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.