METHODIST SPLIT ECHOES PRESBYTERIAN PAST
Fissures in the church — and efforts to bridge a divided world
Shortly after young Randy Nabors transferred to Covenant College in the fall of 1969, his future wife, Joan McRae, among the school’s first Black students, took him to a new little Sunday school in a dilapidated apartment at Cherry and East 3rd streets in downtown Chattanooga.
Covenant College had moved in a few years prior at the old Lookout Mountain Hotel, and this new ministry did not assuage the suspicions some locals had toward the school run by a small fundamentalist-tending Presbyterian sect, which, according to Nabors, also happened to be suspicious of mainstream Presbyterians in turn.
For one, the college was full of outsiders. Randy and Joan’s former classmate and fellow New Jerseyan, the pastor J. Render Caines, said by phone that students came from Delaware, Pennsylvania, Missouri — and that some locals saw them as carpetbaggers.
Meanwhile, the descent into the city set against a social order in which wealthy people donated to nicesounding causes but tended to dwell in elevated enclaves like Lookout Mountain.
“When you talk about upper class and lower class, I mean literally in this city, it’s geography,” Nabors said by phone recently. “And there was a good reason for it, because if you lived down in the valley, you had to breathe brown smoke.”
The young, multiracial, poor-people oriented, theologically conservative Christian outpost in the city confused practically everybody, Nabors said, and it would develop into a rare and ultimately iconic institution in the generally white
and often rich Presbyterian Church in America.
At the time, however, the PCA, as it is known, did not even exist. That came later, as conservatives left the historically southern branch of the Presbyterian church over what they saw as wayward liberalism in the church’s theological and political life. It was not the first split in the Presbyterian church amid such debates, nor would it be the last.
Today, America’s largest mainline Christian denomination, the United Methodist Church, is splitting up over social issues that some see as flash points of a deeper theological disagreement. Fifty years ago, Presbyterians in Chattanooga and beyond went through something similar. What happened next showed the messy ways money, race and culture shape — and sometimes hinder — the efforts of different Christian communities to establish a common ground on the basis of faith.
SPLITTERS
The Protestant reformation emphasized an individual’s capacity to interpret what the Bible and God had to say. It spawned groups that tended to splinter — and, sometimes, merge again. Presbyterians especially. Reasons varied, but certain themes recurred. The Cumberland Presbyterians, seeking to plant churches in rural places like what is now Tennessee, clashed with their Eastern Seaboard brethren over how much education a minister needed to lead a church, said James HudnutBeumler, a religion historian at Vanderbilt Divinity School. The Presbyterians emphasized personal conscience and split easily over questions of Biblical interpretation, which sometimes centered on divisive social issues like gender and race. They split over whether ministers could be slave owners — then split again over whether a church could rebel against the U.S. government.
By 1900, only Lutherans were more widely split than the Presbyterians, Hudnut-Beumler said by phone. Lutherans got over their differences. Meanwhile, a timeline map tracing Presbyterian splits and mergers in the 20th century looks, as in the 19th, like the blueprint for an electrical circuit.
INSPIRED AND INERRANT
Frank Brock grew up attending Lookout Mountain Presbyterian Church, a southern Presbyterian social hub in a world where religion and culture were not always easy to distinguish. Brock’s family runs deep here. His family produced multiple U.S. senators and local leaders of other stripes. Brock entered the family business managing a candy factory — an experience he, in a phone interview, credited with exposing him to the hardship many working people face.
Another force to that end? He eventually became the president of Covenant College, after it became part of the PCA, but first he knew it as the new nearby school where students dressed weird and had an uncommon fervor, forged in a Northern context where faith could not be taken for granted.
The school, when it arrived in 1964, was run by the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, the product of a prior Presbyterian split, committed to the belief the Bible was inspired and inerrant word of God.
Debates on such matters had for decades riven the family of Presbyterian churches in a scientificminded world where miracles seemed suspect and theologically liberal religious leaders worked to distinguish myth and metaphor from historical fact. According to Kevin Smith, the pastor today at New City Fellowship in Glenwood, the question, from one vantage, became: Was the Bible the word of God, or the word about God?
As today, how one feels about that question might have correlated with how one felt about another: Was Christianity principally about saving souls or about using the Bible as a guide for social action?
Such a distinction did not make sense in the context of Covenant College, where the Bible was generally taken quite literally, and whose chemist president, when federal officials ranked industryheavy Chattanooga as America’s sootiest city, headed the group that worked to address industrial pollution.
