Friday, May 14, 2010

The Emergent Church: Substituting Style for Substance

We have turned our church worship services into youth rallies. But even so, that suffices only to make the Emergent types mock us as not "cool" enough.

When is it going to dawn on us that there is no endpoint to the relentless accommodation of church architecture, music styles, order of worship, type of preaching etc. to the sloppy, middle class, youth culture-dominated mores of the modern West.

Watch this. It is enough to make you either laugh or cry.

2 comments:

Michael DeFazio said...

This is definitely hilarious! But most churches that wear the label emerging would be equally deplored, though for different reasons. The emerging churches have lots to critique, no doubt, but this doesn't really apply as much to them as to those of us who are still growing out of the church growth movement. I say this from within a church that this video does rightly mock, and our whole staff has laughed at ourselves after watching it, which is probably a good step for us!

Craig Carter said...

Michael,
The liturgy is just as fixed as the Latin Mass and about 100 times less theologically profound. Maybe the way forward is to reflect theologically on the meaning of the liturgy in the light of the history of Christian worship and work back to the tradition. I wonder what that would look like in your context.