We Need A Futuristic Church

Traditional churches need to take the L and learn from our mistakes if we want to see the church thrive in the 21st century and beyond.

Man-Centered or God-Centered Churches?

Much of the modern history of church has been summarized by a simple question: Should church be man-centered or God-centered?

When framed this way, the answer appears obvious. God is greater than man, and church is where we go specifically to worship God, so it seems obvious that church should be God-centered. So when you look around and see the way that big-box, seeker-sensitive churches dwarf their “God-centered” counterparts it seems like a validation that we are in a great season of unfaithfulness.

Or so the explanation goes. It’s not exactly a fair way to frame the modern/traditional debate. The “God-centered” churches may be “confessional,” but those confessions are more often than not barely enforced, believed, or taught, and they have a reputation for dead orthodoxy.

Think of the signs of spiritual vitality:

• Children that leave home, start their own families and don’t abandon the faith

• Practical reliance on God by prayer for everyday problems like sicknesses and problems at work

• Willing to share Christ with neighbors or evangelize in public

• Rejection of alcoholism, gluttony, lewdness, and pornography

• Rejecting the stains of the world like gay pride and woke ideology

Are “man-centered” or “God-centered” churches doing better? I’m not sure there is a strong winner. In the LCMS and the PCA (the main confessional Lutheran and Presbyterian denominations) about 50% of the church approves gay marriage¹. Not to pick on them in particular, there are similar issues within other confessional denominations. Anyone who is honest knows that the confessional churches are not thriving when judged by the above metrics. Meanwhile, among Southern Baptists, Non-Denominational, and Pentecostal (which encompasses most of the big-box megachurches) the rate is 20-30%, and they also have greater numbers of people.

What is going on? If we invest all this time reading the Bible, studying, and absorbing theological teaching, and identifying with historical confessions, why is this failing to translate to spiritual vitality, in some cases worse than the supposedly man-centered churches?

Jesus himself said of prophets, “You will know them by their fruits.”

I want to go back and revisit the opening question. Should church be man-centered or God-centered? My answer is neither: they should be Man’s-Relationship-To-God-Centered.

The difference here is subtle, but critical. The Bible teaches us almost nothing about God as a purely abstract fact, nor do we learn the answers to plenty of otherwise interesting questions, like “why does evil exist at all?” or “what was God doing before creation?” The Bible does infallibly teach us truths about God, but only in the context of God’s intentions to meet with and relate to man. Our idle questions are irrelevant to man’s relation to God, and so God does not answer them.

This difference may at least partially explain the counter-intuitive vitality-gap. It is possible to have a God-centered church that is preoccupied with truths about God, the correct answers to theological questions, and how he wills that church services should run, yet fail to translate this into an actual relationship with God practically.

The biblical words for “church” literally translate to something like “gathering” or “assembly.” The word itself describes men coming together for worship. Every major story arc in the Bible centers around the problems and solutions of men relating to God. This relationship problem is more fundamental even than sin in the abstract. It is why idolatry is the cardinal sin of the Bible, especially among God’s people.

Even when God-centered churches extol the importance of appropriating these truths for yourself and personally putting them into practice, this doesn’t necessarily translate into real vitality in the same way that an automotive mechanic explaining the workings of an engine doesn’t make someone into a good driver. We need basic driving lessons and hours of road practice more than we need a sophisticated knowledge of fuel injection.

The common narrative of the “man-centered” churches is that they cater to the carnal nature and tell people what they want to hear, which is certainly true in at least some cases. Nevertheless, at least statistically, a lot of people come out with sincere and vital faiths that change their lives. Could it be that even without the good theology and mastery of the Bible, they are at least getting the “road practice” and in some cases mentoring in the fundamentals?

Even the most cynical pastor of a man-centered church will understand that people go to church at least in some part to meet their spiritual needs in relationship to God.

Traditionalism is Not Safe

Think for a moment about the high points of Christendom:

• Stunning architecture: The great cathedrals and church buildings of history.

