Table of Contents | 14. What is church as "a community of memory?"
In light of the questions about the long-term value of the "seeker church" movement and the "contemporary worship" phenomenon, I wonder why denominational leaders keep pushing this perspective. There is some data, however limited and modest, that this "movement" has crested and is receding. In his musings in Context for April 1, 2003, Martin E. Marty, retired professor of church history at the University of Chicago, writes about an interview with Yale professor Nicholas Wolterstorff in Perspectives. In a seminar at Calvin College two young practicing architects, working mainly in church architecture, said "that what they now see in their practice is a new type of church member emerging, people who don't want to go back to old churches but also want nothing to do with gigantic seeker-type churches. They want intimacy; any group over 400 is too big. These two architects have already been designing buildings for these new types. I must say it makes me feel enormously old -- as if I was just learning to play vinyl LPs and now these people are off into goodness knows what! So I don't know what's happening; the entertainment/seeker church thing may be passe. Maybe worries about such churches are worries about what's on the way out." That is a worry I would welcome! It seems to me, based on the reflections of Marty, that there is something wrong in departing from the ancient Christian tradition of assembling on the Lord's Day and from much of that which keeps one connected to history. Maybe my major objection, along with Wolterstorff, is that "these seeker-type churches lack Christian memory. From my perspective, much of the new music is awful. But not all of it. Some of it has legitimacy, even though it's not to my taste. So, what's disturbing isn't the music but the Christian amnesia, the parochialism, the sense that we have to forget all that our forebears did. I think that's ultimately the worst part." Marty says more. In Context, November 15, 2003, he reports, "To regain a moral footing in contemporary life, we must dig deeper than information and knowledge to the traditions that carry virtue from generation to generation. We will have to invest as much time and energy in the habits of our hearts as we do in our high-tech practices. Otherwise we will lose track of the crucial links to the past that can illuminate the path to goodness." Staying connected with the tradition understood dynamically, not literally, is crucial. In The Heart of Christianity Marcus Borg echoes this view. "We need a path. We are lost without one. Community and tradition articulate, embody and nurture a path...a path of reconnection and transformation in this life." He states that "one can be in relationship with God apart from participation in community and tradition" yet "community and tradition matter." They are essential because they mediate and nourish the relationship. Religious community and tradition put us in touch with the wisdom and beauty of the past. Not only does it contain wisdom, but it can deliver us from the provinciality of the present, our limited way of seeing that we seldom recognize as a form of blindness. There is much to be said for being part of a tradition centuries old rather than one made up yesterday....It is important to be part of a tradition and to live more deeply into the life that it mediates." Herman Melville has the preacher in his famous sermon in Moby Dick say, "Shipmates, God has laid but one hand upon you; both his hands press upon me." That may be beautiful literature but it is terrible theology. The truth is that both of God's hands press upon those who are the people of God called "church." Living by the notion that God's hands are pressed on all of us is one way to keep connected to the "saving tradition." |