Captain Capitalism has left the church and now lives with the fruits of nihilism: a clear minded despair and misanthropy moderated by the use of cheap liquor. But he is correct about the church: in it’s attempts to be relevant and caring it has become drippy. Grerp commented at his site wisely, and it is worth repeating in full
There were very few guys in my youth group by the time I was a senior in 1988-89, which predates his timeline a little.
Both of the women youth pastors I’ve known and worked with were hot messes – up and down (mostly down), emotional, food bingeing, perpetually single.
The music in Protestant churches has really gone downhill too. Now it’s all 7/11 choruses (the same seven words sung eleven times). Hands in the air, accompanied by electric piano or (shudder) drums.
The old hymns frequently had “battle” language – A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, Lead On, O King Eternal, Onward, Christian Soldiers, Battle Hymn of the Republic, Lift High the Cross. The Catholic church I attend now is about 50% men, and not just old men either. We don’t have so many teens, but we’ve got quite a few Gen Xers, and I think it’s the liturgy. That traditional man-in-the-pulpit, alter boys, candles, incense, stained glass thing seems to appeal to men. We also have GREAT music – classical compositions sung and played, pipe organ music, occasional Gregorian chant. The thing about youth group is that girls will go even if it gets pretty drippy, but they lose enthusiasm without the boys too. It’s not just the boys who don’t respond well to female-led Churchianity.
I think it is the liturgy as well. The old Divines knew what they were doing: most of the Puritians and Presbyterians who wrote the Book of Common Prayer in one generation and the Westminster confession with the associated book of order in the next were ministering to their local congregation, good theologians, and poets. They read aloud what they wrote to make sure it was clear, consistent and correct. But liturgy alone will not save us. Consider this, from an excellent article called 5 Reasons why the emergent church is receding by Trevin Wax
Unfortunately, some Emerging Churches look like the continuation of the Seeker movement, even as they decry the Seeker-focused mindset. Incense, candles, icons. These aspects of worship might be helpful for ministry to postmodernists somewhere. They would look silly in rural Tennessee. Contextualization does not always look the same, something the Emerging Church conversation affirms in theory, but often ignores in practice.
Now that the Emerging Church is becoming known a “style of worship” or a “way of doing church for young people,” the movement has moved out of the realm of contextualization and has joined the evangelical faddishness it once protested.
Think of Jesus Movement of the 1970?s. Replace Vietnam with Iraq, beards with goatees, and contemporary music with liturgy.
Now Jesus was interested in telling the truth. Let’s recall for a second the context here. He had fed thousands — probably around four thousand families — miraculously. Now people wanted to (a) see a sign and (b) be fed by him forever. But he is talking about what he has to do to save the world.
He is using their metaphor — feed us as Moses did Manna in the desert — but he is looking to the day when he will die for us all. For he has stood in our place and taken our punishment. And this was seen as anathema. People hated this teaching. People fell away. In droves. But Jesus continued to teach it.
41Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” 42They were saying, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” 43Jesus answered them, “Do not complain among yourselves. 44No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. 45It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. 46Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. 47Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48I am the bread of life. 49Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
One of the simple rules you learn in IT is “Don’t do it again”. If you have killed your OS by forgetting the dot when removing logs from the root account: reinstall, restore and you have learnt what not to do. Instead to it the correct way. In the same way… one of the things we do at work is say at times that psychotherapy is contraindicated. The patient has had years of therapy, but does not know how to cope with stress: teach coping skills — relaxation, mindfulness, and scheduling activity and exercise — then, one the person can cope with day to day life well reconsider looking at their deep hurts.
It is fairly clear that we have, across many denominations (because I am aware, for example, of Catholics who sing what Grerp called 7/11 choruses and Presbyterians who have choirs singing Chant) moved towards being popular with our audience. We have let women seek promotion and status: and they have removed “in the name of non violence” all songs and teaching about spiritual warfare, courage and duty.
And we wonder why the only men left are wimps. We need to leave the faddish behind and look at what we used to do. The older missionaries knew this as they contextualized worship for all peoples — from Xhosa to Korea to Tonga — but kept the doctrines and practices of the church intact.
The good news is they wrote what they did. And there is no copyright on this stuff.
@A voice from the wilderness
I really liked what you said. It reminded me of the following from a post I recently read (NB I am not necessarily endorsing the entire post this snippet came from):
“American churches remind me of those ads for Bally’s health clubs. You know the ones — they show attractive people with perfectly sculpted bodies lifting weights, running on treadmills and dancing or kick-boxing energetically in perfectly choreographed aerobics classes.
The message those ads intend, I think, is that if you were to join Bally’s, then you could look like this. You, too, could soon become an attractive person with a perfectly sculpted body, the ads suggest. (Although it’s not clear to me how any amount of disciplined exercise would also produce the perfect white teeth, exquisite bone structure and unblemished skin that also characterizes all the beautiful model-atheletes in those ads.)
The problem is that those ads also send another message. They tell us that Bally’s is a place for people who look like this. And what that also tells us is that Bally’s is not a place for people who do not look like this.
