Drawing Down the Lightning, 1932–1942

This chapter discusses Norman Vincent Peale’s life and career as a Methodist minister during the years 1932–1942. It first describes Peale’s move to New York in 1932 during the darkest days of the Depression, hoping to develop an innovative ministry around a message of practical Christianity and fight the New Deal. It then considers Peale’s decision to change his religious affiliation to the Reformed Church in America and his tenure as pastor of Marble Collegiate Church, along with the early challenges he encountered there. It also examines how Peale used the internal polarized struggles of Protestantism, real and imagined, as the special focus of his public platform. Finally, it analyses changes in Peale’s New York ministry and the growth of Marble Church under his watch; his establishment of a religio-psychiatric outpatient clinic that later became known as Institutes of Religion and Health; and his ministry to businessmen.

“Aliens Ministering to Aliens”: Reformed Church in America Missionaries among Chinese in the Philippines

This article reviews the two decades after RCA missionaries were forced out of China, revealing that the church’s “China mission” was not abandoned, but simply changed geographic focus to overseas Chinese in the Philippines. Although the RCA continued a ministry targeting Chinese from South Fujian, where they had worked since 1842, they faced many new challenges in the Philippines that were quite inconsistent with their experience in China. A major point of contention for missionaries was balancing their relationship with the United Church of Christ in the Philippines (UCCP) and Chinese churches that refused to join this ecumenical organization.

Worship Wars, Gospel Hymns, and Cultural Engagement in American Evangelicalism, 1890–1940

This article argues that gospel hymnody was integral to the construction of modern evangelicalism. Through an analysis of the debate over worship music in three denominations, the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Christian Reformed Church, and the Reformed Church in America, from 1890–1940, I reveal how worship music was essential to the negotiation between churchly tradition and practical faith, between institutional authority and popular choice that characterized the twentieth-century “liberal/conservative” divide. While seemingly innocuous, debates over the legitimacy of gospel hymns in congregational worship were a significant aspect of the increasing theological, social, and cultural divisions within denominations as well as between evangelicals more broadly. Gospel hymnody became representative of a newly respectable, nonsectarian, and populist evangelicalism that stressed individualized salvation and personal choice, often putting it at odds with doctrinal orthodoxy and church tradition. These songs fostered an imagined community of conservative evangelicals, one whose formation rested on personal choice and whose authority revolved around a network of nondenominational organizations rather than an institutional body. At the same time, denominational debates about gospel hymnody reveal the fluid nature of the conservative/liberal binary and the complicated relationship between evangelicalism and modernism generally. While characterizations of “liberal” and “conservative” tend to emphasize biblical interpretation, the inclusion of worship music and style complicates this narrow focus. As is evident through the case studies, denominations typically categorized as theologically liberal or conservative also incorporated both traditional and modern elements of worship.