Before a single wall is judged, the line must be hung — and the line comes down from above.
Series Introduction • By the Virginia Christian Alliance Editorial Board
The Big Three
- Many American denominations have kept the name, the building, and the calendar while quietly retiring the authority that made them Christian.
- This drift is neither new nor sudden; it follows a charted pattern that always begins with the demotion of Scripture.
- This series lays down the measure first — the plumb line of God’s Word — by which every church that follows will be weighed.
There was a time when the words church and Christian church meant the same thing. They no longer do.
A living body and a corpse can look alike for a while — the same face, the same familiar clothes. What separates them is breath. “As the body apart from the spirit is dead” (James 2:26, ESV). A church can be a body of that kind: the steeple still standing, the hymns still sung, the calendar and the stained glass and the name on the sign all kept — and the breath gone out of it. Strike the living Word from a church and you do not get a worse church. You get a beautiful building with no life in it. Scripture even gives the address: “You have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead” (Revelation 3:1, ESV). That is how a Christian church becomes just a church. The sign still says church. The question this series asks is whether the word Christian still belongs in front of it.
A Name Without the Life
This is not a new fear, and it is not an angry thing to say. More than a century ago, Charles Spurgeon watched the churches of his own day loosen their grip on Scripture — trading the authority of the Book for the spirit of the age — and he refused to call it growth, or unity, or progress. He called it the Downgrade. Writing in 1887, he named the counterfeit without flinching: “A new religion has been initiated, which is no more Christianity than chalk is cheese” — a thing that “palms itself off as the old faith with slight improvements” and “usurps pulpits which were erected for gospel preaching.” He stood nearly alone in saying so, and it cost him dearly — his own denomination censured him for it. The pattern he named has not changed since. Only its pace.
We do not write this with relish. There is no joy in measuring a church and finding it bent. These were congregations where the gospel was once preached and the lost were once saved, and to watch what some have become is to grieve, not to gloat.
A Church Does Not Vote to Leave the Faith
Here is the hard truth that makes the grief sharper: a church does not vote to leave the faith. It drifts. And it drifts by a method so ordinary you can chart it.
First, Scripture is still honored — quoted, printed, read aloud — but no longer simply obeyed. Soon it becomes one voice among many: tradition, reason, experience, and the conscience of the age all pull up a chair beside it. Before long, by slow degrees, it becomes the obstacle — the hard text that compassion must learn to explain away, the old rule that progress must work around.
And by the time anyone calls for a formal vote, the vote changes nothing that matters. It only ratifies, in public, what was decided years earlier in rooms where no one believed they were leaving anything at all. This is why the falls in this series will look so sudden from the outside and feel so inevitable from within. The headline is the vote. The disease is everything that came before it.
The Plumb Line
So before we examine a single denomination, we must do what a builder does before he condemns a wall. We must hang the line.
The prophet Amos was given the picture:
“Behold, the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. And the Lord said to me, ‘Amos, what do you see?’ And I said, ‘A plumb line.’ Then the Lord said, ‘Behold, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel.’” — Amos 7:7–8 (ESV)
A plumb line is the simplest tool in the mason’s hand — a weight on a cord — and it does only one thing: it shows true vertical. It cannot be argued with. It does not bend to accommodate the wall. The mason measures the wall against the line; he never adjusts the line to flatter the wall.
Three Edges, One Line
That line is the Word of God, and it has three edges that are finally one. It is the canon — the measuring rod, the straight rule that judges everything else. It is the canon — the settled books of Scripture, God-breathed and complete. And it is the canon in the oldest sense — the core truth of the matter, the thing that is simply so. “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16, ESV). Reproof. Correction. The line was always meant to test the wall.
And notice where the line comes from. The plumb hangs from above. It is lowered into the room; it does not rise up out of the floor. The standard is not the church’s to set, and not the culture’s to revise. It descends. A church that begins adjusting the line to fit the wall has not grown more compassionate. It has only let go of the one fixed point it was ever given.
What This Series Will Do
Understand first what we are measuring. We are not laying out the structure a wayward church has built and touring its rooms — that would only hand the architect of the confusion his own blueprint. We are doing the opposite. We are measuring the walls God built, and showing where one body has leaned away from them. The standard sets the terms here; the rebellion only gets exposed by it.
God built His walls plumb, and named them in the first pages of Scripture. There is the wall of marriage — one man, one woman, the first institution He raised (Genesis 2:24). There is the wall of our very nature as male and female, the image He stamped on us (Genesis 1:27). And there is the wall around human life itself, the image-bearer guarded from the womb to the last breath. In the articles that follow, we will hold the line against each of these walls in turn, and let a specific American denomination — within living memory, in its own published words — show us how far it has bent from true.
We will be fair. Each believed it was choosing love, and we will let that case be made in its own words before we answer it. We will measure institutions, not hearts — what a body decided and signed, never the eternal standing of any one soul inside it. We will keep it on this side of the ocean: the American church is our subject and our burden. And we will keep asking the harder question underneath — not how a culture went astray, but how the pulpit that was posted to guard these walls fell silent while they leaned.
From Canon to Cannon
But understand what a plumb line becomes in a war.
The same ancient root that gives us canon — the straight reed, the measuring rod — gives us a second word built on the very same image: the cannon, the straight line that does not measure but fires. And that is what this series finally is. We lay the canon down now, as the rule. Then we turn it on the field. Each wall measured and found bent, the artillery of Scripture is opened on the position — not to destroy the people behind it, but to break the lie that holds them, and to clear the ground before the troops are sent over the line. “Contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3, ESV). The reader is no spectator here. The reader is the one being sent forward.
One straight line. It is the rule that measures the wall, and it is the line we aim down. The same edge does both.
The Line Still Hangs
Do not mistake the gravity of this series for despair. The plumb line still hangs, and it still hangs straight, because the One who lowered it has not moved. For every body that bent the rule, others have held it at real cost — proof that the drift is a choice and never a fate. Walls can be rebuilt. Churches have repented before, and by the mercy of God they will again.
No argument on this page has ever raised the dead, and no measurement ever saved a soul. Only the Spirit who raised Christ can do that. The Board’s task is smaller and plainer: to hang the line where every eye can see it, to name what is bent, and to commend every reader, every pulpit, and every church still able to repent to the God who alone makes the crooked straight.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).
Spurgeon quotation: C. H. Spurgeon, “Another Word Concerning the Down-Grade,” The Sword and the Trowel (August 1887). Public domain.