Bally’s is thus advertising itself as a health club for people who do not need a health club. Want to get healthier? Don’t go to Bally’s. If you’re not already in perfect shape, then you don’t belong there.
Anyone who needs to go there won’t be welcome.
That’s also the message that many American churches are sending out. We try to convey the message that we’re Good People and that this is what church is and what church is for — a gathering of Good People who’ve got it all figured out. The result is that we come across just like those Bally’s ads. We wind up unwittingly suggesting that if you’re not already a Good Person and you don’t already have it all figured out, then you don’t belong here — that sinners aren’t welcome in the body of sinners.
That’s backwards. Being a sinner is actually the only prerequisite for coming to church.” (http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/01/25/mark-driscoll-is-a-wee-little-man/)
@grerp
I loved your comment on repetitive songs:
“You’ll want to stab yourself in the throat if you sing more than one refrain of ‘One Bread, One Body.’ ”
I know some people who have come to feel the same way about the song “Yes Lord, Yes Lord, Yes, Yes, Yes!”.
The thing about liturgy, just to respond here instead of in the thread of a few days ago, is that it has to be something of “integrity”. In the Catholic/Orthodox world, there are actually many liturgical “rites” (by which is meant liturgical families, rather than specific rituals) of which the Roman Rite and the Byzantine Rite are only the two largest. There are quite a few others, such as the Coptic and Ethopian, the Armenian, the Jacobite Syrian, and so on. There also used to be other rites in the West as well, such as the Sarumite and the Gallican.
In the context of non-Catholic and non-Orthodox communities, it seems to me that what some seem to be striving for is some greater degree of liturgical integrity similar to what one sees in the “rites” of the high liturgical churches. That doesn’t mean it has to look the same as the Byzantine or the Roman Rite. Conceptually, there could, for example, be a “Reformed Rite” that would encompass an integral, historical Reformed liturgical tradition — rather than the ad hoc liturgies that tend to be present in a lot of the more popular non-denominational Protestant communities (at least here in the US). Ad hoc is “relevant” at the expense of “integrity”. Among the Protestants, it would seem that the Reformed would have the best shot at trying to integrate this kind of integrity into a Reformed Rite (would have said the Anglicans a century ago, but their integrity level has fallen for various reasons, really) that could solve many of the issues the Emerging Church seems to want to address.
Agree. There is a rite for the Reformed, and it is called the Book of Order. However, most Protestant Churches in NZ (and I think the USA) either don’t know about it or choose not to use it.
Wow, thanks for the shout out, Chris. I don’t go to a traditional Latin mass; I only wish I did. Our church has a very traditional liturgy (it’s a minor basilica), and our new priest has made an effort to include young men as alter servers. If you do not get boys as alter servers, you will not have nearly as many priestly vocations, as that is where many of them discover a passion for the church. If you let girls serve, boys will lose interest in fulfilling that role – which is why alter servers should be boys, not girls; because you want priests and not priestesses.
I was raised Protestant and converted to Catholicism, so I know a bit about how various evangelical churches are run. I should have been clear, though, in my original post: the music at most modern Catholic churches is execrable. Real hippie stuff and dischordant to boot. You’ll want to stab yourself in the throat if you sing more than one refrain of “One Bread, One Body.”
I agree that liturgy is not everything, but if you have a beautiful liturgy, it makes your heart closer to God.
Thanks, and I would agree with you, even though I’m Reformed about the liturgy, and the standard of music.
The man from the wilderness has a point. What you need to do is find a church where you do not have to pretend. It will not look nice, it will not necessarily have bach cantatas or a professional music programme, and it certainly will not have twenty different ministries, but you are allowed to struggle there.
Because anyone who says they are perfect is lying.
My problem isn’t with Christianity, but with how it is practiced. Probably the last place I want to be is at church.
Note – my experience applies to evangelical Protestant churches, not Catholic.
We “play church”. Yes, everybody must present themselves as their best, behind masks than show blissful happiness and the absence of struggle. After all, we’re good Christians and must keep that appearance of goodness.
Authenticity, realism, openness, intimacy and grace are thus lost. The church and Christianity as practiced becomes little more than a social club.
This is another dimension of the “churchian emergent murk”.
I am not willing to wear a mask and be a pretender for that is a denial of who I am, but more so it’s a denial of God’s working within my life.
I am a quiet struggler who wrestles daily with being the man God wants me to be. I need God’s grace daily and occasional support from a fellowship of fellow strugglers, but the church doesn’t provide that. Trite and shallow “easy answers” don’t cut it. Application and relevancy does. I have found most churches to be destructive rather than supportive.
I wish it weren’t so, but I have given up on church… I have not given up on Christianity, nor will I.
Sounds as if Grerp assists at a Traditional Latin Mass. Anyhow, I’m a Traddie RC and will say this – the precise rubrics of the Latin Mass for the priest and altar boys is masculine to the core – think the precision of the military and soldiers in formations.
The modern day Novus Ordo RC Mass might be a mixture, but it’s roots are clearly in the 60′s. For me, I’d rather worship in a way that’s “out of date” by 500 years – that’s cool, than by 50 years – which is ridiculous.