God and Man at Cambridge

Back to the scene of the crime: In Cambridge, where early American Puritanism once reigned, relativism now holds sway. But a broad coalition of Reformation-minded evangelicals has returned with a withering indictment of American evangelicalism gone awry. They hope their work at Cambridge will spur a movement back to historic creedal Christian faith and practice. But the struggle over whether to issue a stinging condemnation or a gentle critique reveals the Cambridge Declaration as very much a work in progress. | Joe Maxwell

They are financially potent but sparsely populated. Whitewashed sepulchers have replaced Christian congregations in this historic Massachusetts city where once true worship swelled.

A simple stroll through Cambridge reveals a scene more European than American-one Swiss study said as much-its Gothic arches and colonial steeples pointing toward heaven while its jumbled ideas and broken lives point toward hell. Local architects recently gutted one church in old Boston, but saved its stone Gothic facade. A Congregational church on Massachusetts Ave. adds new meaning to "having a form of godliness" without real content or power.

The Cambridge church buildings "are monuments to times when Christianity was really flourishing," laments Terry Gyger, who moved to the Boston area two years ago to lead the planting of a new congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America. Mr. Gyger's energetic 150-member congregation meets in a 150-year-old church building just halfway between Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The shell they bought was just one of dozens of church buildings that Mr. Gyger says have become "empty monuments now."