Saturday, April 25, 1998

Churches returning to more traditional forms of worship

By LORETTA FULTON / Abilene Reporter-News

Ten years ago at a meeting in Odessa, attended mainly by evangelical preachers, Lutheran minister James Hanson observed that he was "the only man in the room who owned a gown."

But before the meeting was over, the main speaker, an African-American pastor of a charismatic church in New Orleans, was urging every man there to get one.

"Guys, get a gown and put up an altar rail and start kneeling," the New Orleans pastor advised. "It's the wave of the future."

The future is now.

Hanson, 68-year-old pastor of St. John's Lutheran Church in Winters, has seen trends come and go. What he's witnessing now is sort of a "back to the future" movement. Although charismatic churches aren't ready to throw out their drumsets and electric guitars, there is definitely a movement in the style of worship that is back to the basics, Hanson believes.

"There is a desire for worship that is not off the wall but is more disciplined," Hanson said. "It's surfacing all over that we really need to pay attention to worship and the forms that it takes."

A recent article in *The New York Times noted that the one-time severe losses reported by mainline denominations have slowed and in some cases reversed.

The Episcopal church lost more than 1 million members from 1965 to 1989 but grew by nearly 100,000 from 1989 to 1994, the article stated, citing church statistics. Losses resumed in 1995 and 1996 but church attendance, or those who actually go to services, held stable and then rose again in 1996.

Also since 1991, the United Methodist Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America have seen their annual membership losses narrow.

Hanson believes the losses in the mainline churches are due more to "getting away from what people believe" than a desire for a more free-flowing worship style.

"The Bible is the Bible," Hanson said, and some traditional churches got away from teaching that and into more liberal theology.

The interest in church traditions can be seen in Hanson's own hometown where First Baptist Church recently held its second Good Friday service, a tradition more typically associated with Roman Catholic and liturgical Protestant churches such as Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Lutheran.

The church's pastor, the Rev. Glenn Shoemake, said that although a Good Friday service isn't typical in Baptist churches, his members warmed to it.

"I think there is an awareness that there are people who are more comfortable in more traditional styles of worship," he said.

Church traditions, whether Baptist or other denominations, depend somewhat on locale, Shoemake said. In the eastern part of the United States, Baptist churches are more likely to follow customs associated with liturgical churches than in this part of the country.

"It kind of depends on the pastoral leadership and that church's tradition," he said.

A tradition not likely to become incorporated into Baptist worship, however, is the reading of the Apostle's or the Nicene Creed, both statements written by the early church to state specifically what the church believed.

That's unfortunate, Winters' Lutheran pastor, Hanson, believes.

"If the Lutheran church stopped doing those, I'd have to leave," he said.

Even if many churches today don't incorporate those creeds, Hanson said he has seen a move away from "creed bashing" that once was popular in charismatic settings where "no creed but Christ" was the rallying cry.

Hanson agreed with Episcopal priest and author Loren Mead, who has written books about what churches must do in the future. One chapter of Mead's book Five Challenges to the Once and Future Church deals with "cool" and "warm" spirituality. Mead believes the future church must include both.

He compares "cool," or traditional spirituality, with the music of Mozart, while "warm" or spontaneous spirituality is more closely aligned with jazz.

"We need a world with both kinds of music," Mead said in a telephone interview from his home in Washington, D.C.

Mead is the founder of the Alban Institute, an Episcopal "think tank" in Bethesda, Md., and is the author of numerous books.

One of the five challenges he speaks of in his book is that of a broader spirituality, a word he defines as "a way of getting close to and expressing our closeness to God."

The historic traditions of the church offer people a way of "connecting with God," Mead said. "They are not a new focus on self-growth."

Although Mead admitted that many charismatic practices "set traditional people's teeth on edge," some of that should be incorporated into the more staid services of the mainline churches.

"The hot dimension has tended to be more squeezed out, which left us with a watered down expression of religiosity," Mead said.

Mead believes the future church must make room for both "cool" and "warm" spirituality. The traditional churches have spiritual gifts that charismatic churches could use as well as vice versa, he said.

Silent retreats, prayer groups, and traditional hymns all add to the spiritual life of members of traditional churches. On the other hand, charismatic churches offer a spontaneity and emotional involvement that traditional churches don't.

Both Mead and Winters' Lutheran pastor, Hanson, cited the need for orderliness and routine as reasons that mainline worship is making a comeback. Hanson noted that a group of eight men who were charismatic leaders in the 1960s and '70s have now converted to Greek Orthodoxy "because of the meditative quality of the spirituality and the liturgy."

And, there seems to be a need in humans to cling to something that is ancient and time-tested. Hanson cited a book called Requiem in which the author, Thomas Oden, a Methodist professor at Drew University, noted that in the '60s the catch phrase was "never trust anyone over 30."

Now, Oden wrote, his advice is "don't trust anybody who hasn't been around for 300 years."

The age of rapid change that we live in has much to do with that, Hanson believes.

"People are looking for anchors, something that at least retains the form," he said.

And, more and more people are expecting to find that in their church.

"Those that are lasting are moving in that direction," he said.