He once told me that he found Christmas and Easter services the least effective, relative to ordinary Sundays – and Sunday-evening services perhaps most effective – in mediating redemptive grace. Indeed, his ministry confirms the observation of British historian Herbert Butterfield that “the church has best served civilization not on the occasion when it had civilization as its conscious object, but when it was most intent on the salvation of souls and most content to leave the rest to Providence.”

When Philadelphia Magazine compiled 76 reasons “Why We Love Philly” in December, the editors placed Tenth Presbyterian Church’s Christmas Eve service in the 23d spot. “The spine-tingling, haunting sound of the congregants’ collective a cappella ‘Silent Night,’ “the monthly observed, “is as serene and unifying as . . . Christmas. You feel chills, and not from the night air.”

Yet, just as Philadelphia gets lost in the shadows of New York and Washington, the historic church that graces the southwest corner of 17th and Spruce Streets rarely competes in the media’s estimation with such better-known Protestant houses of worship as Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, the popular Southern California megachurch, and Riverside Church of Manhattan, the iconic cathedral of liberal Protestants founded by John D. Rockefeller.

But Tenth Presbyterian still fills its neo-Byzantine-style sanctuary for two services every Sunday morning, while drawing a smaller, yet respectable, number for Sunday-evening worship. Most important, the Center City church exerts a calm, steadying influence amid the exhaustion of a waning American Protestantism as obsessed with being relevant as high school girls longing to travel with the popular crowd.

The mainline Protestant establishment can’t parrot fast enough the groupthink of the Upper West Side, jettisoning the Augustinian view of human nature for Gnostic delusions of gender egalitarianism and same-sex marriage. Meanwhile, evangelicals flirt with another twist of Gnosticism, presuming that cultural forms and music used in public worship do not matter. So their churches trade “reverence and awe” for Jay Leno-style informality and “praise songs” that cater to adolescent sensibilities.

In contrast, Tenth remains content to follow the confessional standards of the Reformation – the Westminster Confession and Catechisms in particular – and let the chips fall where they may. To suggest a Catholic analogy, Tenth might be considered pre-Vatican II.

Careful not to jump on intellectual, theological, or cultural bandwagons, Tenth has stayed anchored on scholarly, expositional preaching of the Bible as the Word of God and robust hymn singing that would swell Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley with pride….

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