In 2010, The Gospel Coalition’s website posted a video of a roundtable conversation about multisite churches between three well-known pastors. At the time, two of these pastors, Mark Driscoll and James MacDonald, oversaw multisite churches (Mars Hill Church in Seattle and Harvest Bible Chapel in Chicago, respectively). The third, Mark Dever, led Capitol Hill Baptist Church, a single congregation in Washington, DC. In the video, buddies Driscoll and MacDonald mercilessly double-teamed Dever over his refusal to entertain a multisite model.
The debate seemed good-natured enough, with Driscoll and MacDonald aggressively pressing Dever to leverage his preaching gifts and expand his influence while Dever made his minority case with patience and good humor. Yet the 12-minute discussion revealed two vastly different visions about churches, their leaders, and the path to wielding influence in the 21st century. Fifteen years ago, Dever’s stalwart commitment to one assembly at a single service seemed almost quaint, with successful multisite pastors Driscoll and MacDonald representing the future of evangelicalism.
Yet by the end 2020, both Driscoll and MacDonald had left their churches in at least some disgrace. In the words of one commenter on another site where the video appeared, their bravado had aged “like fine milk.” Meanwhile, Dever’s Capitol Hill Baptist congregation continued to gather weekly for worship, preaching, and discipleship. All the while, the church steadily trained an army of young pastors and flung them out to plant and revitalize other local assemblies within the city and beyond. Could it be that one old-school congregation committed to ordinary gospel faithfulness offered the best strategy of all?
Caleb Morell argues that case in A Light on the Hill: The Surprising Story of How a Local Church in the Nation’s Capital Influenced Evangelicalism. Capitol Hill Baptist Church (or CHBC) is not “an extraordinary church,” argues Morrell, who serves on the church’s pastoral staff. Yet in contrast to megachurches and celebrity pastors “who burn hot and fast and rarely last,” this downtown congregation in the shadow of the US Capitol has remained faithful to the gospel—and its location—for more than 150 years.
One could be forgiven for questioning the inspirational value of a 300-page congregational history. But Morell’s account, while attentive to numerous fascinating details, never gets bogged down in minutiae.
The book crafts a compelling narrative that advances from a humble prayer meeting in 1866 to a church of global influence in the present day. Over 14 chapters, Morell ably situates the Capitol Hill Baptist story within its wider historical and cultural context. Readers follow the church’s fortunes through Reconstruction, World War I, the fundamentalist-modernist conflicts, the dawn of neo-evangelicalism, the Civil Rights Movement, and more. The book provides a sweeping tour of American evangelical history through the lens of one local church.
Plenty of colorful characters parade through the pages. These include prominent leaders like Green Clay Smith, a former congressman and territorial governor who pastored CHBC at the end of the 19th century. Stephen Tyree Early, a press secretary during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, was a longtime member. Carl F. H. Henry, founding editor of Christianity Today, shaped the church for decades as a Sunday school teacher and resident theologian. K. Owen White is best remembered for publicly questioning presidential candidate John F. Kennedy about his Roman Catholic faith, but first he preached through books of the Bible and cleaned up the CHBC membership rolls in the 1940s. Harry Kilbride, the Martyn Lloyd-Jones protégé whom R. T. Kendall called the “best preacher in England,” led the church in the early ’90s before tragically resigning over an adulterous relationship.
But Morell also draws attention to individuals like Celestia Ferris, the washerwoman whose prayer meeting birthed the church. Unnamed Sunday school children scoured the city for bricks for the first building, inspiring local brickyards to donate the bulk of the needed materials. Agnes Shankle asked probing questions in a members’ meeting that pulled the church back from calling a modernist minister in the 1940s. Margaret S. Roy, joining the church as its first African American member in 1969, resolved to “treat people right regardless of how they may treat her,” remaining until her death in 2001. A man named Bill, who served as chairman of deacons, held CHBC together with his energy and financial savvy during a low ebb in the late 1980s. Morell attributes much of the church’s enduring impact to the prayerful labors of its unheralded members.
Surprises abound. For instance, the church faced two government-enforced shutdowns in 1918, first over a World War I–induced coal shortage and then for the Spanish flu epidemic, which left 3,000 DC residents dead over a five-month span. Under the strain of war, the church coped with congregational deaths and groped for creative solutions for safe assembly. In an effort to “stop the spread,” city leaders eventually extended a ban to the church’s outdoor gatherings, creating a tension between submissive citizenship and faithful discipleship.
Ultimately, the congregation pushed back against the local mandates and assembled on the Lord’s Day. Morrell discovered this remarkable episode back in 2020, during the height of the COVID-19 crisis. For him, it was more than a historical curiosity, because CHBC was embroiled in its own conflict with local leaders about meeting for worship under pandemic conditions. The church’s principled witness in 1918 convinced him of the relevance of its entire history.
