Old is not inherently Biblical and new is not necessarily worldly

Worldliness is a bad word. It is also a rarely defined word. Typically "worldly" really means "stuff that those people I don't like do" and almost always is directed at the latest fads. Having a coffee bar in your church? Worldly. Electric guitars? Worldly. A pastor who wears an open collared shirt instead of a suit and tie? Worldly. I don’t know of anyone who would embrace being called “worldly”. There just isn’t really a context where this is a positive term.

So at the White Horse Inn a recent post, Does Worship Really Need To Be Exciting? , referenced a book by an atheist who infiltrated the wacky world of evangelicalism (Kevin Roose, The Unlikely Disciple). Out of the mouth of an unbeliever we find that Kevin went to Thomas Road Baptist Church (the church Jerry Falwell founded) and found the “worship” service there was an exercise in overstimulation. Score a point for sober, liturgical (non-Baptist of course) churches!

It is only tragic that it takes someone posing to be an evangelical to point out something that the “experts” themselves either can’t understand or chose to suppress—i.e., that the excitement of contemporary “worship” is more driven by consumerist impulses than genuine gratitude or spirituality.

If you’re drawn toward exciting, contemporary worship settings, know this—we all are! But this is not because it is right; not because it is proper; not because God is truly putting a burden on our hearts to pursue worship of him in this way… it is because all of us prefer to worship ourselves! All of us are idolaters who fashion gods in our own image!

If we like video clips, well then God must want us to watch those while worshiping him. If we like rock music, God must like it too. If we like to sit in church with our feet up, drinking a cafe mocha, then there can only be one reason for this—God must want nothing more than for us to sit in church with our feet up, drinking a cafe mocha! Whatever we like to do, God likes to do it too, right?

After all, we’re too genuine to be self-centered, right? Idolatry is only practiced by people out there, isn’t it? What we want to do just feels so right—how can you argue with that?!?!

I thought the feet up and relaxing while drinking a café mocha thing was hilarious since the early church met in homes, with the meal as a central part of the gathering and likely did so while reclining. The first thing that the early church did was probably not to install pews and pulpits so people would be forced to sit up straight and face the front of the room where the pulpit was.

Of course since the early church met in a form that looked nothing like even the most Reformedest churches and probably looked a lot more like a big family get together, the question can easily be flipped around. Of course God wants nothing more than for us to sit in church in a suit and tie, in a pew, staring forward, sitting and standing when told, listening to one guy up front speak for about 45 minutes and perhaps passing around “a nibble and a sip” in lieu of the Lord’s Supper. Turns out that what we think of as proper “regulative principle of worship” settings might just be as man centered and worldly as the most boisterous contemporary gathering.

I of course had a few comments on this notion:

Perhaps the somber, sober rituals of liturgical worship with its comfortable rhythms is every bit as appealing to the human desire for entertainment as the high production value Thomas Road service. Not all worldly entertainment is necessarily modern. Back a few hundred years ago what we think of as a properly sober “worship service” was high culture.

Rather than asking if a “worship service” is supposed to be modern worldly or older worldly, perhaps we should ask why we don’t see either form in the New Testament church. We might ask why we don’t see a ritualized Supper and instead see shared meals as the centerpiece of the community of the saints, why we see 1 Cor 14:26 as the model of church interaction and mutual edification rather than a one man show monologue sermon. Just because something is more than fifty years old doesn’t mean it is Biblical and just because something seems more modern doesn’t mean it is worldly.

The dirty secret of suit and tie fundamentalism and high church liturgy Reformed "worship" alike is that you can be every bit as worldly with a somber, button-down meeting as you can with a latte bar and a preacher with groovy glasses and skinny jeans. This is the same issue we see with the MacArthur-YRR kerfuffle. Focusing on externals like the clothing style someone is wearing is prime evidence of a largely worldly understanding of worship and the gathering of the church. That doesn’t mean that clothing choices are inherently value neutral. A woman who is dressed immodestly is immodest whether she is wearing a short skirt or she is wearing a sensible dress but is dolled up with make-up and adorned with flashy jewelry. It does mean that when we declare one culturally meaningful clothing style to be OK and another to be inherently worldly, we are missing the boat.

Here is the thing. Some people like the high church liturgical service. Some people like the rock-n-roll contemporary service. Neither of them looks like the early church and neither of them is supportable in other than the most ancillary way from Scripture so both of them are equally worldly and designed to appeal to our personal tastes and preferences. We have been conditioned to think that cultural religious traditions that are a few hundred years old are somehow more representative of a millennia old church than cultural religious traditions that are only ten years old. New is worldly, older is Biblical. A pipe organ is OK, a synthesizer is not (and by the way, synthesizers are never OK no matter the setting).

That is not to suggest that a lot of the stuff going on in “contemporary worship services” is not worldly. I think it is. Is it more worldly than the worship services of many traditional churches? Not really, not when you look at it from a big picture view. The structure of the worship service, traditional or contemporary, is designed to appeal to people. It provides a religious experience of some sort in a controlled and limited fashion. For the most part someone else is doing the prep work, you just have to show up and observe. It is typically predictable, safe, consistent and hassle free. In a word, it is worldly.

We need to quit fussing and feuding over the peripherals in the church and get back to studying the Scriptures earnestly and examining all of our most treasured traditions in light of what we see. Many of these arguments are fighting over something that has never been seriously questioned at a fundamental level in the first place. If we want to stamp out worldliness in the church we need to stop letting the world define the church for us.