Terry Johnson notes a curious contemporary phenomenon in contemporary western Christianity:
It’s Sunday morning. You wake up, prepare a hot beverage, eat breakfast, and finish your morning routine. Now what? Go to church? Maybe, maybe not. Attending public worship services has become optional for a growing number of professing Christians, as has commitment to the visible, institutional church.
Where does this notion of churchless (bodyless) Christianity come from?
But today the love of novelty is pervasive, even in Reformed circles. We tweak, create, innovate, alter, change, adapt, warp, and finally distort historic Reformed practice. Do the public ministries of any two churches anywhere look alike? Absolute uniformity is not necessary, to be sure, but how about some measure of uniformity? Churches ought not to design their public ministries in isolation from the rest of the church, past, present, and future. No public ministry should be idiosyncratic. A church without roots in tradition is a church that forfeits the respect that accompanies the voice of historical consensus. It violates catholicity and, as a consequence, forfeits authority. It is perceived as arbitrary, mutable, human, and, ultimately, optional.
Johnson cautions Presbyterian and Reformed churches from embracing a trend which carries the seeds of rendering corporate life merely a matter of taste.
Trendy, culturally driven, market-driven churches sow the seeds of their own irrelevance. As the saying goes, “He who marries the spirit of the age will soon find himself a widower.” Their claim upon their audience is temporary: personal preferences expressed, personal needs met, and personal desires fulfilled. Treat the congregation like a market where the consumer is key, where the market’s fickle whims are sovereign, and expect transitory commitments or no commitments. In the process, the transcendent reality of the church as Christ’s church, to which respect is due and where authority is recognized, will be lost.
Ecclesiology is collapsing all around us. Our Reformed foundations are sound. However, if we get swept up in the ecclesiastical trends, we too may find our people perceiving the church as something less than the indispensable institution that it is meant to be. A resilient ecclesiology honors catholicity and the communion of all the saints. It maintains universal practice over against the latest thing, and it ministers to the whole people of God without discrimination, because its ministry is rooted in Scripture and tradition.
Read the whole post at the (USA) Orthodox Presbyterian website.
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