Ever notice how the latest fad seems to have a shelf life of a year or two? It’s true even of our worship songs. The shocking novelty of introducing ‘I Wish We’d All Been Ready,’ or other choruses from the Jesus Movement, into a worship service has worn off and rock bands are now ‘traditional worship.’ ‘I Keep Falling in Love With Him’ (Jesus, that is) might be heard in Christian nursing homes today, but younger generations haven’t even heard of the song. That’s probably as it should be. In 1924 in The Illustrated London News, G. K. Chesterton put it well:
The whole modern world has divided into conservatives and progressives. The business of progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.
On one hand, conservatives seem to think that novelty is inherently wrong. The older is always best. Of course, that can’t be true, as we see even in church history: first, because the ‘older’ is only prior to one’s own existence; and second, because wrong turns have been made by other sinners in the past. Pelagianism and Arianism are very old heresies. Out of nostalgia for the old, many have fled a recklessly ‘progressive’ Protestantism for ‘Rome Sweet Rome’ or the churches of the East. Before long, however, Camelot fades and they realize they’re just in another situation full of compromise where wisdom is needed.
In actual practice, history moves more organically’the new grows out of the old. The wiser in any age evaluate whatever it is, ‘old’ or ‘new,’ in the light of something that transcends these categories. For example, taken as a whole, Charles Wesley’s hymns may be richer both musically and theologically than a lot of praise choruses today. Nevertheless, there are hundreds of decent hymns he wrote that never made it into hymnals. Doubtless, some of our more contemporary songs will survive our generation.
But the key is time. Discernment takes time and a lot of godly input spanning generations. It is the consensus of believers in churches over a few generations that weeds out the less edifying songs. If staying with the familiar (no matter how bad it may be) is the tendency of a conservative temperament, then the ideal of creativity and novelty’as an end in itself’becomes destructive of long conversations.
You don’t get healthy with fad diets and exercise gimmicks, or become a craftsperson from YouTube clips. There are no shortcuts to what we desire most. Far from being the enemy of excellence, affirming the everyday assumes there is a goal worthy enough to invest in over the long haul. It counsels patient attentiveness when we’d just as soon cut corners.
Wisdom challenges our youthful restlessness without quenching its zeal. It does not reduce the faith to a few important doctrines or offer a menu of options for creating one’s own. Biblical wisdom comes to us not as much from living elders or even past famous voices, as from a consensus where extreme views are reined in, and faith and practice are woven into a single bolt of fabric.
We need to recover not only sound doctrine but also sounder practices that serve to deepen us’and succeeding generations’in the new creation God has called into being. We need to learn how to grow like a tree, not like a forest fire.
