Is Our Worship Really Inclusive?

 Is Christian worship cultic or evangelistic? 

When I was growing up the going assumption in Methodist and then United Methodist churches was that every worship service should in some way prompt people to become followers of Jesus Christ. Every worship service ended in an altar call. But there was an assumption behind this: Everyone was a cultural Christian. They might be sinners, but they understood the language of imagery used in church. 

How did we get there? 

Let’s go back about 1700 years, to the time of the emperor Constantine. Christianity had emerged from the shadows to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Vast numbers of new Christians needed to be welcomed into the church. How did the church respond? It responded as it had for some decades, even centuries: it adopted familiar places and practices for its teaching and worship. It moved from house churches to public buildings.

Churches were built in the basilica form. It was a form familiar to every pagan Roman as a meeting hall. Church leaders wore contemporary secular fashion, albeit with the requirement that their garb be white and clean. As time passed this garb would include indications of rank and power. But even those indications of rank and power came from Roman culture. 

Outside the Roman cultural realm wandering evangelists sanctified local worship sites when they could before “traditional” churches came in tandem with the introduction of Roman culture. The unconverted pagan faced neither strange buildings nor odd clothing when they approached Christian worship. 

Now let’s fast forward to the 20th century. At least for Methodists the century opened on a movement whose worship places, practices, and garb were a commonplace to almost any American. Big city Methodist churches aped the religious styles of the urban elite (mostly Episcopal and Presbyterian) while small town churches were more likely to follow the pattern of their fellow revivalists among Baptists and the Church of Christ. Either way there was nothing strange about going to church unless you were a Protestant attending a Catholic mass, or visa versa.

My own grandfather (a West Texas circuit rider and college president) refused to wear any robe or vestment, regarding them as Romish and/or liberal. Worship was preaching, singing, and praying.  He preached in churches indistinguishable from any secular meeting hall and frequently used for the same. Fair enough; he understood the cowboys, ranchers, and small town business owners to whom he preached and whose children he would educate.

He also lived in changing times. His home town, Abilene, was becoming a city and at least the First Methodist Church was built to reflect that. The same thing was happening all over the US as Methodists became rich enough to move out of wood frame meeting halls to "real" churches. And that was okay too. The culture of the East Coast urban elites was moving west and south and the cowboys and ranchers found nothing strange about these new churches. 

But then, as a logical consequence of a Methodism increasingly dominated by suburban and middle class culture, there emerged liturgical renewal. Methodists, and then United Methodists, were drawn into an effort to create worship services to match our new buildings. We doubled down on the emerging middle class and its urban and suburban Christian culture. We wanted a tradition supposedly more sophisticated than camp meetings, revivals, and "five finger" worship. So we moved to the forefront of preserving the worship of the old Christendom even as the culture moved into a post-Christian age. 

At Perkins in 1977 we studied the Book of Common Prayer, wore clergy collars (my grandfather would have died), and either ditched our preaching robes for albs and cinctures, or pimped the robes by getting rid of the old Cokesbury stoles and buying ever-widening and more elaborately decorated stoles. Even as stole width threatened to exceed robe width (despite the expansion of many a waistline), colored robes became a thing. By the time I was ordained a clergy procession looked like a moving box of pastel chalks covered with fluttering streams of multi-colored wrapping paper. And it wasn't cheap. A decent robe was over $1,000 and stoles ran in the hundreds. Power and prestige were part of the image, as they had always been at Canterbury and Rome. 

Of course the familiar trays of communion cups disappeared (rejected as Victorian era ritual-cleanliness) and were replaced by ever grander (and increasingly hand thrown pottery) chalices and patens. I remember a notable worship service where the pastor could hardly lift the stoneware cup filled with a liter of grape juice, and was defeated trying to tear a loaf of bread the size of a small car tire. 

Of course there were protests. When I was a Perkins in the late 70’s Latino students objected that the ways of worship they were being taught had little relevance for and were unlikely to be tolerated by the congregations they served. African-American students made much the same protest. It wasn't worship for the poor, that's for sure. But these groups were marginalized as mere expressions of ethnic diversity. The main show was going to be cathedral worship with its elaborate vestments, banners, bells, and pipe organs.

