Culture Shock and Community

Over the long weekend we were camping down near Mahone Bay. On Sunday we set out to find a church to attend, and ended up at New Cornwall United Baptist Church.

A small church, but certainly friendly and full this Sunday. In many respects it is a very traditional evangelical protestant congregation: a one room church, with an electric organ, and a traditional service with familiar doxology and hymns. After the children's story they head down stairs for Junior Church. Likely little has changed in the nature of worship there since its founding in 1898.

For me it was familiar territory; I know the hymns and Scriptures. I can easy navigate that culture. My children however have been raised most of their lives in churches with contemporary worship. Choruses not hymns. Simple orders of service. Video clips and PowerPoint. And doxologies? Not if it bit them on the nose, would they recognize them. Don't even ask about the Apostle's Creed or Lord's Prayer.

The reality is that the majority of evangelical, protestant Christian churches in North America are like New Cornwall. Small rural or semi-rural communities, anchored in centuries old traditions. The kinds of traditions that feel familiar and comfortable when you return to them. Traditions that tether you back to churches of by-gone days.

I do wonder about my children though. Perhaps the contemporary service styles are more appealing and meaningful to them. But as music styles (and gimmicks) change, what legacies will they have to hang onto? Proponents of new worship styles argue that traditional worship is not culturally relevant. But are we raising a generation of new worshipers who are now culturally at odds with the rest (read majority) of protestant Christendom. In twenty years on their own camping trip, will they enter a small rural church like New Cornwall, and feel for a few minutes that they have somehow come home. Or will it be a strange and foreign place.