Church for a changing culture: an introduction to alternative worship

11: Innovation and tradition

Clearly, the dark rich ambience of the chillout room and the communicative environments of installation art have parallels in ecclesiastical history. Observers are often bemused by the mixture of ultramodern and ancient in Alternative Worship services - medieval prayers over electronic music, video loops as settings for the mass. But oldness and newness as such are not the point.

Alternative worship is church that grows naturally out of the lives of its creators, without a priori rules about what forms this can and cannot take.

This makes it possible to use the very latest forms of cultural expression in church. But they are not being used because they are the latest thing, but because they are where the participants live and find spiritual significance. For the same reason, most Alternative Worship services use a range of old forms of worship, because they are perceived as relevant and are a genuine help to the spirituality of those taking part.

To live in a culture is not to simply consume its most recent or fashionable products.

It is to inhabit its mindset, which will embrace aspects of the past as well as the present. The aspects of the past that are found relevant will be particular to each culture. So cultural change involves not only change in contemporary fashions, but also in the areas of the past that are found relevant.

We have become aware that many older Christian traditions have much to say to current circumstances.

In particular, the shift of our society towards an image-based culture, where the visual is the central means of communication, causes us to look again at how the Church communicated through imagery and ritual in the past. And our ecological anxiety causes us to look again at Celtic understandings of the wholeness of creation and humanity's place in it. Many more recent traditions, especially those which make encounter with God cerebral or rationalistic, have ceased to be relevant and give the impression that Christianity has nothing to offer the world anymore. In a time of great cultural change it becomes necessary to look at the whole of Christian tradition and discern what might be newly valid or ripe for reinterpretation, and what needs to be laid aside for a time.