Culturally
Relevant Worship
The Contemporary Worship Movement is one more facet of God's work of reaching people. It uses the styles and language of secular people in order to communicate the truth of the gospel with them. To say it another way, contemporary worship seeks to make worship culturally relevant. Like the generations of believers before them, those using contemporary forms of worship want to translate the gospel in such a way that people today can understand it and be transformed by it.
Contemporary worship attempts to remove some of the religious barriers that keep people from church. For instance, secular people are unfamiliar with our religious language (e.g., abstract concepts such as redemption, justification, grace, absolution, and so on). They don't know about our religious traditions (the Kyrie, the use of robes and other religious garments, the creeds, and so on). The don't understand many of our hymns ("I raise my Ebeneezer!" Pardon me? "There is a balm in Gilead." A what in where?). Although that language, those traditions, and our hymns provide stability and meaning for believers raised within the culture, they represent barriers to secular people - barriers that secular people must first overcome before they can understand the unmerited grace offered in the Savior. Usually, those barriers prove too formidable, and they give up.
We no longer expect people to learn Hebrew before they can read the Bible. We don't tell them they have to understand Greek before they can know God. We don't even ask them to try and figure out the gospel by reading the King James Version: "O ye Corinthians, our mouth is open unto you, our heart is enlarged. Ye are not straitened in us, but ye are straitened in your own bowels. Now for a recompense in the same (I speak as unto my children), be ye also enlarged" (2 Cor. 6:11-13). Huh? Enlarged bowels? Instead, we remove those barriers by making the Bible understandable and accessible by retranslating it into common English usage. We do the same with works written by the great leaders of Christianity. For example, we don't insist that non-German-speaking people have to understand German before they can enjoy the teachings of Martin Luther. Rather, we translate his works into the language of the people.
Contemporary worship simply strives to do the same thing - to make the gospel accessible to a lost, broken, and hurting world. European music and forms of worship from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries have great value for those raised with it. Such successful music persisted for four hundred years. But secular people, steeped in American pop culture and music, find sixteenth- to eighteenth-century European music and styles irrelevant, out of date and unintelligible.
God is using the contemporary worship movement to capture the hearts of secular people all across North America and even the world. The question is, Can believers use the stuff of culture without compromising the message? Is it even appropriate? For the answer, look to Jesus: "We are people of flesh and blood. That is why Jesus became one of us" (Heb. 2:14 CEV).
From Contemporary Worship, copr. 1997 by Abingdon Press.
Tim Wright is the executive pastor of Community Church of Joy, an Evangelical Luthern Church in America congregation in Glendale, Arizona.
Their website is located at http://www.joyonline.org
