Today's Promised Land Is Tomorrow's Egypt!

I sense a phenomenon happening in current North American Christian worship.  Many Protestant churches now sport what are called "contemporary" worship services.  The movement in this direction started around the 1980's.  It was fueled largely by so-called "baby-boomers," who either had no experience with hymnal/robed choir/pipe organ worship, or who identified that with the form of religion they abandoned in the 1960's and 1970's.  Today it simply means worship driven by electronics, percussion, stringed instruments, keyboards, lots of high tech media, and a "come as you are" motif.   This is, of course, the source of the "worship wars" which few churches of any size have escaped over the last twenty years.   (Conflicts largely laughed at by GenY, who look at "traditional" worship as ancient history, and who regard "contemporary" worship as an anything-but-contemporary product of their aging boomer parents!)   For the record, I experience God in both styles.

Ever so slightly, "contemporary" worship is being challenged by new forms of praise and the presence of God.  I'm not sure how this will play itself out in the emergence of house churches, sort of post-Christendom edgy music, the kind of haunting ballad proclamation  of bands like "Gunger," etc.   And church leaders are actually starting to hear some of their most cutting edge "contemporary" people say things like, "We've never done it that way; we ALWAYS do it this way!"...the very viewpoints that drove them away from "traditional" worship years ago.  Today's "contemporary" is tomorrow's "traditional."  Like an insidious and imperceptible force, a vibrant new "promised land" of doing church slowly becomes the entrenched way of doing it forever and ever, amen.  Robed choirs and pipe organs were a scandalous secular intrusion into "traditional" worship in many churches in the late 1800's.  Now churched people will fight to the death to defend them.

This isn't just about worship.  It's about anything we do as the Body of Christ.  Fresh new ways to focus on our mission of making disciples for Jesus Christ are vital.  Unexamined, however, the goal goes from, "Our goal is to use this method to make disciples," to "Our goal is to use this method."  There's a world of difference.  It's the difference between the joy, freedom, faith, and trust of moving toward a new, unknown promised land, and the fearful defensiveness of saying, "We should just go back to Egypt and be slaves.  We were fed there.  That's how we've ALWAYS done things!"

The method is never the goal.  Jesus is the goal.  The method is not the promised land.  If we turn any method into the promised land, it becomes an "Egypt" that will distract us and suck the life out of us.

Here's to the next wave in worship!  It will probably scare me to death, as an aging baby-boomer.  But then, it's not about me.

I'll see you around the next bend in the river.

Newcomers Are More Important

Suppose a church tries to buck the national trend of Protestant churches.  Instead of growing older and declining, they decide to grow stronger and increase.  Imagine a church decides to take seriously Jesus' command in Matthew 28:19; to go and make disciples of all people.  Think what it would be like to measure everything the church does by whether or not it ushers unreached people into the presence of Jesus.  Picture a congregation that begins to focus more on what happens outside its walls than within.  What would it be like to make that dramatic a change, when most Protestant churches in North America are at a plateau or in decline.

Should a church do this, they can count on a restless or fearful comment arising from their own ranks, something like the following:  "Well, it's like the new people and the people we haven't met yet are more important than the people who are already here!"  I've heard this or heard of this over and over in a number of different types of turn-around churches.  When such statements arise, the "culture of niceness" that afflicts most churches might incline us to respond with something like, "Oh, no; the people who are here are just as important as the new people."  But, truth be known, that's not the case.  Something about there being more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine who have no need of repenting.  If we take Jesus seriously, the mission field is more important than the folks who are already "in."

Now, if you're someone who's already "in", this might make you feel defensive.  I get that.  I've been there.  However, let me point out that the best possible thing for you is to have the mission field be more important than you.  Christians grow strongest, worship best, and have the greatest impact when they live life as if others are more important than they are.  This is not just a nice virtue; this is the very humbling mode of Jesus himself.  (See Philippians 2.)   When churched people think of themselves as equal in importance to or more important than those who are living far from God, that's not healthy.  It becomes too easy to redefine ministry in terms of that which pleases them, as opposed to that to which God calls them in reaching others.  When that which goes on inside the church walls takes priority, the needs of an unreached mission field are forgotten easily.  And when the mission field is forgotten, churches shrink, decline, decay, and die.  And worse, the Great Commission is neglected.  So, for the sake of individual Christian growth, for the sake of a church's vitality and future, and for the sake of obedience to Jesus, the new people and the yet-to-be reached people must be the most important.

So, if you're in a church where it seems as though the newest faces at the church door are the highest priority, then rejoice!  That's God loving you in the best way possible.

I'll see you around the next bend in the river.