Acting Worship (Pt. 2)

Worship “Wars?”

We usually mean by “worship” something like “the practice of expressing our individual and communal adoration of God through the arts, particularly song.” This way of thinking about our Sabbath gatherings is fairly new in the scope of Christian history, but hopefully this discussion of where we find ourselves will encourage us to take a look at where we come from. Of course, it is okay if that’s a different discussion for a different day.

Worship has been becoming a problem for us as evangelicals for a long time now. If you know the phrase “worship wars,” then you probably already know how we are divided over this, often by generation. We’ve, all of us, probably identified with one side of the divide or the other. Usually, we account for the division by pointing to how the “Traditional” and the “Contemporary” are in conflict.

Of course, this distinction can be found under any number of different names, and the irony of evangelical culture is that even what we label “contemporary” is very rarely all that contemporary. The same goes for our use of “traditional,” most of the time.

I want to offer hope that this conflict is escapable. It is escapable precisely because there doesn’t need to be a conflict. The division we see and feel isn’t a necessary one. A philosopher might say it is a “false dichotomy.” A philosopher also might say that the Traditional and the Contemporary are “distinct but not separable.” Let’s start by distinguishing the two and we can get to how they can’t really be separated later.