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.ĭebates on such matters had for decades riven the family of Presbyterian churches in a scientific-minded world where miracles seemed suspect and theologically liberal religious leaders worked to distinguish myth and metaphor from historical fact. 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.Īnother 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. senators and local leaders of other stripes. 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.įrank 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. government.īy 1900, only Lutherans were more widely split than the Presbyterians, Hudnut-Beumler said by phone. They split over whether ministers could be slave owners - then split again over whether a church could rebel against the U.S. The Presbyterians emphasized personal conscience and split easily over questions of Biblical interpretation, which sometimes centered on divisive social issues like gender and race. 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 Hudnut-Beumler, a religion historian at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Reasons varied, but certain themes recurred. It spawned groups that tended to splinter - and, sometimes, merge again. The Protestant reformation emphasized an individual's capacity to interpret what the Bible and God had to say. In the 70's, they ran a Sunday School across the street, the building has since been demolished. Staff photo by Olivia Ross / Randy and Joan Nabors stand at the corner of Cherry Street and East 3rd Street on Friday, February 10, 2023. 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. Fifty years ago, Presbyterians in Chattanooga and beyond went through something similar. 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. It was not the first split in the Presbyterian church amid such debates, nor would it be the last. 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. 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.Īt the time, however, the PCA, as it is known, did not even exist. "And there was a good reason for it, because if you lived down in the valley, you had to breathe brown smoke." "When you talk about upper class and lower class, I mean literally in this city, it's geography," Nabors said by phone recently. Meanwhile, the descent into the city set against a social order in which wealthy people donated to nice-sounding causes but tended to dwell in elevated enclaves like Lookout Mountain. Render Caines, said by phone that students came from Delaware, Pennsylvania, Missouri - and that some locals saw them as carpetbaggers. Randy and Joan's former classmate and fellow New Jerseyan, the pastor J. 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.Ĭovenant 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.įor one, the college was full of outsiders.
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