Description
When the Reverend Mark Allison Matthews died in February 1940, thousands of mourners gathered at a Seattle church to pay their final respects. The Southern-born Presbyterian came to Seattle in 1902. He quickly established himself as a city leader and started building a congregation that was once in the end a number of the nation’s largest, with nearly 10,000 members. Right through his career, he advocated Social Christianity, a blend of progressive reform and Christian values, as a blueprint for building a morally righteous community.
In telling Matthews’s story, Dale Soden presents Matthews’s more than one facets: a Southern-born, fundamentalist proponent of the Social Gospel; a national leader all through the tumultuous years of schism within the American Presbyterian church; a social reformer who established day-care centers, kindergartens, night classes, and soup kitchens; a colorful figure who engaged in highly public and heated disputes with elected officials. Much of the controversy that surrounded Matthews centered on the right kind relationship between church and state ― a topic that may be still hotly debated.