…in prog r e  s   s

For a very long time, I have been trying to figure out why the Church no longer seems capable of initiating and sustaining anything remotely resembling a fresh or innovative aesthetic. In particular, I have been trying to vivisect the Church’s apparent inability and gross lack of desire to seek and support the truly original creative individuals that lie both within and without her walls. A few months ago, I stumbled upon the answer. At least, I think I did, but before I present my conclusions a small survey of the Ecclesiastical landscape is needed.

Among many Christians in America today, there is a deep desire to return to the “Good Old Days” where everyone you knew basically believed the same thing, people were nice to each other, they didn’t steal, you could leave your door unlocked at night, everyone went to church on Sunday and then went to Grandma’s house for a big Sunday dinner. Others in the church long to be “culturally relevant” offering “extreme” worship experiences which at best offer some fresh expressions of praise and at worst pathetically ape a culture that is moving too quickly to allow imitation to appear as anything other than creative incompetence. (To quote Hank Hill, “Can’t you people see that you aren’t making Christianity any better? You’re just making Rock ‘n Roll worse!”) I have seen both of these groups in operation in a variety of faith communities, but the most polarized and entrenched camps seem to be in the Protestant world more so than the Anglo-Catholic. I believe that there are concrete theological reasons for the primarily Protestant orientation of this phenomenon that I will detail later.

Both of these desires for a particular type of church experience suffer from fatal mis-conceptions, but each desire stems from a common root. Those who long for the “Good Old Days” forget that the “Good Old Days” were not that good. The sins of racism alone make that period of history a time that the Church in America should learn from, repent of, and grow past. Heaven is not Mayberry, and God is not Col. Sanders. “Extreme Worship” while it seeks to reach out to those who have been dis-enfranchised from the Church, often forgets what the Church herself is and always has been. Sacrament is many times replaced with a focus on conversion experiences and topical preaching; thus, the “Extreme” para-church becomes either a slightly effective catechumenate or a cult-ish wellspring of heresy or some combination of the two.

So, failings aside, what do these two cultural eddies in the church have in common? They both spring from a world view in which God is too small and the Church (and by extension the Christian herself) is too dependent on the actions of humanity for her ongoing creation and survival. This subjective world view negates the objective reality of a truly omnipotent and omni-creative God. Rather than seeing a Church and a world in which God Himself creates and sustains Christians through His objective actions in Baptism and the Eucharist; the members of these cultural eddies live in a human-built construct where the Christian is made and sustained by his own acts of faith.

This is where the theological leanings of the present Protestant world come into play, for in large swaths of contemporary Protestantism, we see a sacramental theology in which God has been stripped of any active role and the Sacraments themselves have been reduced to symbolic rituals rather than the powerful extensions of the Incarnation that historically orthodox Christian faith has always held them to be. Protestantism has not always been this vaccuous or devoid of orthodoxy nor would it be fair to say that a strong sacramental tradition is completely absent within the Protestant world. Neither has the Anglo-Catholic community, despite its profession of historically orthodox faith, done a superb job of communicating the deep reality of what it means for Almighty God to be the One in Whom we can and must trust for the salvation and sustaining of our souls.

But what does all of this theological wrangling have to do with the Church’s seeming inability to be truly creative? Simply this, in a world view in which the Church, the Christian, and her culture are made and sustained only by human action, there is no room for change. In other words, if the foundation of one’s faith is purely subjective–i.e. based in a conversion experience and transient emotions as experienced in weekly worship–, then the only way for that faith to survive is to impose a false objectivity on the environment in which that faith operates. Such an imposed objectivity gives rise to dead liturgies (in both contemporary and traditional settings), flaccid attempts at creativity (”Can we make the backgroud of the worship slides corn flower blue?”), and cultural paranoia (”Harry Potter is the anti-Christ!”).

It is here that we now see that it is Fear that has choked the creative Spirit in the Church. It is Fear that says that God is too small and the Church and the Christian too fragile to bear up under the birth pangs of serious creative work. But God is not too small, the Church still stands in her vangaurds on the horizon of eternity, and the Christian still bears the armor of light which is Christ Himself. Jesus says, “Be Thou not afraid. I go before you always.” And go before us He does into the galleries, the concert halls, and the after-hours clubs. Christians, if we let this Fear, this insipid laziness born of the subjectivity of a nursery school faith, kill the creative life of the Church, then it is we who shall answer for it, for we would have quenched the flame of God’s glory in a world that is dry as tinder and begging to be set alight with the wondrous, creative love of it’s Maker and Sustainer.