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.
Guilt That Misled Me
I should’ve known better. I’d studied and written about Lesslie Newbigin, who insisted the modern West is a mission field as demanding as any abroad, and I’d argued in print that no culture forms disciples by accident. Everyone is being catechized by feeds, stories, scripts, and scrolls. The only question: Which story are we being catechized into?
I believed all of it. And I still assumed the South was home base, the place a missionary refuels before heading back out.
But the call I felt guilty for taking wasn’t a retreat. Revitalizing a 205-year-old institution is no less a work than planting one. In our cultural moment, it may even be more defiant. We live in an age that has turned against its institutions. As Yuval Levin argues in A Time to Build, we’ve stopped asking institutions to form us and started using them as stages on which to perform. Institutional life is a specific casualty of expressive individualism.
The local church, that ancient and stubborn institution, isn’t exempt. To recommit to an old congregation, to build well in an era devoted to tearing down, is to resist the spirit of the age at its root.
This has taken me years to learn, and I am still coming to see it in fresh ways: I had to leave the South, and leave its establishment, before I could love it rightly. Not the lust that wants a place for what it gives you—belonging, comfort, a name—but the love Jesus has for his church: sometimes hard as the nails, sometimes tender as the sweat in Gethsemane, always willing the good of the beloved at its own cost.
I came home able to love this place only because I’d first learned to stop needing it.
Two Cities, One Secular Age
The difference between London and Nashville isn’t the difference between a hard place and an easy one. Both cities belong to what Charles Taylor called a secular age, simply in opposite directions. Taylor’s secular age is not a godless one. It’s one where belief has become a choice rather than the air, one held option among many. London chose against it. Nashville chose it the way it chooses everything else, by preference, off a shelf. In London it came as a subtraction, the faith stripped from the culture until little remained. In Nashville it came as saturation, so abundant, so common, that it somehow loses something of its distinction. Two routes to the same lost urgency. Two kinds of hardness.
I had to leave the South, and leave its establishment, before I could love it rightly.
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.
Tim Keller would commonly point out that the opposite of love isn’t wrath but cool, passive indifference. London’s resistance, at least, cared enough to argue. The harder soul to reach is the one who has just enough Christianity to feel well and wants no more of it. He is not hostile to the gospel. He is indifferent to whether it is true, attentive only to whether it suits.
And that is the most dangerous thing I have found in either city. Resistance knows it has a quarrel with God. Comfort does not even feel bothered enough to ask. Comfort, not persecution, is the more sophisticated threat to deep discipleship. Persecution drives a church to its knees. Comfort lulls it to sleep.
Reputation for Being Alive
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.
In London, I met people who knew they were spiritually sick. In Nashville, I meet people who’ve had just enough Christianity to feel well.
Not a church underside, but a church so spoiled for choice that it forgets it was ever sent like Jesus into the life of the world. London showed me a faith made small-but-mighty by resistance. Nashville showed me a faith made weightless by abundance of choice. Of the two, the weightless one stands for closer to Sardis.
Many talk about how America is years behind the incoming secularization and post-secularization that Europe has already known. I’m here to testify that in its Southern, comfortable form, it is already well underway.
The old Sardis city’s geography sharpens the warning. Sardis sat on a height its people believed unassailable, and twice it was captured, not by a superior army but by an enemy who scaled the cliff at night while the city slept. The residents trusted their walls and posted no guard. Cultural Christianity is a fortress that assumes its heritage is a wall. The threat was never the army at the gate. It was the watchman certain he was not needed so he fell asleep on the job.
So let me say the hard thing plainly, because love requires it: The hardest soil to plant in isn’t unbelief. It’s the illusion of belief that costs nothing. A stakeless Christianity.
But hear what Christ says next, because everything depends on it: “Yet you have still a few names in Sardis, people who have not soiled their garments, and they will walk with me in white, for they are worthy” (v. 4).
The chief church planter Jesus gathers and grows a faithful remnant, and the he knows each by name. I pastor among them. People who stayed. Who labored. Who gave and prayed and believed the gospel. The diagnosis of Southern church culture is not a diagnosis on them. It cannot be, for Christ himself sets his people apart and clothes them in white. I am not the one dividing the faithful from the formal. I am only reading a letter in which Jesus has, and he reads it tenderly, toward the few.
Strengthen What Remains
Here, the letter turns from diagnosis to commission, and the commission is not a rebuke but a calling: “Wake up, and strengthen what remains and is about to die” (v. 2).
For those of us who pastor in places that assume they are already Christian, that verse rewrites the job description. Our work isn’t the maintenance of an inheritance but the patient, missionary labor of forming people who misbelieve they’ve already arrived. So we catechize the comfortable. We build rhythms that form disciples rather than entertain attenders. We preach for conversion and not only affirmation. We refuse to let the church become a museum of what God once did, and we labor to make it a movement again. The surest mark of a dying congregation is the day the Great Commission becomes the Great Omission.
So, we get stuck in. This is the defiance the marketplace of church cannot comprehend. Where everyone is free to leave the moment the music changes, we plant ourselves and refuse to move. We measure faithfulness, not market share.
But Christ did not send this letter to the pastor of Sardis. He sent it to the church, and the faithful few were standing in the room when it was read aloud. So if you are not the one in the pulpit but one of the ones who stayed, who kept showing up when leaving would have been easier, this charge is yours too. You are not the remnant he has already named.
Stay. Stop treating the church like a product to be rated and start loving it like a home you belong to. Bonhoeffer warned that the one who loves his dream of community more than the people in front of him destroy the very thing he longs for. The church-shopper is in love with a dream. The one who stays learns to love the people God actually gave. Pastor and people, the same charge: strengthen what remains, and refuse to believe you labor alone.
The hardest soil to plant in isn’t unbelief. It’s a belief that costs nothing. A stakeless Christianity.
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.
Revitalization was never our renovation project; it is his resurrection work. He still wakes the sleeping. He still strengthens what remains. He is still building, even in the cities that forgot they needed him, a church the gates of hell will not overcome.
Wake up. He’s not done with us yet.
The Gospel Coalition