies, the potentially “red-pilled” who are otherwise useful idiots for the opposition. Winning them is crucial.”
Baptist churches are well-positioned to win the loyalty of Normies because they are, well, normal. The religious culture of America, for good or ill, is largely Baptist due to the proliferation of Baptist churches in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many non-church-going cultural Christians in Appalachia and the South have personal and family roots in Baptist churches. Having grown up going to VBS and playing church basketball in Baptist churches as kids, the barrier to attending a Baptist church is fairly low because they are familiar.
Further, the remaining members in these churches are latently aligned with the new Christian Right. They wouldn’t necessarily put it in those terms, but they realize the country they knew and grew up with is gone, but they can’t quite put their finger on how it happened or what to do about it. But they are eager for those who tell the truth without wavering and offer assertive leadership. When someone does that, their instincts align.
Therefore, if we can revitalize these churches and fill their pulpits with bold preaching that applies all the Bible to all of life, including making unapologetic specific application for today’s most pressing issues, we can capture the loyalty of Normies.
Further, while the dwindling membership of these churches might represent a short-term hurdle, the situation has potential long-term upside because these churches have already experienced a pruning. By the law of averages, larger established churches will have more people among their ranks loyal to the spirit of the age, especially when it comes to egalitarianism and woke ideology. These types of people often will have already self-selected out of the dying Baptist churches. The new pastor can then screen and filter new members by his preaching and public writing, attracting aligned members and repelling those who would subvert the mission from within. The long-term result is a stronger fortress.
We Can Do This
Revitalizing Baptist churches is feasible for at least five reasons. First, the Baptist understanding of the autonomy of each local church makes it easier for based pastors to enter the pastorate. They need not deal with any progressive denominational bureaucracies. Each church calls its own pastor, and due to a burgeoning national pastor shortage, many dying churches are simply looking for a few good men. An organization focused on connecting churches in need of revitalization with aligned and qualified men willing to pastor them could see tremendous fruit.
Second, revitalizing churches is feasible because people need shepherds. A pastor who loves and serves his people; who genuinely cares for their souls; who is present both in times of joy and seasons of suffering; who is a steadfast anchor in times of crisis; and is a faithful teacher of God’s Word will win the loyalty and following of his congregation. God made us to need and follow shepherds. Therefore, if we can connect true shepherds with true (if struggling) churches, God might be pleased to bless the church and turn them into one of the many fortresses that usher in the new Christendom.
Third, many of these churches are in Christianity’s historical strongholds in America—Appalachia and the South, still the regions of our nation most hospitable and receptive to the Christian faith. Fourth, and related, these regions are also home to many in the Unbelieving Right, the non-Christian dissident conservatives who, being fed up with the progressive Left, are ripe for the Gospel that roots their desire to RETVRN in history, eternity, and truth. In other words, southern and Appalachian struggling churches who take a missionary posture toward cultural Christians and the dissident right have a bright future for revitalization.
Fifth, the proliferation of remote work makes revitalizing churches in rural and dying communities more viable. As the Great Sort continues and more families seek to move out of urban and large suburban areas to more affordable housing and less intrusive government, the pool of congregants for these dying churches will grow. Likewise, many churches in need of revitalization can only employ bi-vocational pastors. In years past, the pool of potential pastors in these areas would be severely limited by the other job opportunities in the area. Now, with remote work, the pool of bi-vocational pastors available to a church is greatly enlarged.
The Means and the Will
Again, this essay is only meant to give one specific application of the fortress-building strategy for cultural insurgency. I’ve limited it to Baptist church revitalization because, being my tradition, it’s the one I’m familiar with, but also because of the prominence of Baptist churches in the American religious landscape.
Another reason church revitalization, especially among Southern Baptists, is a decisive point is because we have the resources to pull it off. The SBC’s North American Mission Board has half a billion dollars in assets and receives over $100 million each year in missions giving from Southern Baptist churches. Imagine a based NAMB pouring money and resources into revitalizing rural and small-town churches across Appalachia and the South instead of sending most of their missions dollars to large blue cities that require a leftward contextualization and a progressive framing of Christianity. Imagine NAMB connecting qualified and uncompromising men to struggling churches rather than expending their efforts on soft-pedaling egalitarianism and woke ideology to Southern Baptist churches. I am thankful that NAMB does have a focus on church replanting, which is similar in many ways to revitalization. However, in terms of messaging and money, this does not seem to be a top priority for NAMB. What if Southern Baptists committed to salvaging what we have rather than always starting something new? What if we loved and served these congregations in such a way we earned their loyalty, and then led them to redeploy their resources—in time, focus, people, money, facilities—toward rebuilding Christendom in their communities and networked with other fortresses throughout the nation doing the same?
What if we took some old-school Baptist energy with us into the new Christendom? It’s fun to imagine deacons smoking on the back steps again, poasting attendance in the front of the sanctuary, and making potluck Jello salad great again. But what we really need is men with chests who preach that Heaven is real, Hell is hot, sodomy is a great sin, the Bible is authoritative and sufficient for every area of life, men are not women, the blood of Jesus cleanseth from all sin, and (whispers to our presbyterian brothers) baptism is for believers only. We need missions offerings, hymns about the cross, and neighborhood evangelism. We need thick communities who love the Lord and each other; who teach their children and the neighbor kids the Bible; who won’t give an inch to the progressive Left that wants to destroy their way of life.
All of this is possible. It’s not that we don’t have the means, it’s that we Southern Baptists don’t have the will—yet. We are experiencing a crisis of leadership, for our leaders have their priorities inverted. This is why the newly launched Center for Baptist Leadership is so important. We need new leadership that can lead Southern Baptists to wage a cultural insurgency that doesn’t make peace with Negative World but conquers it.
A vision to strengthen our stronghold regions through church revitalization is precisely the insurgency mindset that is possible to do and worth doing. By God’s grace, and one church at a time, we’ll take our homeland again for King Jesus.
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