“Stately and Set Apart”

In Chapter 2, the members of Park Street Church in Boston (founded 1809) wrestle with the question of how to maintain their church’s historic identity without becoming a museum. The solution is an organic interpretation of progress. Park Street leaders believe that, just as a seed contains all the genetic information necessary to become a mature plant, healthy change unfold slowly and logically, according to a predictable trajectory, from a single point of origin. This chapter analyzes how the congregation’s understanding of progress is reflected in its preaching and musical repertoire. Just as God’s covenant with Abraham unites Israel and the New Testament church into a single people of God, so too does a musical “covenant” penned in 1810 by the church’s first musicians unite nineteenth- and twenty-first century congregations into a single Park Street Church.

“A Convenient Seat in God's Temple”: The Massachusetts General Colored Association and the Park Street Church Pew Controversy of 1830

The Massachusetts General Colored Association was the most advanced black civil rights organization of its day. In 1830, the MGCA backed a protest against segregated pews in Boston s Park Street Church, an event that provided a crucial opening for the alliance between black abolitionists and William Lloyd Garrison s New England Anti Slavery Society.