When I was growing up in the rural West, Washington DC was the home of the beast out of Revelation (which beast was a little fuzzy at times). Or maybe the dragon, or the whore of Babylon, or Gog or Magog, or any number of other bad guys from the Bible. It was the place where, so talk radio told me, godless atheists were injecting the poison of political liberalism into the veins of the nation and crime was the only thing you could expect to see if you went there (and you would go there–on a high school trip with Close-Up or Presidential Classroom or some such organization). What I didn’t know was that there were Gospel preaching churches sprinkled throughout the city, and that in the 1990s one that had been there faithfully witnessing for over a century was preparing to spread its influence through the nation.
You can now read the history of that church, Capitol Hill Baptist, in Caleb Morell’s new book A Light on the Hill: The Surprising Story of How a Local Church in the Nation’s Capitol Influenced Evangelicalism.
This is certainly going to be a book of interest to those of us who have been members of Capitol Hill Baptist Church (“CHBC”, and yes as a former member of CHBC I too have drunk Mark Dever’s congregationalist Kool-Aid—it is Biblical and sweet and you should drink it too). But it is also going to be interesting to those who want a glimpse of the ups and downs a faithful church can experience over the course of a century and a half.
I won’t spoil any of the stories here–I’ll just note that overall this is a well-written book on an interesting topic that presents a coherent historical narrative entwined with practical application for today.
Highly recommended.
Dr. Coyle Neal is co-host of the City of Man Podcast an Amazon Associate (which is linked in this blog), and an Associate Professor of Political Science at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO
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