Forms vs. Foundation

So much of the tension and argument that I've seen in churches in my denomination (The Presbyterian Church in America)--and so many other denoinations--centers on the forms of "doing church."

• Should this hymn's lyrics have been updated to fit modern culture?
• Should we use a praise band or an organ and piano?
• Should the songs we sing be the "old time" hymns, or should they be praise choruses?
• Ought we to have a contemporary worship style?
• Traditional?
• Blended? (If we have three services, should we do one of each?)

I find lines of argument in these debates to mainly center on "What am I comfortable with?" (Answer: most often, the status quo, unexamined.) or "What do others, or seekers, or non-Christians want? (Answer: whatever works to pump up our numbers, we must do it, unexamined.)

There is a "third rail" that these two approaches avoid. It's the type of questions being asked in the emerging church movement: "What are the gospel-centered reasons for doing this or that?" "What is it about the gospel or about the history of the church or our love for our culture that causes us to express ourselves this way or that in worship?"

These, and questions like them, draw us to the foundation of who we are to be as the church. They cause us to struggle with our humanness both in its glory and in its broken state. They cause us to look to Jesus. They cause us to realize that the answers don't lie in a simple "traditional verus contemporary" way of doing church. They lie in an examined existence as a congregation, as a denomination, as a church, and as members of Jesus' Kingdom.

I don't pretend to know the answers to the "forms" questions, much less the "foundation" questions. But I do know this: The value of the emerging church and its new reformation (much as it was with the first reformation) is in the questions it raises, and in the struggle for answers it undertakes.