And then there was the Sunday school on Third Street. The Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod had recently, following a commissioned study of the Bible, determined interracial marriage was permissible, Nabors said. Inspired by the radical implications of that, the civil rights movement and in-class reading materials, a group of students and faculty headed into mostly poor, Black neighborhoods, where coal heated rundown brick apartments, and started knocking on doors.
Randy Nabors said he and Joan had themselves grown up together in a housing project in Newark, New Jersey, and attended the same schools. Not long after he arrived at Covenant College, she brought him along to the Sunday school services in an apartment where they summoned the neighborhood’s children for religious instruction. Soon enough, Randy Nabors started to preach.
MODERN MAN
Around that time, a swath of Presbyterians were getting increasingly suspicious of their own denomination — though the basic reasons why remain a matter of dispute.
“The internal story that the church will want to tell is that other churches didn’t want to stick with the historic standards of Westminster,” HudnutBeumler said, referring to documents forged during a 1643-49 conference at Westminster Abbey that included Scottish Presbyterians.
While a lot of 20th century reformed churches wrote their own modern statements of faith — basically descriptions of what the church thinks the Bible says — U.S. Presbyterians had at that point gotten by for 300 years with the Westminster standards.
“It didn’t exactly sing off the page,” HudnutBeumler said, and some people pushed for a modern version that spoke to the plight of modern man.
Theological conservatives were wary of such updates to a confession which, though not seen as infallible like scripture, articulated what they saw as a good and helpful summary of a faith threatened by theological liberals in the denomination.
The modern confession got voted down. Still, battle lines had been drawn, and through journals and groups, disgruntled southern Presbyterians found plenty of other things around which to organize. In one 1960s statement, the Concerned Presbyterians worried about those who questioned the authority of scripture and repudiated denominational factions pushing to rejoin the northern church, for example, and for displaying a disturbingly worldly orientation.
“We are concerned,” the Concerned Presbyterians wrote, “because the primary mission of the church — winning people to Jesus Christ and nurturing them in faith — is being compromised today by overemphasis on social, economic and political matters.”
MOVEMENTS AFOOT
In a 2008 article, the pastor Vernon Broyles recalled his pastorship in East Alabama, when the movement to form the PCA gained steam.
Theological conservatism drove the motivations of movement leaders, he affirmed. But the civil rights movement at their doorstep was an essential context.
“It is incontrovertible, in my judgment, that a great measure of the success of the PCA movement involved playing on not only theological fears, but also the racial fears of their Deep South constituency,” Boyles wrote. “It was rarely grossly overt, but it was always there.”
At that time, activists were entering churches to test if Black people were welcome. And some congregations, including many that would end up joining with the PCA, took the occasion to affirm their segregationist commitments.
Broyles saw that firsthand in the 1960s. Caines saw it in the 1970s: He was a few months into his pastorship at a Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod congregation in Sparta Illinois, he said, when an elder warned him not to let any Black people in.
There were certainly people in the early PCA who reacted negatively to the civil rights movement, Caines said. But he feels to link racism to the PCA in particular would be to misunderstand the era.
“It’s not a PCA problem in the 1970s,” the pastor said by phone. “It’s a white problem in the 1970s.”
EXODUS
In 1973, Chattanoogaarea congregations like Westminster Presbyterian Church, Brainerd Hills Presbyterian Church, Hixson Presbyterian Church and St. Elmo Presbyterian Church joined hundreds of congregations in moving to leave the southern Presbyterians, according to newspaper reports from the time, which generally described the split as a matter of theological disagreement.
Early the next year, the fast-growing PCA nabbed the highly influential First Presbyterian Church of Chattanooga, too.
The Knoxville Presbytery, affiliated with the southern Presbyterian denomination experiencing the exodus, chastised congregations for not following proper protocol and disputed their rationales for leaving, the Chattanooga News-Free Press reported at the time. And presbytery officials worried for dissenters in disaffiliating churches.
“Sometimes these people feel very isolated, as if no one is supporting them,” one official said, according to the paper.
Other congregations awaited further developments. In the early 1980s, the (by some) longsought reunification of the southern and northern churches — which would create today’s Presbyterian Church (USA) — was coming, and congregations sought to take a window of opportunity in which they could leave with their church property, Brock recalled. In 1981, Lookout Mountain Presbyterian Church moved to join the PCA.
GROWTH SPURT
A few years before that, Randy and Joan Nabors (she declined to be interviewed for this story) became one of the earliest interracial married couples in the city, and Randy Nabors, fresh out of seminary, started properly pastoring the Sunday school ministry. An elder read in the Bible of a “New City” coming down out of heaven, and thus New City Fellowship was christened.
It had started meeting at the Southside YMCA, which had certain disadvantages. One time, Randy Nabors said, the members of the fledgling congregation came in to their typical worship space to find it had been turned into a karate studio, with punching bags hanging from the ceiling.