Readers may also be shocked to learn how many early fundamentalists happily listened to women preachers in the 1920s and ’30s. Capitol Hill Baptist opened its pulpit to fundamentalist Amy Lee Stockton (1892–1988) more than a dozen times in the years before World War II, even as it hosted fundamentalist giants like J. Frank Norris, T. T. Shields, and W. B. Riley. The church would not distance itself from female preaching until it aligned exclusively with Southern Baptists in the late 1940s. Stockton’s example stands as a reminder of how theological debates often take time to develop and resolve.
Indeed, each chapter invites thoughtful application for churches and individual believers. One cautionary tale comes from the clumsy succession of beloved longtime pastor John Compton Ball, who refused to yield leadership to K. Owen White. Ball still attended deacons’ meetings and insisted that White recognize him during services. Little wonder that White’s hair went gray six months into his tenure.
Other lessons abound as Morrell considers topics ranging from a downtown church grappling with suburbanization, to cautions against consumerist appeals and overreliance on programming, to the handling of a prominent minister’s infidelity, to the importance of congregational prayer.
Of course, most readers will be drawn to this volume through the influence of Dever, the current pastor. Followers of Dever’s ministry will especially enjoy learning how he came to CHBC in 1993. Morell portrays the young Cambridge graduate as an unglamorous pulpiteer but also as a student of Scripture and church history, a man of prayer, and a leader of remarkably clear (if countercultural) vision.
Indeed, three years before accepting the call to Capitol Hill Baptist, Dever had already outlined his now-famous nine marks of a healthy church in a 1990 letter to New Meadows Baptist Church in Topsfield, Massachusetts. Arriving at CHBC at age 33, Dever committed to a long-range strategy of “preach, pray, love, and stay,” gradually leading the congregation to clean up its rolls, revise its constitution, implement a church covenant, and install a board of elders.
By the early 2000s, Dever’s church reforms and writings had elevated Capitol Hill Baptist to a national platform. Morell accordingly chronicles the origins of both 9Marks ministries and the Together for the Gospel conference (T4G), which in 2014 would host 12,000 attendees in Louisville’s Yum Center. He acknowledges the division that marked the final years of the T4G movement amid national controversies related to sexual abuse in the church, the #MeToo movement, Donald Trump’s first presidency, and highly publicized police shootings of African Americans. Honest but unsensational in his account, Morell suggests only that terminating T4G after nine gatherings supplied a fitting end to a conference designed to parallel the nine marks.
The book shows a far greater interest in CHBC’s unconventional management of its explosive growth in the early 2000s. After purging its rolls in 1997, the church claimed 274 members; by 2011, elders were overseeing 1,095 souls. Amid this remarkable prosperity, Capitol Hill’s leaders bucked the prevailing evangelical trend of growing a multisite network around Dever’s popular ministry. Instead, the church committed to raising up new ministers who could plant and revitalize churches in and beyond the Beltway region.
Morell traces the strategy back to Dever’s 2004 internal staff memo titled “Doing Nothing and Church Planting,” a reference to Martin Luther’s famous dictum that he “did nothing” to spread the Reformation while the Word did it all. For Morell, this approach provides a refreshing example of how a church can “steward success without losing its soul.”
As a CHBC staff member, Morell documents this history with love, not hiding his own commitment to the church’s theology, methods, and leadership. But if he credits Dever with prescient pastoral vision, he also maintains that Dever’s ministry comprises only one chapter in a far more significant story: one of the Lord keeping the Capitol Hill lampstand burning for a century and a half.
Dever has repeatedly asserted his own dispensability, but perhaps never so dramatically as on the Sunday after 9/11. Just days after terrorists attacked the Pentagon, Dever insisted that seminary student Bert Daniel keep his preaching appointment rather than yield the pulpit to Dever in a historic moment. For Morell, this decision illustrates Dever’s core approach to ministry: Rather than build a movement around himself, he empowers younger pastors who will continue to serve Capitol Hill Baptist and other local churches after he is gone.
For this reason, Morell is convinced that the light on the Hill will keep burning after Dever’s tenure has concluded. “I look forward to being reassured of how much the Lord has done here is not dependent on Mark Dever,” observed associate pastor Jamie Dunlop. “I’m quite confident it’s not person dependent, and yet a lot of people think it is. And I look forward to that assumption being vindicated, and it being evident that the church really is built on Jesus and not on Mark Dever.”
Morell deserves applause for this warm, well researched, and elegantly written volume. This is an institutional chronicle that reads like a compelling biography and frequently invites personal reflection for pastors and churches. Readers weary of consumer-driven and celebrity-centered church cultures will find that Capitol Hill Baptist’s model of faithfulness over flashiness has aged very well indeed.
Eric C. Smith is associate professor of church history at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
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