Our “progressive” culture avoids any return to the past. Questions and dialogue about traditions — or beginnings — are not generally welcomed. This is arrogant… and deadly.
Until we go back to or re-visit things of the past, how will we know what works and what doesn’t? Why we are where we are? Until we re-visit our beginnings — either as human beings or as people with a particular worldview or ideology — how will we know who we are, or upon what we stand, or why? If I see that my culture is in decay, can I really be of help to family, neighbors, or community if I don’t know why I believe what I say I believe or do what I do? Many of us speak of what is “traditional” (in worship, marriage, morality, etc.), but if we can’t explain it, how can we defend it when someone wants to tamper with it?
For this reason, I am extremely grateful to my pastor. Some people see him as “too catholic” or “inflexible.” Some ask, “Why do we have to sing old hymns?” Or, “Why do we have to use a liturgy?” Or, “Why do we have to learn creeds or attach ourselves to the doctrine of a bunch of dead Europeans?” Some wish he would just “lighten up” and “get with the movement of our day.” Oh, how thankful our little flock should be that our shepherd resists the “movement of our day” in order to teach us why Christian Lutherans believe what they believe and do what they do.
My pastor has been gifted with a pair of worldview glasses that help him contrast God’s Word with the ways of the world. My congregation is blessed — whether it knows it or not — because our pastor is not afraid to return to the past.
In his book, A Free People’s Suicide,” Oz Guinness writes,
A return can be progressive, not reactionary. Each movement in its own way best goes forward by first going back.”
What does Guinness mean? National, church, or even family renewal happens by going back to its beginnings. To its reasons for being in the first place. Martin Luther knew this. The Puritans knew this. Thomas Jefferson knew this. History, writes Guinness, “shows that when it comes to ideas, it is in fact possible to turn back the clock. Two of the most progressive movements in Western history — the Renaissance and the Reformation — were both the result of a return to the past, though in very different ways and with very different outcomes.”
It is, in fact, a law of physics that things are preserved from destruction when brought back to their first principles. Guinness calls this innovative thinking “outside the box” because it is “back to basics and not a mindless espousal of the present or a breathless chase after some purported future.” Guinness states,
The most creative re-makings are always through the most faithful re-discoveries.”
I am a Biblical Christian of the Lutheran bent living in a hurting world. For the sake of my grandchildren, I need to help re-build, in church or society, by re-discovering things of the past. There is no embarrassment or intellectual shame in this endeavor.
So, thank you my dear pastor, for taking me back so that I might better move forward. Thank you for helping me re-make what is good and right and true by re-discovering who I am. Upon what I stand. And why.
Ezerwoman's Blog 
The Church Has Failed the Culture
Posted in Commentaries of others, Culture Shifts, Faith & Practice, Life issues, Parenting & Education, tagged " homosexuality, Biblical worldview, Christianity, church, environment, hymns, Jesus Christ, judgment, millennials, religion, sexuality, sin, social justice, the Cross, worship on August 8, 2013| Leave a Comment »
Recently, the Presbyterian Church (USA) dropped the hugely popular hymn, “In Christ Alone,” from its hymnal after its authors, Keith Getty and Stuart Townend, refused to omit a reference to Jesus satisfying the wrath of God.
In a powerful response over at First Things, which we’ll link to at BreakPoint.org, Colson Center chairman Timothy George quotes Richard Niebuhr who, back in the 1930s, described this kind of revisionist Protestantism as a religion in which “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”
The response from the PCUSA, that their problem was not with God’s wrath but with the idea that Christ’s death satisfied God’s wrath, doesn’t change the fundamental problem of what George calls “squishy” theology. Theology is supposed to be true, not palatable.
Along these lines, maybe you’ve seen the recent viral opinion piece on CNN by
my friend, Christian blogger and author Rachel Held Evans. In it, Evans offers her answers to the truly important question, “why are millennials leaving the Church?”
To counter the exodus of young people from American churches, Evans says it’s time to own up to our shortcomings and give millennials what they really want—not a change in style but a change in substance. The answer to attracting millennials, she writes, is NOT “hipper worship bands” or handing out “lattés,” but actually helping them find Jesus.
Amen. I couldn’t agree more.
Then she goes on, “[the Church is] too political, old-fashioned, unconcerned with social justice and hostile to [LGBT] people.” Well, okay—anytime political programs co-opt our faith, or we ignore the needy and fail to love those with whom we disagree, we do the Gospel of Christ great harm.
But when she writes that attracting millennials to Jesus involves “an end to the culture wars,” “a truce between science and faith,” being less “exclusive” with less emphasis on sex, without “predetermined answers” to life’s questions, now I want to ask–are we still talking about the Jesus of biblical Christianity?
The attempt to re-make Jesus to be more palatable to modern scientific and especially sexual sensibilities has been tried before. In fact, it’s the reason Niebuhr said that brilliant line that I quoted earlier.
He watched as the redefining “Jesus Project” gave us mainline Protestantism, which promotes virtually everything on Evans’ list for millennials. The acceptance of homosexuality, a passion for the environment, prioritizing so-called “social justice” over transformational truth are all embodied in denominations like the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA).
But religious millennials aren’t flocking to mainline Protestant congregations. Mainline churches as a whole have suffered withering declines in the last few decades—especially among the young. What gives?
Well, in an another essay which appeared in First Things over twenty years ago, a trio of Christian researchers offered their theory on what’s behind the long, slow hemorrhage of mainline Protestant churches:
“In our study,” they wrote, “the single best predictor of church participation turned out
to be belief—orthodox Christian belief, and especially the teaching that a person can be saved only through Jesus Christ.” This, said the researchers, was not (and I add, is still not) a teaching of mainline Protestantism. As a dwindling denomination rejects a hymn which proclaims salvation “in Christ alone,” this research sounds prophetic.
Evans is right that evangelical Christianity is responsible in many ways for the exodus of millennials. But ditching the Church’s unpalatable “old-fashioned” beliefs to become more “relevant” to the young won’t bring them back.
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