Eventually, the group of mostly college students and faculty, and the couple dozen children they coaxed to join them, became a formal church. Sometimes whole families came, and service got livelier with new musical talent, which skillfully blended R&B, jazz and gospel. And good musicians, he said, attract more good musicians.
Meanwhile, change was afoot. In 1982, the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, voluntarily joined the PCA, and New City Fellowship elders sat down to reflect on their new family.
“All the sudden, churches like First Presbyterian and Lookout Mountain Presbyterian were our friends,” Nabors said, laughing. “And we don’t think some of them even liked us.”
First Presbyterian Church — which also happens to be his current employer — was not, to his knowledge, among the churches that resisted racial integration efforts during the civil rights movement.
But it was once known as the richest church in Chattanooga, he said, and had a way of making its views known.
“The outlook of the prominent people of the church was a kind of disapproval of New City,” he said. “They didn’t trust us. They weren’t quite sure what we were about.”
That was expressed obliquely, he recalled. One time, congregational leaders saw him playing basketball in the First Presbyterian Church parking lot with the children he was trying to get to come to Bible study.
The First Presbyterian leaders, who had supported other Black-oriented ministries in the area, asked how they could help, Nabors said. He remembers, naively he feels in retrospect, saying that, well if they helped with these children, maybe they could get them to attend First Presbyterian Church.
“That was the last we heard from them,” he said, laughing.
COMMON FOUNDATION
Still, Nabors felt he and the PCA folks had something fundamental in common.
“We don’t look at, ‘Hey, are we the same social class?’ We look at, ‘What are their core beliefs?’” he said.
Shared theology came first, he felt.
“If you say you believe the Bible like I believe the Bible, then I ought to be able to go to the Bible and say to you the way you’re living is wrong,” he said. “And you ought to be able to do that with me.”
New City Fellowship, which attracted funding from intrigued parties far and wide, eventually became self-sustaining. Nabors was shocked in the mid-1980s when a pediatrician showed up.
“We had never had anybody with that much money in the church,” he
said. “Why is he coming down to the inner city?”
Meanwhile, the church got more Black leaders as Covenant College grew more diverse. And the young New City Fellowship members grew up, had more children, Nabors said. Just as musicians beget musicians, families beget families.
The congregation moved to the Chattanooga Christian School as its membership scaled into the hundreds, and by the late 1980s, the church was seeking a permanent home.
There were some natural fits — it seemed. By 1990, some of the early PCA churches were dying out. Especially those in increasingly Black neighborhoods from which white people were leaving.
When Cal Boroughs arrived to pastor St. Elmo Presbyterian Church around that time, the church was almost at the point of closing the doors, he said in an interview. The same went for old Westminster Presbyterian Church on Third Street in Glenwood, a once vigorous congregation that had shrunk to only a few remaining members, Nabors said.
New City Fellowship worked to buy it, but ran into some hurdles.
“That church actively did not want Black people in the building,” Nabors said. “They had a long history of being pretty racist, and there was a big argument internally about even selling the building,” he said.
Caines, who was involved in the transfer, remembers a specific church elder who fought the process.
“He was vocal, and he was nasty,” Caines said, and the man left little doubt it was because the incoming New City Fellowship had so many Black members.
Still, the majority voted to sell the church, Nabors said.
“Most of them stayed and joined us. And it was a fascinating experience for some of them to sit next to Black people in the congregation,” he said.
The church added staff. It doubled in size and soon it doubled again. An affinity group of churches with similar values emerged all over the world — the New City Network.
Some members balked at the size; small churches have their appeal. But Nabors said the church worked to stay radical.
“I tried to always keep that focus. We’re at a church that exists for the Black community and the inner city of Chattanooga — for the poor,” Nabors said.
They started a food pantry, helped with bills and trained deacons to respond to help people in a pinch.
“A lot of people were angry at poor people because poor people are inconvenient,” Nabors said. “They don’t have an appointment. They just show up.”
Houses burn. Cars break. Brothers go to prison.
“Poor people,” Nabors said, “have emergencies every day.”
CULTURE SHOCK
Smith, the current pastor at New City Fellowship, heard about the church in seminary on the East Coast in the 1990s. It was known as a congregation that brought together Blacks and whites, he said. But some wondered if it was liberal in its theology, by which they meant a social service organization dressed as a church.
Smith grew up Pentecostal in middle-class Philadelphia. He felt called to ministry but had a radical change of heart one day when he encountered some Presbyterian texts presented to him so as to be refuted.
He found in the PCA idea of a God who, before the world was created, had our names in mind and knew what was in store — offering a deep, new sense of security and hope, he said.
