Two departures

Many of my friends over the years have abandoned the traditional Baptist churches they grew up in. While some of them have ended up in other healthy evangelical churches, a large group of them have gone into one or two camps:

Some have departed for something new. These friends have gone into churches that have completely embraced contemporary Christianity. They are in churches that have been heavily influenced by the loose movement lead by men like Rick Warren, Bill Hybels and (more recently) Andy Stanley. These churches are often orthodox in doctrine, but are allergic to tradition and have a stated goal to be unlike the church of previous generations.

Others have departed for something old. A smaller (though not insignificant) group of my friends have left the traditional baptist churches they came from for something much older: catholic or orthodox churches. These guys are disgusted by the novelty of contemporary Christianity and want to feel like they are a part of something old. Their quest for being in a “historic church” often leads them back to Rome, and they “swim the Tiber” back into Catholicism.

Two underlying attitudes

These are the extremes. But there is a whole spectrum and on both sides of this there are people remaining but leaning in one direction or another. Even in the best churches, there are people who tend to think along these lines:

• This is good because it is new.
• This is good because it is old.

On the one hand you have those who seem willing to change everything just to change it and “stay relevant.” They seem to give little weight to the reason behind things and often seem a bit too careless in their destruction of the old.

On the other you have people who worship tradition and who see any change as a threat. The only reason they need to reject change is because it is change. “This is the way we have always done it” is enough for them.

One group is unmoored and careless. The type who replaces cathedrals with modern monstrosities. The type whose reading is almost exclusively stuff released in the last year.

The other group is trying to preserve what they did not take the time to understand. In many cases, what they are trying to preserve was itself a modern innovation (or doctrinal deviation) from forty or fifty years ago.

Avoiding extremes

I think it is important that we avoid both of these extremes. That we maintain a connection with history and tradition without ossifying into groups who worship history and tradition. That we be like a tree, whose roots and inner rings proudly stand in history but whose leaves are breathing the air now and as a living thing, is flexible enough to withstand the winds of our ever changing world without changing itself.

How do we do that? While I’m no expert, here are my humble suggestions:

Recognize, understand and appreciate our history.

We all tend to default to what C.S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” Because of the rapid increase in technology over the last hundred years, we tend to dismiss what is past as deficient and useless and give more weight to what is new and current. We tend to think of people who lived in the past as being a half-step away from cave men, and to think of ourselves as having it all figured out.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Actually, the civilizations of the ancient world were quite advanced. Pompeii (which was preserved by a volcano in 79 A.D.) had restaurants, public accommodations, well built streets and houses, fashion, literature and art. Some of their homes had radiant heating and cooling systems that would seem advanced in modern homes. Their cook wear (though made of bronze and not cast iron) looked incredibly similar to the stuff in my own kitchen.

We are prone to forget the architectural achievements of the ancients. What they were able to build without modern power tools baffles the mind. How did the Egyptians build the great pyramids, how come they are still standing thousands of years later, and how are they so flat and square? How come the Romans could build public buildings that are still standing thousands of years later, and the public buildings we built 50 years ago are crumbling and decaying? The answer is they knew stuff, and some of that stuff we are only now figuring out after it was lost for millennia.

In Professor Michael Svigel's excellent (if terribly named) book RetroChristianity, he brings up this hypothetical:

What would happen if, after every year of school, we had our brains wiped. What if we had to start over every year?

The answer, obviously, is that we would be forever kindergartners. Without building on the things we learned from prior years, our learning would be forever stunted.

When we dismiss what past generations have to teach us, we are basically consigning ourselves to living stunted lives. We can never get past intellectual kindergarten, because our collective memory has been wiped.

If we are dealing with something today, chances are, it's been dealt with and wrestled with before, probably many times before, by people much smarter than us. When we reject their knowledge and wisdom, we are acting like the bratty teenager who insists on "making his own mistakes" rather than learning from the painful experience of his parents. We are consigning ourselves to another period of intellectual darkness.

Traditions should not be worshiped. But they should not be discounted either. Before we change something, we at least need to understand it. We need to take the time to figure out why our parents did something, and why their parents did it, and keep going until we figure out why - then and only then should we take the wrecking ball out.

The same thing is true on the other side: Before we champion something, we should take the time to understand it. Some of the things you think are “old paths” might themselves be innovations that are only 30-50 years old. Some of the things you think are innovations might actually be a return to “old paths.”

If you don’t understand something, don’t change it. But if you won’t take the time to understand something, don’t be dopey enough to blast those who do.

I think one of the best things we can do is to read the biographies and writings of those from previous times. Their writings help us understand and learn from their thinking. The biographies help us to understand their times. Both can give us a deeper appreciation and understanding of where our own ideas and traditions came from.

Cautiously recognize, understand and adapt to the modern world.

It is undeniable that our world is changing more rapidly than at any other time in human history. The life of a man in the 1700s would not be all that different from the life of a man in the the 500s. But since the 1900s our world has changed at breakneck pace. Our culture has changed almost completely on some things even in the last 15 years. (We forget that Obama would not support gay marriage when he was first elected in 2008; a position almost unimaginable today.)

Some of those changes (like air conditioning and our attitudes toward racism) are undeniably good. Some of them (like free love, no-fault divorce and the LGBTQIA++ stuff) are undeniably anti-biblical and thus bad. Most lie somewhere in the middle. The challenge for us is deciding when and how to adapt to them.

I’m of the opinion that some cultural changes need to be recognized and adapted to, but that we tend to default to adapting to cultural changes too quickly and too haphazardly. Especially in our churches, we should be obviously talking to people today and oriented toward the future, but we need wisdom for how, what, and when we adapt to the changing world around us.

Technological and social innovation has consequences. One of the most insightful things I ever heard (and I’m not sure where) was this quote:

Church discipline died with the invention of the automobile.

None of us would say cars are bad, but it’s hard for us to imagine what church must have been like before our fellow parishioners could just hop in their car and drive to the next town whenever there was the slightest problem at church.

On the one hand, if we aren’t careful, we can end up preaching to a world that no longer exists. On the other, if we aren’t careful, we can be so eager to adapt to a changing world that we accidentally destroy things that those before us were very wise to put there.

So we must be cautious and seek God’s wisdom.

Let the Bible be the judge of both what is new and what is old.

Finally, we must remember that the Bible is God’s final authority for our faith and practice and we must then judge both what is new and what is old by the standard of Scripture. There are plenty of practices that are old that we know don’t match up with a plain reading of scripture. We are fools if we think some of our new ideas about how to do church and live as a Christian aren’t going to be weighed in a balance and found wanting by later generations too. Let’s let Scripture be our guide and follow the leading of the Lord day to day.