Concord: Evolve. Don't Change

The following is an article that appears today in the February 2012 issue of Luther Seminary’s Concord theological journal. To check out the entire issue head on over to http://www2.luthersem.edu/concord/.

Evolve. Don’t Change

            “Pardon me, but that’s bulls---” said my internship supervisor, responding to a colleague’s claim that worship is the ideal space for evangelization. Actually, I misquoted him. I doubt he said “Pardon me.” The idea that worship is the time or space for intentional evangelism was, to my supervisor, blasphemy of the highest order. He believed that worship is a time to gather together in the promise that God is present in the bread and the wine and in the word proclaimed, and any intention for it otherwise is bologna. I want to suggest that this is true but insufficient. What we need is more than good theology of worship; we need to understand the evolution of worship and to put to death the language of “change.” Allow me to explain.

            The church has always had tension between welcoming those on the margins and maintaining established practices. This is the fundamental challenge in multi-ethnic, multi-class, multi-generational ministry settings (which, to my mind, covers every setting there is): those things that have deep meaning to one group of people have no meaning to another. How then shall we worship together?

            It’s easy to say that the older generation needs to change—that they need to be willing to give way to a younger group of people with fresh ideas of how to do worship, that the old music needs to go and finally that they need to relax their grip on all those things we have come to consider traditional. Yet, this solution only encourages division, spawning worthless nomenclature such as traditional and contemporary.

            In a place like the Twin Cities it’s well and good to have different churches offering different forms of worship. Mercy Seat can coexist quite nicely alongside Mt. Olivet. Yet, much of the church lives in places where different worship equates to division in the community that is unwanted and often painful. In small-town America there are already far too many things that pull people apart from one another. Worship should not be another of these. Thankfully, in some ways we have no choice. Attendance numbers and pastoral sanity often require a single service, a single time to come together to worship God, to break the bread and drink the wine and to re-member (that is, become members again) the body of Christ.

            The pertinent questions regarding worship in Hallock, Minnesota are the same questions everywhere in small communities: How do we faithfully gather together when so many of us have so many different spiritual needs? How do we allow space for the Holy Spirit to work in a broad way without watering down the message? These are our struggles, and adequate answers are usually lacking. I’ve visited enough churches in my twenty-five years to know that most are doing a poor job of generating answers.

            So maybe that’s the point; maybe there are no good answers. Maybe the congregations that are alive and vibrant haven’t so much figured out the magical formula to do the most effective worship, but have learned to live the questions. Every Sunday is an opportunity to look around and ask one another, “I’m here because worship means something to me. Does it mean the same thing to you?”

            If we ask the question, then we have to admit the possibility that someone could say, “No,” in which case we should resist the urge to fix them. We are not the Borg, assimilating the ones who do not give in to the purported superiority of our liturgical model. Instead, we are the body of Christ in desperate need of members at the margins. Members with different spiritual needs require us to step back and ask ourselves, “Are we doing this for the glory of God, for our own fulfillment, or because we see our church like a sports team and affiliation matters more than salvation?”

            I think the latter is the underlying philosophy of many—perhaps most—worship practices. If you’re a sports fan, you have undoubtedly heard fans deriding other fans of the same team for “jumping on the bandwagon” or, in other words, cheering only when their team is winning. Likewise, we have people in the church who have acquired a sense of ownership after having devoted themselves even when it seemed like a lost cause. Now, they are quick to turn on the bandwagon followers—i.e. the folks who haven’t been so sure about church—and they have denied them a voice. Yet, for a healthy congregation (or, for that matter, a healthy fan base) we need the participation of both. We need the margins as much as we need the center, and the center has to be willing to move; not flip inside-out, mind you, but it cannot be set in one place. Culture and practice evolve through time. The center has to shift with the times or else the margins will disappear.

            This is where the rubber meets the road for worship, whether in Hallock, Minnesota or on the campus of Luther Seminary. Those with a controlling stake have to be willing to evolve. We throw around the word “change” too much and it evokes all kinds of negative emotions, and this is in part because it is the wrong word. Change suggests something that we do. What we need is evolution, a process beyond our control marshaled over by God and not by us. Evolution teaches us two things: 1. we are not in control, and 2. new life requires death. Things will slowly die out of favor—evolution does not happen overnight—but the best way to honor how we have worshiped in the past is not to try to live it over again. Instead, the best way to honor the past is to understand that the present relies on the past like a pyramid whose capstone cannot stand without those that have been laid before. Worship is like this, and when it is at its best it remembers its past without attempting to revive it.