Absurd church signs and the sad condition of Evangelicalism.

I expect that most readers will agree with me that the messages that many churches put on the sign outside the building are petty awful. Wise churches and clergy simply use the sign to announce service times, but some cannot refrain from adding what they think are pithy sayings. Instead of pithy though, they can usually be better described as inane. One can find websites devoted to such ridiculous church signs.

I recently saw one that read: “Come inside for a fresh & new message.” Christianity has a word for fresh & new messages, and that word is “heresy”. Of course, these people very well might not be teaching heresy. Though heresy does seem to be popular in a lot of churches these days. More likely they are following the ideas championed by the Emerging Church movement. It seems to be a fundamental tenet of the Emerging Church movement that the way things have been done in the past is bad simply because it is the way things have been done in the past. The past is ipso facto bad in the minds of the leaders of the Emerging Church.

 

Now I’ll grant you that there is some merely cultural stuff that churches mix in with tradition that could be safely be left off. Yet still the Emerging Church’s wholesale contempt for the past neglects what the church has always understood as a catholic consensus, that Holy Tradition is the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking in the life of the church. To be fair to them though, it’s not usually the catholic consensus that the Emerging Church leaders are trashing. More often it’s the Protestant consensus.

For a long time, evangelical Protestantism seemed to have become stuck in a mindset that was formed in the nineteenth Century. When Evangelicals talked about “that old-time religion”, that’s more often than not what they had in mind. They were not talking about incense and icons of the historic church. More often their vision of “old time religion” involved tent revivals and admonitions against imbibing alcohol. This was the kind of church that my parents raised me in.

Today though, contemporary worship schemes are constantly being foisted upon Evangelicals by appeals, not to tradition, or even really to the Bible, but mostly to a business model for “church growth“. If it’s what the customer wants, then we‘ll change what we have to, to get more people into the building. Willow Creek Community Church, near Chicago, a flagship for the church growth model, even decided to remove the cross from inside their building because some people found it offense.

The alteration of their worship could perhaps be counted as the greatest attack on the orthodoxy of Evangelicals. The feminization of the clergy in Evangelical churches got its start in the feminization of the worship in Evangelical churches. After that a whole host of assumptions and practices followed in its wake. Have you ever noticed the prevalence of the “Jesus is my boyfriend” praise songs that have replaced hymns in so many evangelical churches these days?

From a more catholic point of view, the undoing of the nineteenth century mindset of the evangelicals would be a positive thing if it led them to reexamine their assumptions about what “old-time religion” actually is. If it led them to become more open too and understanding of Tradition. What is actually happening though is that the underlying orthodoxy that was formerly understood by Evangelicals has severely eroded. This erosion is moving toward a point where any commonality with the catholic consensus of the church will become more and more slight.

Lent is a good time to think about things such as this. Because Lent is not about anything like a “fresh & new message.” It is about reminding ourselves again of the same message that the church catholic has been proclaiming for the better part of two millennia. It is a message as old as is fallen human nature. Lent is not contemporary. It is not a message about, “God’s Five Principles of Business Success.” Instead it is about acknowledging our wretched sinfulness, our neglect of true repentance, our forgetfulness of God. These are things that contemporary culture, and the contemporary worship that springs from it, not only neglects to recognize, but from which its very forms effectively keep people distracted.

The search for something new and different is function of our culture’s sickness. It is leading astray many evangelicals. Tradition is regarded as stale and antiquated. Wrong simply because it is old. This attitude is though, a sign of blindness. The practices that the historic church witnesses to be our spiritual cure, seems to our jaded eyes to be more tedious and troublesome than it is worth. It is just so much easier and simpler to ignore the witness of the historic church, pretend we have no need of a cure, and to instead spend our time searching for “fresh & new” messages.

We are, however, making an enormous mistake if we ever regard the ancient cure of souls, for something stale and passé. Innovators, seekers after novelty, may make this choice. But as for me, I’ll pass on the “fresh & new” and instead keep to the stale old Tradition