Psalms, Hymns and Spiritual Songs

A Paradigm for the Church of the Future by Gerrit Gustafson

All of us have personal preferences. Some prefer blue over green. Some prefer a trip to the beach over a trip to the mountains. Some favor grits over hash browns, country music over rock, and almost everyone favors the home team over the visitors.

But whereas we smile at some of our preferences, our religious preferences are often quite a different matter. For some reason, our own special religious traditions and experiences tend to concretize our ideas of what God's preferences are and aren't. Nowhere is this more true than in the area of worship styles. How quickly our preferences become biases. And how easily our biases become walls which keep us from the larger Body of Christ and from fuller expressions of worship.

The sum total of these distinctives and preferences is termed culture. Every individual and group is part of a culture. Worship and culture are very closely related. It is interesting that the root word for culture is cult, which is simply a system of worship or devotion. You could say our culture reflects our worship. We should neither despise nor deny our culture for it helps to give us the initial parameters for personal identity, but we must thoughtfully evaluate all our ways in light of God's ways. When God says that His ways are higher than our ways (Isaiah 55:9), He is saying that His divine culture is higher than our human culture. The Lausanne Covenant of 1974 appeals for churches to be "deeply rooted in Christ and closely related to their culture. Culture must always be tested and judged by Scripture.... The gospel does not presuppose the superiority of any culture to another, but evaluates all cultures according to its own criteria of truth and righteousness.... Churches have sometimes been in bondage to culture rather than to the Scripture."

Denominations within the church are usually cultural divisions before they are theological. They have to do with conflicting folkways. A Presbyterian pastor made this observation: "Part of the problem in coming into unity is that we have recruited people into the personality distinctives of our own congregations and traditions, rather than into Christ. As a result, their loyalties are more to these distinctives than to Christ's Kingdom." In the spirit of Lausanne, we need to evaluate our traditions of worship - whether historic traditions or more recent renewal traditions - in light of Scripture to see if we are adherents of an approach to Christ or of Christ himself.