Sunday morning, Kristine and I went to the baptism of a nephew. It was the first time I had seen one performed by full immersion, and the service was unusual to me in a number of ways.
It wasn't held in a church, but at a farm around a small pond. My sister in law's church (a United Brethren congregation) held its service out there for the day, though the event seemed less like what I think of as a church service than like a a beach party. The congregation sat along the edges of the pond on lawn chairs and beach towels. During the sermon young children ran laughing along the shore and threw rocks in the water or hunted crayfish . Jeans, shorts, and swimsuits were the preferred attire. The church worships in a "contemporary" style--rock hymns, sermons resembling pep talks, no clerical robes, an assiduously cultivated informality all around.
In general, I'm not a fan of this worship style. I'm not against modern music, but the kind that resembles blithe and repetitive top-40 pop doesn't hold much appeal for me. Informality is good, but the pleasure of it is lost when voices over the loudspeaker deliver instructions such as: "Sing louder! The Lord isn't ashamed of you; don't be ashamed of him!" "Pray out loud!" "Share your testimony with the people on your right and left!" Sermons in the manner of a corporate motivational seminar, with a chain of bullet-point instructions, don't make me think much about my own spiritual life or where I need to grow. I like to hear actual scriptural texts read in church, not front-porch-yarn glosses of them. Sometimes the best parts of a service are moments of silence--those were conspicuously absent.
But if the service was thin gruel to me, it certainly moved and inspired most of the congregation, and I found much to admire there. I got the sense that the people were genuinely immersed (no pun intended) in the proceedings, that their prayers for the baptizees (seventeen of them, ranging from toddlers to the middle aged!), and their accord with the preacher's message were heartfelt. The order of service may have been loose, but as everyone prepared for the dunkings, you could hear vestiges of the ancient liturgy of baptism. As the preacher was invoking the Holy Spirit over the water, a single dove flew out of the woods, wheeled around the pond once, then disappeared back into the trees. That's something you'd never see over a marble font in some venerable gothic church. When the post-service picnic commenced, I had the definite feeling that people were celebrating more than a pleasant summer afternoon.
Contemporary style churches obviously appeal to many, especially to those who feel uncomfortable in traditional churches, a feeling I don't share but can understand. Traditional church services place many people within a world that is very strange to them. They can appear to proceed though a sequence of mysterious rituals and codes that initiates take as a matter of course. It is a situation where the feeling that one does not fit may come very easily. Yet the contemporary service that blurs easily into mainstream pop culture can be alienating to others. What strikes me as their noisy, reductive tone isn't strange--it's depressingly familiar, the dominant style of our anxious, hype driven, short attention span culture. That culture seems to disdain or degrade most of what I see as worthy or valuable in this world. As much as anything, what draws me to traditional worship is its apparent unworldliness, its suggestion of an alternative reality to the one most of us inhabit in our daily routine. I say that unworldliness is "apparent," though, because in it, I glimpse what I believe is the ultimate reality of the world, a creation suffused with spirit and drawn, through suffering and loss, toward a richer awareness and ordering of life: toward reconciliation with its creator, and among its constituents.
Some might say the real distinction I'm making here is between mass and niche (cynics would say "elitist") Christianities. That may be true to an extent, given the growing popularity of contemporary churches and the declining attendance at a lot of traditional ones. But I'm not firing any shots in the "worship wars" here, and I don't look down on anyone because of the church they attend, or the sort of hymns they prefer to sing. I have no doubt that those who embrace contemporary worship styles find their own vision of redemption in it, and likely one similar to my own. Gratitude, not disdain, was the main feeling Sunday's experience left me with. If churches can reach people though the forms of their culture's main streams--something stalwarts like St. Paul, St. Patrick, and John Wesley weren't above doing--I'm grateful for that. But I'm grateful too that there are still churches willing to cast for souls in the side channels, tossing nets woven with fine and ancient cords whose strength has become too often confused with stiffness.
Tags: Religion; Spirituality; Christianity; Baptism
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