Many often lament the unchurched state of northwest United States. It feels like a different world from other parts of the country where churches on every corner reflect an understanding of the world that is, on the surface at least (or at most?), Christian. We easily forget how young our country is and how the spread of the faith to the West has always been slow. I’m looking at a map here of the US in 1850. It’s only half settled, and Texas is the westernmost state. Every western state is less Christianized (138-288 Religious Adherents per 1,000 people) than the rest of the states. Frontiersmen were generally not church planters. Alexis de Tocqueville saw them as “adventurers impatient of any sort of yoke, greedy for wealth, and often outcasts from the States in which they were born. They arrive in the depths of the wilderness without knowing one another. There is nothing of tradition, family feeling, or example to restrain them.” Perhaps this is overstated. It came from a Frenchman afterall.

The Methodist preacher went after these wild lands and grew the church so effectively that historians have called the nineteenth century the Methodist Age. Nancy Pearcey describes them:

By contrast [to state supported clergy], the Methodist circuit preachers became a legend on the frontier. They traveled constantly, virtually living in the saddle. They were willing to preach to tiny frontier outposts, even to individual households. Most were single (they were on the road too often to maintain a family), worked for almost no money, and literally died young form the sheer hardship of their lives. One minister dubbed them God’s “light artillery,” perfectly adapted to the frontier. They had a reputation for braving terrible conditions and bad weather, so that during particularly bad storms it used to be said, “There’s nobody out tonight but crows and Methodist preachers.”

Physical danger is no longer the issue in the unchurched west, and now the church needs men who will put roots downward that will bear fruit upward for generations. The need is dire for new artillery.