Faith Works 4-6-19
Jeff Gill
Walks like church, quacks like church?
___
After talking for a couple of weeks about "dechurchification" in our culture more generally, about weddings and funerals and a weekly schedule for families and individually, I want to look under the hood. Under the steeple, if you will.
A parishioner came to me last week and told me I'd never believe what they had experienced going to worship with a relative recently. And went on to describe what is still known as "contemporary" Christian worship, even though it's been around for nearly half a century now.
Contemporary is usually put up against "traditional," which may or may not be laid alongside "liturgical," a style of worship with much tradition behind it, and generally follows a set order of worship, often a bulletin or program or missal, and generally quite a bit of history, as well.
Recently, I went on a three day silent retreat down at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, just south of Bardstown. Some in my circles, being mostly Protestant, asked me why I'd go to a Catholic establishment for a retreat. What the questions got me to thinking about it that, for younger folks like my own son, the distance between the ancient order of worship followed by the Trappist monks of Gethsemani and our Sunday service at my own congregation seems shorter than between our regular worship outline and the style of contemporary praise and worship he's used to.
Contemporary worship uses contemporary music, or what's called CCM for "contemporary Christian music" and has entire segments of radio station formats and satellite radio channels devoted to this genre. And a Christian church following a contemporary format usually opens with a music set of three to five songs, for which much of the congregation stands and sings along. After that, or woven between the songs, comes prayer, an offering is taken where not everyone participates because most give electronically, and then a sermon is shared making full use of the screens on which you'd just gotten done reading the song lyrics from – there are no hymnals. (Or announcements. Or often bulletins. If there are, it's more of a newsletter of upcoming events than an outline of the day's service.)
And they tend to be about ninety minutes long. The sermons are closer to 40 minutes than twenty, and the end of the service may have one last song from the praise team, or more often CCM recordings are played as people depart.
As I said, I recently had a member of my own church express their amazement that anyone worships like this. But I also had another member tell me about an encounter when in conversation the concepts of "choir" or "anthem" or "hymns" had to be explained to a perfectly intelligent and thoughtful modern individual. For life-long churchgoers in a traditional or liturgical tradition, our assumptions that a) most people today worship in generally the way we do, and b) even those who don't go to church are familiar with our traditional pattern of prayer and praise are rapidly being broken down.
Today, liturgical worship is an acquired taste. It's not the mainstream anymore. And that's not saying it won't survive, doesn't have a relevance, or shouldn't continue – but it does mean that those of us used to and using an order of worship have to be ready to explain what we do, justify in certain ways why we do it the way we do, and communicate to often a resistant and confused visitor why doing prayer and praise this way has value. For generations, we could assume a visitor would at least think on first encounter "well, yeah" but in fact many enter our buildings and go "what the . . ."
Trends are moving towards windowless spaces oriented for CCM music set-ups and screens for almost entirely a visual experience rather than a print explanation in the hand. Traditional worship spaces struggle in many cases to accommodate these expectations; some resist them directly. I hope to share more about my time with the monks in preparation for Easter this year, and with them, I think there's a place for holding onto tradition . . . but it is not going to be the expectation or assumption of many in the foreseeable future.
Traditional has become almost counter-cultural!
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he actually was silent for three days, truth. Tell him how long you think you could do silence at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