• Incredible music: Mozart, Bach, Handel and many of the greatest masters of music in history dedicated their talents to church music.

• Great statements of orthodoxy: the creeds, the confessions.

• The conversion of kings, nobles, warriors and millions of souls.

Many of the traditional churches rightly appreciate the past and draw from tradition, which in one sense is a good thing. We don’t want to reinvent the church every generation nor to corrupt the great treasures of the church.

However, there is a fundamental disconnect when traditional churches essentially freeze themselves in a certain century to be “safe.” For one, the men of that century weren’t playing it safe. They were dealing with the real problems and challenges of their own day and trying to dedicate their most excellent efforts to God. (Bach wasn’t “playing it safe,” and sticking with tradition when he wrote his music.)

For two, we don’t live in those centuries and their fights are not our fights. It does us no good to shadow-box against irrelevant enemies only to fail to fight the enemies of our day. It is what Jesus accused of the Pharisees when they decorated the tombs of the prophets and said that “if we were alive in their day, we would not have killed the prophets.” If you really would have been as valiant as the men you revere from another century, fight like they did in your own day.

We often think that we live in an era when nothing is excellent anymore, but that’s not the case. We just don’t dedicate excellent works to God anymore. We play it safe for God, and do excellent works for whatever we really prioritize.

In another era, a Carnival Cruise ship or the Las Vegas Sphere would be wonders of the world. We are just now in an era where great things are done for the sake of good vacations, rather than the glory of God.

Carnival Cruise Ships - Essentially a floating skyscraper resort.

The Las Vegas Sphere. A giant sphere that is also a giant video screen.

Like most political conservatism, church traditionalism in large part exists to help us cope with losing. We can be content being irrelevant because we can “explain our failure” in ways that frame it as us being faithful or principled. The great football coach Vince Lombardi famously said, “Winning isn't everything; it's the only thing.” We have precious few Christians who are this obsessed with winning for God.

Perhaps worse, it feeds Christian infighting, since we are permitted to scapegoat our Christian neighbors who are outperforming us (in the cases of confessional churches) or we are refusing to appreciate and encourage the development of rigorous theology and biblical insights (in the case of seeker churches).

Case Study: Church Music

Consider modern church music as a proxy for the general direction of the church. The guitar praise band is polarizing, with some finding it a relatable and expressive way to worship God while being attuned to their own emotions, while others finding it tasteless, lyrically vapid, and irreverent. In this polarization, how much is actually separation as a matter of moral principle²? If musical instruments are permitted to be used at all in church, what exactly is wrong with the selection of some instruments over others? If we are permitted to write our own worship songs (as opposed to psalms only), what is wrong with structuring them in the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure that is common in popular modern music? It seems the objection mainly has to do with the aesthetics and the execution, and this has been incorrectly elevated to the point of being a moral principle. There is no biblical requirement, for example, that we limit musical instrumentation to piano and organ, or that we sing only hymns written between the 18th and early 20th centuries but nothing from the 1980’s or onward.

Comparatively speaking, I would agree that most modern church music is inferior to earlier hymns in theological content and in the aesthetic, but to elevate this to a matter of principle I find to be inconsistent and prideful.

If modern worship songs have vapid and thoughtless lyrics, what prevents the writing of new worship songs that have better lyrics? Or writing songs with more tasteful instrumentation? It is possible to manipulate people with overly emotive and repetitive music with powerful bridges that move the emotions and confuse this with a move of the Holy Spirit, but it is also possible to write instrumentation that matches the true emotional impact of sincere encounters with God and reverence for his majesty.

Many will mock modern Christian music asking questions like, “Is this a song about Jesus or a song about you?” Have they forgotten how many of the psalms are about the personal experiences of believers? Others mock the repetitive use of choruses, when Psalm 136 repeats a refrain 26 times.

Had the church not functionally divided over beliefs about music, it is possible that those song-writers and worship leaders most skilled in writing emotionally resonant music would have had the support of those with better musical taste and better theology, and the combination of each contributing their particular skills would have resulted in the best of both worlds.

