Rejoice in God’s
saints, today and all days;
A world without saints
forgets how to praise,
Their faith in
acquiring the habit of prayer,
Their depth of
adoring, Lord, help us to share.
Fred
Pratt Green (1903-2000)
I love family picture albums. One of my favorite activities in visiting my mom and dad after they retired was to thumb through their books of family photos. Though many of the pictures faded, I took great pleasure in rehearsing the warm memories of my childhood. As I dug a little deeper, I also found pictures of relatives I had barely known and houses where I had lived but which I could not remember. Those pictures tell a story that never loses its freshness. The story is mine. The images communicate the development of who I am – where I’ve lived and the people and events that have shaped my soul.
The church has a story, too.
But for most modern Evangelicals, it seems that we’ve mislaid the photo
albums. Either that, or we’ve never
cared very much to look at them. We tend
to be rootless, except for the beginning of our story which is recorded in
Scripture. But to mark the end of the
first century to the present, we only have a few pictures hanging on the walls
– perhaps of Martin Luther, John Wesley, or D.L. Moody. On the other hand, we’ve got plenty of
contemporary images – people with the latest fix to grow the church or gifted
leaders who have built successful ministries.
And the images are not just hanging on the walls or stored away in
picture albums. We’ve made slideshows
and movies out of our contemporary heroes.
Just check the shelves in your local Christian bookstore and you’ll find
a plethora of material to help you live the Christian life.
A Crisis of Spiritual Formation
I am writing out of conviction to address the serious
challenges we face as Evangelicals in American culture. I am a product of the late twentieth century,
born right in the middle of the Baby Boom.
As I child, I lived with the very real threat of nuclear annihilation
during the sixties. “Duck and cover” was
a familiar drill to me in grade school.
I recall the political and social upheaval of the time. Though I was a few years too young for the
draft, I felt the confusion and anger over the Vietnam War. Just as I was emerging into adulthood, I
despaired at the “national malaise” of the late 1970’s. I doubted that I would ever be a participant
in the “American dream” – own my own home and have a family.
As I write this, the spirit of the times feels eerily like
those depressing days of high inflation and unemployment in the late 70’s and
early 80’s. The world, it seems, is on
the brink of economic disaster. Our own
national debt continues to explode and is more than 100% of our annual gross domestic
product. The threat of terrorism seems
ubiquitous and the possibility of a rogue nation acquiring nuclear weapons is a
horrifying possibility. The American
political system is hopelessly divided while we debate healthcare, energy, and
the size of government. It is clear that
we must address issues of sustainability for our planet but even that question
is mired in political polarization.
Capitalism is the most productive economic system the world has ever
known but it has spawned crass consumerism and selfishness in all areas of our
life.
The modern American evangelical church must address the
challenges we face as a culture. In the
past, we have maintained that for
society to be changed, the sole solution is for more people to be brought to
Christ. It seems that a large percentage
of Americans already identify themselves as having been “brought to
Christ.” In Barna’s State of the Church 2016 report, 35% of Americans claimed to be
“born-again” Christians.[1] In the first three hundred years of the
church, a much smaller percentage of the population claimed the name of Christ
and yet they transformed the known world.
But the 35% in our culture who claim to be “born-again” seem to have no
noticeable distinction from the rest of the population except that they tend to
be politically conservative. Marital
fidelity, sexual ethics, and other markers of moral conviction seem to be
indistinguishable between those who claim to be Christians and those who do
not. We preach a good game, but in the
end, we are no different from the rest of society. No wonder so many in our
culture consider the evangelical church as irrelevant and openly express
hostility towards us. We don’t
necessarily need more people “brought to Christ” (though I am all for
evangelism); we need to be brought into
Christ (Eph. 4:15).
How did we get to such a place of seeming impotency? As I see it, Evangelicalism and Americanism
were “made for each other.”
Evangelicalism’s emphasis on personal faith fits well with the
individualism of the American spirit. I
don’t consider that to be an unfortunate convergence. That Evangelicalism found a ready home in the
American story has been a blessing to
the whole world, attested to by the missionary and ministry initiatives
launched from our shores for over two hundred years. But with the convergence of individualistic
values, we have been blinded to the dangers of accommodation to our culture’s
expectations. Evangelicals have always
been a pragmatic people. We, like the
Apostle Paul, would become “a servant to all, that
I might more of them” (I Cor. 9:19).[2] But in our pragmatism, we have often failed
to reflect and recognize how we have compromised the gospel and its mandate to make true disciples who are
being formed in the image of Christ.
