I was preaching at one such church a few years back. I was 44 at the time. The church, which is one of the largest boomer churches in America, had an average age of 10 or 15 years older than me. Yet they believed themselves to be cutting-edge.
They thought they were effectively ministering, but they had fallen in love with the way they did church more than the people in their current context.
The Trap of Tradition
When we hold to our traditions, we value our cultural expressions of the past more than the people God has sent us to in the present.
When churches fall into such a trap, it creates a self-affirming value system that upholds their particular methodology and subculture. When plans are made within the church, they look back to what is meaningful to them from the past.
For example, when deciding what songs to sing in worship, they return to the songs that have been formative or meaningful and repeat them. This perpetuates the tradition and locks the church into that particular culture and era.
As a general principle, churches that are most effective in one paradigm often have the most difficulty moving into a new one. The reason is they “know what works” and refuse to see the need for change.
Business Examples
In the business world, IBM, Xerox, Kodak and many others learned this principle the hard way. There are myriad companies, once giants in industry, which either disappeared completely or are shells of what they once were because they did not see the need for change.
In similar fashion, many of our churches stand as visible reminders that we’ve valued our subcultures more than the people to whom we’ve been sent, and have refused to change.
Culture is always changing. Always.
So, if we are going to continue to communicate the message of the gospel meaningfully, our churches must change, as well. If it feels like you are stepping in a time machine to worship with your church, and that’s not because of your (big-T) Tradition, but rather because you are trapped in traditionalism, it’s time to change. You’re disconnected from the culture around you, which isn’t in the ‘50’s, ‘70s or the 1700s any longer.
A contextualized church feels like you’re still in the same culture in which it is planted, but the values and the focus are radically different. Churches should be biblically faithful, expressing the unchanging gospel in all we do and representing the character of God’s kingdom.
We must do this in culturally relevant ways; that is, in ways that make sense to the culture around us.
While doing so, however, we reject the sin around us, living counter to the culture. We are to be biblically faithful, culturally relevant, countercultural communities that reflect God’s kingdom for his glory among the people around us at all times.
That should be our tradition.
Ed Stetzer holds the Billy Graham distinguished chair of church, mission and evangelism at Wheaton College and the Wheaton Grad School, where he also oversees the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism.