I would like to make a few of my own comments about the video which Pat posted recently, “Sunday’s Coming” Movie Trailer from North Point Media.

I’ve been seeing some comments in entries on other blogs regarding this video, and I find them rather telling.

…how sad. Packaged and served just like fast food. That’s what religion is today. And that’s how people like it.

Really? We do? People prefer feel-good-isms and content-less entertainment thinly veiled behind the disguise of church? In our sinful states, yes, we do.

As fallen people, we always desire the new shiny bobble. A part of us never outgrows that infantile desire to grab at the shiny new thing we’ve never seen before, drop the boring old one we’ve been playing with up until now, and put the brand new one in our mouths and ogle its wonderful glitzy qualities. This will never change this side of heaven.

I can say for certain that right now, through technological advances, we are now able to produce shininess that has never been seen by former generations. I mean, put on the sunglasses, spread on your SPF 1000 sunblock and hold on to your seats levels of shininess. And still we get bored. Why? Because that it is an idol that does not save.

Yet unfortunately, too often this is how we view the choices:

would i want to go to a church like that?
no.

But if the only other option was my grandma’s church…well…

and I remember that the model in the video was born out of a time when that was the case.

Let me digress for a moment. I had written something completely different for this entry, but after last Sunday I have decided to mostly start over.

I visited Faith Lutheran Church in Capistrano Beach, California last Sunday and was reminded of the changes they’ve been going through. (Please bear with them, the website is currently going through a complete overhaul.) Faith is a church which has both a traditional liturgical service as well as a hybrid service which is a blend of a contemporary worship sound and feel, but which retains the text of the traditional liturgy and the same Law/Gospel sermon which is preached in the traditional service.

(Go here to listen to the sermon I heard while I was there on May 16.)
(You can find the text here for the hymn which Pastor Hodel mentions in his sermon.)

Faith has been growing by leaps and bounds. That traditional service is packed out. I mean, it’s standing room only every single week, even after a recent refurbishment and expansion of the sanctuary. But why?

The reason they’re so packed is that Faith is being inundated with ex-evangelicals, ex-contemporary worship service goers and others who are looking for a worship service with substance. When talking to these people, I’ve learned that it isn’t a decision they’ve made lightly. They are extremely passionate about what they’ve done. They uniformly feel like they’ve been rescued from some kind of hopeless nightmare. I won’t recount the details of the stories I’m hearing, but trust me when I say some are pretty dark.

And that’s what Christ-less and Gospel-less teaching will do to you!

Something else that I find very interesting is that these folks who are leaving their contemporary worship service-based churches to arrive at the traditional liturgy at Faith did not first attend the hybrid service which Faith offers. They’re coming directly from one to the other without the layover. And they’re loving it! They’re so passionate about the traditional liturgy, in fact, that if any ‘contemporary-sounding’ elements accidentally slip in there, as can happen sometimes, they’re very upset. I heard words spoken almost at a yell about some contemporary-sounding elements accidentally making it into one of the traditional services I attended there months ago.

Talk about refreshing! And these people are no dummies. They are quickly getting up to speed theologically, or are already knowledgeable about Scripture, but finally getting solid Christ-centered teaching. They can recount many details of the kinds of Christless teaching they’ve been receiving at their former church and what effect it has had on them, often with tears in their eyes. They feel like they’ve been delivered. The sermons and the teaching are big parts of the reason why, but clearly they also love the traditional liturgy. They love the confession and absolution at the beginning. They love the chanted Psalms. They love the hymns. They love the Lord’s Prayer and the creeds spoken amongst one another. They love the communion, eating the body and drinking the blood of our Lord Christ while hearing that these elements are given for their sins. They’ve come from the ‘new’ to deeply appreciate something which is hundreds of years old.

We at NRP are trying to tie in with Faith more and more as they work like crazy to get the unadulterated message of Christ’s death and resurrection for the sins of the world out to the masses. (In our catalog you will see more and more recordings produced by South Orange County Outreach, or SOCO, affiliated with Faith Lutheran Church.) People are starving for it. I know this to be true because they’re telling me face to face how they have been quietly and privately languishing in their current contemporary church, not knowing (because they’re not hearing) the message of the Gospel. A very common phrase on the lips of these newcomers when they arrive is something resembling, “What is this strange new teaching?”

I wanted to tell this story because, clearly, not all want a contemporary service. Some are beginning to reject it. They no longer want something subjective and based on their feelings. They want something objective which comes from outside of them. They want to hear about Jesus Christ, the God-man, coming down from heaven to rescue them from eternal damnation. This is serious stuff, and these converts mean business.

Let me wrap this up with a little bit of a response I recently wrote to a commenter on the recent post in which we shared the video. He mentioned that we should have more respect for what he considers a “modern liturgy”, referring to the contemporary worship service, and signed off with this line – “What we really need to do in the body of Christ is recognise, appreciate and celebrate diversity, not mock it.”

We all need to be where these ex-evangelicals have come to. That is, they’ve been languishing and they know what matters: Christ crucified and resurrected. That is all that matters. If the preachers and teachers out there, of any denomination in any church, are not preaching and teaching Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins week in and week out, not only is it useless crap, but it is false teaching and dangerous. What value is this to anyone? Removing Christ from the preaching and teaching in the church is not ‘diverse’, it’s just us once again offering false gods in replacement.

To the churches which have a contemporary worship service and do preach every week the true depth of our sin and the sacrifice Christ made in His death and resurrection in order to rescue us, I say, “Good on you!”. We can argue the differences between the contemporary service and traditional liturgy separately once we have covered the only point that really matters – keeping Christ at the center of it.

What we need is simply Christ crucified for our sins, every week – don’t accept anything less. Your faith and salvation are on the line.

But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it readily enough.

…And what I do I will continue to do, in order to undermine the claim of those who would like to claim that in their boasted mission they work on the same terms as we do. For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness.
(2 Cor 11:3-4, 12-15)

The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners
(1 Tim 1:15)

By Ted R