More Than Music.

I’ll be leading a break-out session this weekend at Lutheran Church of Hope’s “More Than Music” Seminar. Grant Norsworthy, of Sonicflood fame, is the keynote speaker and will be addressing what it means to be a worshiper of Christ and how it invades all areas of our lives. Right up my alley.

I’ll be speaking on the emerging/postmodern church and the need to reconnect our modern-day church model with our ancient, Eastern roots. This is a hard road to navigate, as many people on both sides of the coin are passionate about the direction in which the church of the future is headed.

The following is a passage from the book, “Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism?” by James K.A. Smith. I will be using this in my talk and wanted to share it with you because it perfectly illustrates the tension that the 21st century church is in. We have mistaken a new way of doing church for being unfaithful to the charge of Jesus and the work of the 1st century church – it’s called primitivism:

“Primitivism retains the most minimal commitment to God’s action in history (in the life of Christ and usually in the first century of apostolic activity ((The fact that primitivists accept the shape of the biblical canon as determined several centuries later is a nasty little exception to this rule.))) and then seeks to make only this first-century ‘New Testament church’ normative for contemporary practice. This is usually articulate by a rigid distinction between Scriptures and tradition (the latter then usually castigated as ‘the traditions of men’ as opposed to the ‘God-given’ realities of Scripture). Such primitivism is this anticreedal and anticatholic, rejecting any sense that what was unfolded by the church between the first and the twenty-first centuries is at all normative for current faith and practice (the question of the canon’s formation being an interesting exception here). Ecumenical creeds and confessions – such as the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene Creed – that unite the church across time and around the globe are not “live” in primitivist worship practices, which enforce a sense of autonomy or even isolation, while at the same time claiming a direct connection to first-century apostolic practices.“

What about you? What news ways are you finding working in your church? Where do you see primitivism at work?