Serving the gospel or cultural idols?

Before I begin this post, let me state very clearly that I consider myself as nothing other than a committed evangelical Christian. I affirm the Westminster Confession of Faith, and am a member at an Evangelical Presbyterian Church. In our Sunday morning services we worship with a robed choir and a pipe organ, sometimes with the accompaniment of a brass quintet or a chamber orchestra, in a sanctuary where there are ancient symbols of the faith in the architecture and building fixtures. Sunday morning attendees are typically dressed nicely — not casual, but Bible-belt Sunday go to meeting clothes. I don’t happen to wear a coat or tie, but I’m in the minority, and I suppose my shaved head is a bit out of the norm. But I have never felt out of place in this traditional service.

Our evening service is different — I wear jeans or shorts and may wear sandals, and casual dress is the rule. The youth are typically in jeans or shorts and tee shirts, with sneakers, sandals and flip-flops the normal footwear. Our evening worship band consists of a guitarist, an electronic keyboard, piano, bass, drum kit and percussion, and may be accompanied by other instrumentalists depending on the music (I’ve played penny whistle in this service, for instance).

I’ve talked about these matters of style not because I think that one style is superior to another, but simply to state that the church I attend and love is fairly conservative and thoroughly evangelical, with members and visitors representing every age group from infants to elders — all I want to do by this is to establish that I’m not some young fellow with a goatee and a chip on my shoulder toward the traditional church.

All this is said to introduce this article from the St. Lous Post-Dispatch
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/religion/story/76525E382E260FB8862572B1000C874E?OpenDocument

The linked article details the efforts of Roger Moran, a Missouri Baptist who has taken up the cause of opposing what he broad-brushes as the emerging church.

As someone in the process of ministry candidacy with the aim of church planting, I think it necessary to speak about the term “emerging” and perhaps draw a couple of distinctions. First of all, “emerging” is a broad term which basically encompasses a spectrum of younger Christians who acknowledge that Western culture has changed greatly over the past half century, and the pace of change continues to accelerate. A concomitant acknowledgment is that churches cannot continue to do things in the same way that we did in the middle part of the 20th century and expect to remain viable and relevant to the culture.

In the middle part of the 20th century the church took for granted a position of cultural influence and privilege, and a level of political power that was the legacy of more than a millennium of what has been called the Christendom or Constantinian dialectic. “The Mission Field” was a faraway place that one sent missionaries. Here at home, we could simply continue to do things the same way that we have always done them — the culture was at the very least pre-Christian, characterized by values that had been influenced by Christianity and shared much in common with Christian ethics.

That reality is past. Christendom (or Constantinianism) is spent as a cultural force, and the culture we face is increasingly pluralistic. Traditional Christians are bewildered by the changes in the culture, and often become belligerent and militant, trying to reclaim the position of cultural influence and privilege the church previously enjoyed, without examining any of the cultural presuppositions that inform such a view. Christians should try either to turn the clock back, or at least keep it from going forward.

Mr. Moran in the linked article appears to fall into this category. I have no doubt but that he is a Christian gentleman of personal integrity and piety who has only the best of intentions. But I also think that the way Mr. Moran is going about his program is not only ineffective, but risks making him and those who are allied with him into cultural foils or worse.

Mr. Moran is particularly concerned about the Acts 29 network, a movement of church planters which is as thoroughly evangelical as Mr. Moran himself, but has some stylistic and cultural differences. In a later post I’ll talk about some of the variants in the “emerging” church, but for now will stick with the linked article.

Mr. Moran expresses concern that some of the people in a St. Louis church affiliated with the Acts 29 Network drink beer during an event sponsored by the church. The Journey Church, pastored by Darrin Patrick, holds a regular event called “Theology On Tap” at a local brew pub, where there is a talk on redemptive themes, often over mugs of beer. Other Acts 29 Churches hold showings of films with discussion afterwards where redemptive themes are brought up by facilitators. Some of these films are rated R.

Drinking beer and watching R-rated films are two of the specific things that Mr. Moran finds particularly troublesome. The Southern Baptist Convention, of which Mr. Moran is a part, has taken a position of total abstinence with regard to alcohol, and suggests that its members eschew watching films that are rated “R” or might otherwise expose Christians to worldly values.

One of the visionary thinkers who influenced me greatly was Bishop J.E. Lesslie Newbigin, a British Presbyterian (a Presbyterian Bishop? Yes, he was, in the diocese of the church he served in India while on the mission field, but that’s another story). Newbigin said wisely that Christian, and especially church leaders, must steer a careful course between syncretism on the one hand and sectarianism on the other. If we fear one more than the other, he said, we will surely fall into the one we fear least. I think that Mr. Moran may do well to heed Newbigin’s warning.

In Romans 14 Paul talks about stronger and weaker brothers and how the former should not give offense to the latter: the stronger brother must bend because the weaker brother can’t. I was reminded by one of my systematic theology teachers, Ligon Duncan, that sometimes the weaker brother must be rebuked when he thinks he is the stronger brother. Duncan talked about Dr. Edmund Clowney, who sometimes preached in Scotland, where the rural churches didn’t want to hear a preacher who wasn’t wearing a clerical collar. Dr. Clowney always made it a point to wear his jacket open and the most garish red tie in his collection when he preached in one of those churches, just for the purpose of bringing down one of their cultural idols.

I’ll close this post with the reminder to myself as well as my readers that we should always consider carefully whether we are serving the gospel or our own cultural idols.