At a seminar on preaching, a pastor invited him to Philadelphia’s famous Tenth Presbyterian Church.
If someone entering his old Pentecostal church encountered “an explosion of song,” this new PCA church was “an explosion of reverence” — and a culture shock for Smith. Hymns only. Classical music. Old liturgy. Low emotion.
But he said it was an essentially loving place.
“True Christianity makes us family,” he said in his office recently. “You’re not going to get rid of me.”
In the late 2000s, Smith pastored multi-ethnic congregations in Washington, D.C., and Miami — and New City Fellowship had become iconic in his eyes.
“Pastor Randy Nabors’s ministry took the PCA by storm,” he said. “The PCA wasn’t ready.”
He heard around 2010 that Nabors was going to step down, but was too nervous to apply, fearing he would mess it up, he said. But when he came to speak at Covenant College, a couple people gave him a nudge. One of them, he said, a Covenant College professor and a Black man on the New City Fellowship search committee, walked by Smith in the aisle and said “Kevin, we’re disappointed you didn’t apply.”
CHURCH PLANT
The PCA is not large. But the church, known for its missionary zeal around the world, is growing, and Chattanooga has among the highest densities of PCA churches today, said Caines, a longtime fixture of the Presbyterian scene who helped plant Covenant Presbyterian Church in East Brainerd.
Among the new plants, as of 15 years ago, is New City Eastlake, though for its new pastor, Josiah Katumu, all is not well.
He still doesn’t feel at home, he said in his office this week. He arrived with his family just as the pandemic — a generally terrible time for pastors, who had to placate warring factions — and before he got to seriously know anybody.
And in a church planted in part to serve East Lake Latinos, forging an authentically multiracial spirit of the church is not easy.
“We are what I call a classic PCA church,” he said, laughing. “We are a white church that longs to be diverse.”
Still, this longing has, he said, translated into concrete, intentional action, both at the congregational level — which offers translation services at services and is currently celebrating Black History Month — and at the denomination level. In 2015, at a PCA general assembly in Chattanooga, PCA pastors and scholars presented a resolution for the denomination to acknowledge and apologize for its complicity with opponents of the civil rights movement. A version of it passed the following year.
Katumu, who said in 2013 he became just the 53rd Black man ordained in the church, remembers sitting by Black teaching elders who had been with the denomination for years. They were weeping, he said.
New scholarships, he said, help Black people attracted to the PCA go to seminary, he said, and he feels that the denomination, despite and perhaps as a result of its conservatism, has a dynamic potential.
“The PCA was supposed to provide a place not for purity per se,” he said, “but actually a place where we could welcome disagreements; a place where we were not going to bind each other’s consciences.“
Whether that dynamic will prevent future splits remains to be seen, however. In the denomination today, disagreements simmer over the question of church sanction of homosexuality — the flash point issue dividing United Methodists.
ENDURING SUPPORT
For Smith, who became the New City Fellowship pastor around 2011, discipling the poor out of poverty means three things: The first is transforming the human, the second is education and the third thing is enduring support.
“The church supplies support, but our goal is to infect the family with those same values,” he said, such that it can fulfill that role itself.
In the past few years, his congregation has launched various initiatives to that end. It teaches English. Elders hang out in rec centers. It trains people on job skills, how to fill out an application. It offers dentistry. It helps people pay for food, electric bills, rent, whatever, Smith said, and the city sends people to them to get help.
Members have long tutored neighborhood kids, he said, but one thing he always wanted to do was open a school. Finally this past fall, the Glenwood School, which is connected to the Chattanooga Christian Academy, opened its doors at the church.
The money part was tough, Smith said. The church needed to raise around $700,000 to outfit the school to meet certain government requirements, he said, and he feels his fundraising capacity is limited.
He’s dismayed by the persistently high rate of Black poverty in an evermore expensive Chattanooga, and he feels he makes some white people in town uncomfortable.
“And some Black people look at me as an Uncle Tom,” he said. “So I’m kind of caught in the middle.”
The only way he can dispel the confusion is to let the love of Jesus flow through him, he said. Still, practical accommodations sometimes must be made. Ultimately, one of the church elders, a white academic at Covenant College, spearheaded the fundraising effort for the new church school, Smith said.
“It was gonna fall on me to do that,” Smith said. “God could have done it — don’t get me wrong — but it would have been very difficult to raise that money. In this city? No connections? I’m an outsider? I’m an African American? No.”
There’s a lot of money floating around in this town, and people who call themselves Christians often control it, he said.
“It’s just — the connections,” he said, with a sigh. “It’s still a good ol’ boys network, man.”