On Relevance, Part 3: Aging Hipsters and Cultural Racists

Our culture has largely accepted the notion that form and content are not only distinguishable, but are largely unrelated. For this reason there has been a widespread tendency on the part of ministers in historical denominations to attempt to cloak their churches’ worship in more modern and youthful attire. If we grant the major premise that our historic, confessional theology can be communicated in whatever forms we happen to prefer, the conclusion not only follows, but to some degree demands the makeover of our worship to accommodate our up-to-date culture. But as is often the case with parents who desperately desire to appear “hip” to their teenage children, dressing Reformed theology in contemporary garb can be as silly as a fifty year-old man sporting a brand new earring and salon tan—he appears awkward and uncomfortable, while his kids roll their eyes and see right through the facade.

To quote Dr. Evil (who didn't spend six years in evil medical school to be called Mister), "There's nothing more pathetic than an aging hipster."

Moreover, the attempt to make Reformed worship more accessible to contemporary culture betrays an unspoken assumption that is naïve at best and racist at worst. With the possible exception of the towns portrayed in 1950’s sitcoms like Leave It To Beaver, there exists no city in the United States where one monolithic culture is represented. For example, in the Seattle area there is a seemingly endless diversity of races, people groups, and cultures, all with their own tastes in music and nuances of language. To follow the example of many Seattle churches and simply target the culture of the artist (white, bohemian, unconventional) is to ignore—even exclude—both the conservative middle-age Republican and the inner city black liberal youth. To rewrite the melody to "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" may be a breath of fresh air to “twentysomethings” who grew up listening to New Kids on the Block, but it will ostracize those elderly saints who learned the hymn from their parents, who learned it from their parents. We freely grant the point that no church’s worship—the Reformers’ included—completely escapes the trappings and styles of its own contextual setting, but that is a far cry from allowing this setting to govern the worship of the living God that we offer up each Lord’s day. Such blatant iconoclasm and a religion that is supposed to be covenantal and multigenerational are strange bedfellows indeed.

What ought to be done, therefore, is to engage in the hard work of determining what worship is before we seek to assign it a particular style, be it contemporary or traditional. If our understanding of worship is inherently flawed then it matters little whether we dress our error in new clothes or old, for it is still erroneous.

Worship is, at its very core, the meeting of the covenant God with his covenant people. This re-enacting of the divine drama is to be characterized by both reverence and awe, and by joy and celebration. Whatever forms that tend to compromise this are to be rejected, be they old or new. Further, as a confessing covenant community whose culture has come to include such hymns as Luther’s most widely loved and recognized work, we have an obligation to sing it and to teach our children to sing it as well. The worship tradition that has been handed down to us is not to be preferred merely because it is old, for it has not always been so. If it is to enjoy preference in the present day, this is due to its faithfulness to the Scripture and to its capturing of the beauty and glory of divine redemption. If the forms seem foreign, that is because our religion is foreign. The answer is not to domesticate our faith or de-fang our worship, but to learn it and learn to love it. If there are words that we don’t understand, we must endeavor to come to understand them. If there are hymns that sound complicated to our ears that have been catechized by “Top 40” radio then we must retune them, even if but once a week, so that we can join in singing the same praises that our grandfathers and grandmothers in the faith sang long ago.

In short, Christianity has its own language and culture, and though these can never be utterly divorced from their contemporary setting, this does not change the fact that they are all inclusive; they just take a little getting used to. After all, if I have somehow picked up what “second and eight” means even though I don’t like football, it is surely not too much to ask that Christ’s people—who like Christianity—learn the meaning of “justification.”