Evangelical Aversion to History
and Tradition
Almost since our beginnings in the eighteenth century,
Evangelicals have been dismissive of tradition.
Sola scriptura has been our
mantra. No book but the Bible. No creed but the Scriptures. Our faith is personal and spiritual, in which
we rely on the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth. We take at face value the words of the
Apostle John, “…the anointing that you received
from him [the Holy Spirit] abides in you, and you have no need that anyone
should teach you” (I John 2:27).[3] Consequently, Evangelicals have tended to
discount over two thousand years of Church tradition, maintaining that for much of that time, most of the Church was
apostate.[4] There is little interest in church history
for most Evangelicals. Heroes of the
church are seldom mentioned in sermons or in Sunday School. My efforts to establish All Saints Day as an
annual service in churches I’ve served have been met with suspicion and fear
that it might be “too Catholic.”
As participants in the American spirit and suspicious of
tradition, we have also been swept up into the modern narrative of the world
which was birthed in the eighteenth century.
Modernism has given us the scientific revolution and all of the
wonderful conveniences that we continue to enjoy. It has given us the automobile, the computer,
and even taken us to the moon. But it
has also elevated Reason above God and scoffs at mystery and spirituality. In its arrogance, modernism sees only today
and tomorrow. History doesn’t matter.
Modernism’s tendency to jettison history as irrelevant has
left many Evangelicals as veritable orphans, cut off from the past which has
shaped us. We desperately need to find
and revel in the family picture albums of church history if we are to
understand ourselves fully and how to move forward in the challenging days we
face. Furthermore, there is probably
no enterprise of the church that more urgently needs understanding of its
development than our practice of corporate worship.
What we do when we regularly gather together
forms us, both as individuals and as communities.
It is my conviction that the pathway of renewal in the
contemporary church is first through its corporate worship. It is in corporate worship that the gospel is
proclaimed and enacted. And it is the
gospel that “is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes” (Romans 1:16b).
It is the gospel that has the power to change not only the church, but
also the whole world. The critical question, however, is which gospel are we proclaiming and enacting
in corporate worship today? That has
always been the question. Whenever the whole liturgy - our songs, prayers,
preaching, baptism, and Communion - have been true to the tradition handed down
to us from the apostles and the written word of the Scriptures, the gospel has
transformed people and society.[5] But when the church’s worship practice has
diluted the gospel through theological error, arrogance, exclusion, cultural
accommodation, or any other distortion, it loses its transformative power. It is no longer the gospel of which the
Apostle Paul was not ashamed. Cultural
critic and author Nancy Pearcey explains and laments the historical process of
gospel dilution that Evangelicals incurred because of our reactionary worship
practices based on faulty premises:
The troubling thing about all this is that Christianity was not shaping the culture so much as the culture was shaping Christianity. In the classic Protestant churches – Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican – corporate statements of faith such as creeds, confessions, and formal liturgies were considered necessary means of expressing communal identity and structuring communal worship. But now all theological formulations were denounced as nothing but man-made devices to keep the people “under the thumb of clerical tyrants.” As liberal individualism was taking root in politics, it was being uncritically applied to the churches, producing a highly individualistic and democratic ecclesiology. Modern values like autonomy and popular sovereignty became simply taken for granted in evangelical churches.[6]
Returning the church to its counter-cultural role of
transformation can begin effectively through renewing its worship. But to navigate the pathway of worship renewal
successfully, we must first get our bearings.
An understanding of our story – the movements and events that shaped us
– will enable us to locate our circumstances on the map of history.
The Focus of the Book
This
book is an attempt to address the need for modern non-liturgical (Free Church[7])
worshippers to understand ourselves...
[2] Unless otherwise noted, as Scripture
quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV).
[3] “Taking it at face value” is not always
the best hermeneutic. In the passage
cited, the interpreter needs to be aware of the challenge that the Apostle John
was addressing – namely, know-it-all heretics who were trying to pull the church
away from the true gospel (v. 26).
[5]
An excellent source for understanding the relationship between Tradition and
Scripture is Retrieving the Tradition and
Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants by D.H.
Williams. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B.
Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999).
[6] Nancy
Pearcey, Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural
Captivity, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2005), 277.
[7]
“Free Church” as I use the term in this work is not an institution like the
association of churches known as The Evangelical Free Church, but rather
churches that share common values, beginning with opposition to an established
State Church and extending to opposition against any outside controlling
influence on the local church. Free
Churches are autonomous and as an expression of that autonomy tend to resist
historic creeds or set liturgies.
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