Church for a changing culture: an introduction to alternative worship

3: Culture shock

For all its outward opposition, the Church was drawn more deeply into modernity than it realised.

Many of its traits predisposed it. Its dualism inherited from the Greeks led it to raise up the rational mind as the highest guide to spirituality and behaviour. Its belief in the centrality of the Word of God - Jesus - and the words of God - the Bible - led into a belief in words as the only valid form for knowledge. Its sense of history moving inevitably towards fulfilment in the Kingdom led it to import ideas of progress and the next big thing into its spiritual life. And modernity offered the Church the promise of complete control - that if beliefs and behavours could be shown to be objectively correct, they could compel obedience.

The sensuality and mysticism of the new culture took it by surprise. And the new culture could not see that the Church held anything it needed.

In identifying Christianity with modernity, the Church initially identified postmodernity with anti-Christianity. The sensuality of the new culture seemed an affront to Christian values and reverences, even in faithful forms; loud worship music, dancing and freely expressed emotions. It took a while for approved and domesticated versions of these things to be negotiated. But in a period of continual innovation in forms of cultural expression, taking many years to accept one or two new forms disconnected the Church from the culture around it. Before it had even made limited concessions, twice as much was required of it.

Faced with church forms that are divorced from the surrounding world, we have to choose.

Many believers feel obliged to accept a compartmented life, and get used to leaving their normal tastes and thought patterns at the door as they enter the church building. Some can only deal with the contradictions by leaving the Church altogether - others leave the outside world to live in a Christian subculture. It's sad that church, which should be a place of wholeness, can lead to split personality for its adherents.

A faith whose forms of expression don't connect with the wider culture is in danger of becoming implausible even to those who thought they believed.

In many places Alternative Worship is a move born out of sheer frustration on the part of adult believers that they cannot bring their own culture into church. The largely 'amateur' nature of the movement is a side-effect of this, as people take church into their own hands.