We could have Berkeley-College-of-Music-quality musicians that pioneered an entirely new genre that was simultaneously modern, elegant, tasteful, reverent, and skillful while also having a vocal-centric aesthetic designed specifically to promote and foster congregational singing, with great theologians checking them for truth content, and great historians drawing from the best of the past. There is absolutely nothing that demands that the greatest church music to ever exist be relegated to the past, we just are not hungry for it. We don’t want to devote our best works to God.

Now zoom out and consider it broader than the musical question. There are dozens of other issues and problems that have been handled like the music question. Rather than dealing with them together, we have isolated, clung to the past, and allowed modern passions to go unchecked.

Futuristic Church

Most people don’t feel comfortable trying to relive a previous century. This is an ordinary human behavior, not a dysfunction. We don’t live like the 18th century, the 16th, the 10th, or even the 1st centuries. The insights and treasures of those centuries must be mediated to us and translated to us for the lives we actually live. The precious truth of justification by faith alone is universal and true at all times, but in order to be applicable to us, we need to understand how it applies for people like us. How does the truth of union to Jesus Christ impact me during a morning commute, in a cubicle or at a job site, when I talk with coworkers, or when I pay my bills? If church and Christianity itself is man’s-relationship-to-God-centered, these truths mean nothing if they don’t actually impact my real life. Treasures need to move past their ideal forms that dwell in the mind.

Consider the difference between a drawing of a house and what a house really looks like.

An idealized house: always A-frame style, indeterminate construction materials, people posed in front of the house unrealistically larger in comparison to the house, the sun prominently featured in the frame, flowers and trees in the front along the side with green grass.

The actual appearance of a typical modern home with beige vinyl siding and manufactured windows, dried out dormant Bermuda grass, an air conditioning unit, and a few immature bushes under the windows for decoration and to discourage home invasions.

The idealized house awakens warm feelings, but we spend our time in the real world interacting with houses like the ones with vinyl siding. The idealized version puts on display ideas about what we value (family, sunlight, nature, beauty) whereas the real house is an accurate reflection of actual experience.

In man’s-relationship-to-God-centered Christianity, we cannot afford to believe our ideals to be real life. We need to be more honest. Traditions and confessions have not filtered out the wolves from the flock. Each year brings a new batch of confessional pastors who fall by scandal or predation. They have not generally improved our own personal walks with God: driving us to prayer, helping us overcome the sins of youth. They haven’t helped us to reach the lost. Embarrassingly, most confessional church growth is from theological changes in people that got saved in modern big-box churches, or from childbirth of confessional Christians.

I love the confessions, and I even teach my kids to memorize the Westminster Shorter Catechism. I strongly prefer psalm and hymn singing to modern worship music, to the point of feeling discomfort listening to it, but we have to be honest about the state of affairs and move past the ideal into real life. I’m not substantially holier than other Christians and it is spiritually unhealthy to take as a baseline a posture of suspicion toward other Christians for not adopting a confessional posture or being interested in theology.

Rather than perpetually looking backwards towards a “safe” era, what if we were always looking forward? What if we identified the biggest impediments to men having relationships with God, and specifically targeted them to eliminate them? What if everything the church did was forward facing, and we were the first to provide answers, wisdom, and comfort in the changing times?

We need a futuristic church.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/religious-landscape-study/religious-denomination/lutheran-church-missouri-synod/?activeChartId=30e3bb535882a6ee2222435459ef5233&dialogId=9523928eb7dec4714f5ef09b479305bd, link found by https://x.com/treblewoe.

2. There are Christian that believe as a matter of doctrine that we are forbidden to use musical instruments in worship or use any songs in worship that are not out of the biblical psalms. This is a matter of principle and they have rational arguments for these points but those arguments, in my view, are a stretch and depend on dogmatically insisting upon poorly substantiated interpretations of isolated texts.