Church for a changing culture: an introduction to alternative worship
16: Thinking out loud
The alternative worship movement represents a process of 'thinking out loud' about church, with all its attendant insights and mistakes.
Historically there have been times when believers 'thought out loud' about church and times when their thinking was fixed in formulae. We live in a time when thinking out loud is a necessity, and it's far too soon to attempt to fix conclusions. Eventually Western society will move beyond its present state of transition, but Christians need to be prepared for the transition to take a lot longer than they might like. There will be no resumption of 'normal service' any time soon.
Paradigm shifts reframe our world at a deep level. The process is distressing because it feels as though everything is being pulled apart. Not one stone can remain upon another. It's natural to want to stop things at the level of superficial change, to try to get away with the minimum response. Such a strategy risks hollowness and irrelevance in the end.
For those still in the old paradigm, the emerging patterns are invisible or meaningless. They're hard enough to grasp for those already on the journey! So we need to give one another permission to experiment, permission to get it wrong, in the light of the forgiveness of Christ. We are called by God to adventure - have always been, but too seldom heeded the call.
Alternative Worship has been called a campfire spirituality, exploring new terrain, lighting beacons and making maps for those that come after. Campfires are places where other travellers can find hospitality and encouragement [or warnings] for their own continued journey. Campfires are themselves on the move, although the day may come when they spawn settlements again. In the meantime the Spirit bids us travel.
A postscript
I'm conscious that this has been an Anglocentric account in spite of my best efforts, but also I hope reasonably applicable to Australia and New Zealand. The situation in the United States is rather different because it is emerging a decade later and out of a church background with a different age and cultural profile.
Alternative Worship in the UK, Australia and New Zealand arose a decade or more ago out of the evangelical wing of the Church at a time when evangelicalism had barely begun to acknowledge postmodernity, let alone embrace it. Indeed in some places such thinking was denounced as anti-Christian. The net result was that those who wished to create new forms of church for postmodernity often faced incomprehension and rejection. This has left a legacy of division and suspicion of motives on both sides, and Alternative Worship finds itself marginalised and underresourced in most places.
Another point of difference, in Britain at least, has to do with the age profile of churches. Britain never had 'boomer church' as a widespread phenomenon. The Boomers were the generation that left the churches, and their children have not returned. Church attendance has declined over the last four decades to less than 10% of the population and is still falling. Current statistics show that the average congregation has half its members aged over 45, and of that half half are aged over 65. Liturgies and music, even when 'modern', tend to be geared towards acceptability to the elderly. Rave culture as a mass phenomenon arrived in the UK a decade earlier than in the States, but the 20s to 40s are 'the missing generation' in the majority of British churches. So the generation and culture gap between Alternative Worshippers and the general church background is much wider.
