culture and worship: style and substance; what's negotiable, impacts us sub-consciously, and so on

From Brad Harper and Paul Metzger in CT...

The symbols of popular culture transmit the shared meanings by which a people understand themselves, identify their longings, and construct their world. There are no truly neutral symbols, images, or rituals in popular culture.

Whether popular culture and its symbols are inherently evil or good has been a matter of much debate throughout church history. Today, most Christian leaders recognize that like it or not, as theologian Tom Beaudoin contends, "We express our religious interests, dreams, fears, hopes, and desires through popular culture." Religious expression is a cultural reality. Christian symbols were not pristinely dropped from the sky. As the Incarnation so profoundly illustrates, God reveals himself in the common. As he reveals himself through the common reality of flesh and blood, so we engage him through the common elements of bread and wine.

At the end of the day, culture is an arena from and to which God speaks, but also one that distorts God's self-revelation. So it is not only acceptable but also necessary that we bring popular culture and its symbols into the church, for through them God engages us, and we respond to him. But since culture's symbols can also distort both God's engagement and our response, we must be wary....

The basic question the church must address is, Do changing worship forms adapted from popular culture facilitate an authentic encounter with God in Christ through the Holy Spirit as described by the Scriptures and understood by historic Christian orthodoxy?

To examine this question, we will build upon six affirmations for worship from John D. Witvliet in his book Worship Seeking Understanding:

(1) All liturgical action is culturally conditioned.

(2) The relationship between liturgy and culture is theologically framed by creation and the Incarnation. If creation provides the basis for human cultural activity, then Christian cultural engagement can be seen as containing great potential for good. Moreover, the Incarnation provides the model for the church's involvement with culture.

(3) Integrating liturgy and culture requires us to be critical of our own cultural context. Worship leaders need to critique the culturally generated worship forms they use, asking whether each form enhances or degrades authentic worship.

(4) The extremes of either complete identification with or rejection of a given culture should be avoided.

See also: Daniel 1-- where Daniel accepts some and rejects some aspects of Babylonian culture, while in exile/captivity. The next point covers the middle ground. The 6th point covers the minimal middle.

(5) Worship must reflect common elements of the Christian tradition through the unique expressions of a particular cultural context.

(6) The liturgical actions of the church—including proclamation of the Word, common prayer, baptism, and Eucharist—are among the "universal" or common factors in the Christian tradition.

First, the church is not only a multicultural community, but also a historical community, one that always finds its identity in the same God revealed in Jesus Christ....not merely a present community, in danger of passing away along with other fads of modernity, but a community in living union with believers of all time...