Don't get me wrong. I loved it and still do. I loved being part of the processional when a massive organ sounded its voice to lead us in God of Abraham Praise. First come the acolytes with their black cassocks and white surplice (for an Anglican touch), then the choir in its robes, followed by the pastors in their even grander robes or albs, with stoles, to be seated behind the high altar and even higher pulpit.

In such a place the great hymns (not that old revival stuff of granddad's time) still bring tears to my eyes. I still sing in such a choir in a traditional sanctuary and service. And we even have achieved, smuggled in during Covid, that great goal of liturgical renewal: weekly communion. 

Don’t get me wrong. Liturgical renewal served good purposes: It broadened and deepened our spiritual formation by pulling us into a richer world of physical beauty and movement. It linked us to both our fellow Christians and our own past. But even as it was ecumenical and traditional it pulled us further away from our evolving American culture even as it pulled us further from our own tradition. And it pulled us much further away from other cultures and their norms. 

It turned us into a cult.

Some think that is good. I knew an old Anglican priest who said outright that he hoped people would find his sanctuary, with its odd furnishing, odder garments, incomprehensible liturgy, and odd smells, strange. He wanted them to know that they were entering an entirely different world from the one they left. I get that. 

But apparently others don’t, because every poll shows that there are fewer and fewer Americans that want to come to Sunday morning worship. And almost nobody wants to join our cult. 

It gets worse with Gen Z. 

It isn't that our worship uses old hymns (new one’s were being written), or old prayers (those can be renewed as well). It is that we have built a visual and spacial culture that excludes all who hadn’t been initiated into its mysteries. A 20th century UM sanctuary looks like no other building around. Even what were then contemporary designs were clearly something other than an ordinary place where humans met. Towers, spires, vaulted ceilings. Pews alone make them absurd, as do naves, chancels, organs, pulpits, lectures, and rails. These are things you never see outside a church and if you never go to church you never see them at all. Pastors in albs, robes, clergy collars, vestments - these are unknown out on the street. Given what we read in the media the clergy collar is the mark of likely grifter or sexual abuser who can't be trusted.

In short - the visual form of the classical church and everything that happens inside is alien to our culture. And that is a problem, because recent surveys show that Gen Z just finds churches, and their rituals and dress, offputting. They are reluctant to come in because they don’t know what to expect, and if they come in what they see seems strange. It is the exact opposite of the reason our traditional churches and vestments were chosen in the first place. 1700 years ago churches and pastors were normal people wearing normal clothing. Now they are bizarre and incomprehensible.

Which was a good reason to turn to so-called contemporary worship. Walk into one of these new worship spaces and it is all familiar. A theater with a stage, leaders dressed in street cloths, a band, a media show on big screens. Even concessions out in the foyer! Whether I’m 15 or 65 I’m perfectly at home. And instead of a stilted liturgy resembling nothing I’ve ever seen or heard I get a production much like a late night TV show or pop concert. Again, totally familiar. And thus much more likely to become the home of a homeless pagan seeking some good news. (Of course its not my cup of tea, since I'm at home with so-called "traditional worship." But here is the important thing. I'm not that important. It is the people who need to hear the gospel that are important.)

 

Contemporary worship, thoroughly inculturated in the American context, has its problems and they are big problems. Too much "contemporary" worship is already losing touch with the culture - not least through using music that seems an endless homage to 1980's era rock ballads. Culture changes and we will need to go a step further if worship is to be both inclusive and evangelistic. 

Because the emerging contemporary generation also lives in a digital world, where multiple channels of engagement are normal. But further, Gen Z is as at home in a virtual game world as the so-called real world. They are used to finding the answers to life’s most persistent question by listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos, reading blogs, or just consulting pastor Google. How can the space where we worship and the things we do in worship look normal to them?

 

That depends on whether it is normal to us. So it is time for both clergy and those who teach them to take on a missionary spirit; to immerse ourselves in the emerging cultures in which Christian ministry must take place. 

In 1985 I moved to a different country and learned a different language in order to serve the mission of the Church of Jesus Christ. In 1997 I moved again and learned another language. So it is in ministry. Today I am not a digital native. Nobody my age (nearly 67) is. But the call to mission does not change.  If we are going to serve Christ in mission in this place and time we need to move from being digital tourists and commit to being digital residents. Only by living in the land of Gen Z are we going to learn their language and begin to create worship spaces where they feel safe, welcome, and at home.