Built-in Obsolescence: The Philosophy of Contemporary Worship

An ongoing debate within Confessional Lutheran churches is the question of Contemporary Worship vs. historically rooted Liturgical Worship. This brief treatment intends to expose the heart of that which drives Contemporary Worship. Through this exposure, the implicit excellence of historically rooted Liturgical Worship, which is already the position advocated in our Lutheran Confessions, will be made all the more plain.

To begin, the Contemporary Worship movement, frequently abbreviated as CoWo, is the actualization of a philosophy of conformance and capitulation to culture. It is culture-reactive and derivative, which is why it inspires neither respect nor reverence. It is more than just a preference about style, because style itself is philosophy in action. That's precisely how marketing and branding function to sell things. To say CoWo is merely about stylistic preference is thus to misunderstand the depth of the ideological motivation energizing CoWo, which is essentially pop music customer/consumer culture.

CoWo attempts to say “we're hip and cool and relevant,” which is precisely why it cannot be those things, because the irony built into the meme of being “cool” is precisely an indifference to being cool. The result is that CoWo necessarily becomes passé by default.

The very notion of “contemporary worship” is built out of a word that means “with,” or “according to,” or “conforming to,” the zeitgeist, which is to say “the times.” This means that it takes as a primary inspiration for its worship-norms trends from outside the culture of the Church itself, which is also to say the pop culture norms found in an ever-mutating secular culture.

In reality, the Church's worship is called to be timeless, not temporary, not disposable. The idea of con-temporarity, however, cannot escape the temporary because, translated directly and even more simply, contemporary means being aligned “with the temporary.” It therefore has a built-in self-destruct mechanism, because by nature it does not have the timeless central in its mind. In this way the use of CoWo always carries with it a message of provisionality, instability, and even nihilism, if not desperation. It may sound extreme, of course, to connect the ideas of nihilism and desperation with CoWo but, being “with the times,” CoWo theologically grounds itself in the kingdom of the world and the flesh, which is to say paradigmatically outside of Christ, and so where death reigns. The phronema of the “contemporary” is the phronema of the world, and so it is bound to the kingdom of death, and so the perfume of nihilism and desperation pervade CoWo.

What is yet more fatal to contemporary worship is that popular culture not only constantly mutates, it mutates in a very particular way. The particular way it mutates is that, by the time something becomes “popular” or “fashionable,” the personalities that drive popularity, the “influencers,” have already moved on to a new temporary. Thus popular culture and contemporaneity are always behind and following its culture-drivers, and in very principle can never catch up with them. Thus a church that seeks to adopt the temporary forms of fashionable popularity must always find itself irrelevant to the very culture to which it seeks to be relevant. After a couple of decades of chasing the dragon of the contemporary, then, the internal structure of the church's identity becomes so destabilized that it loses itself in the urgency of fashion.

The principle driving conformance to the times makes one's identity seem almost fluid, so much so that what is left of the old identity becomes necessarily framed as the enemy, for it becomes only clearer and clearer, if one sticks to their commitment to the principle of contemporaneity, the original identity (if still honored as venerable it is yet doubtless outdated and obsolete) was basically an obstacle to keeping up with the times in the first place. Only a bolder commitment to the principle of contemporaneity makes sense anymore. And so tent peg after tent peg gets removed, and soon the whole structure collapses and all that is left is a name and an urge to keep up with the ever elusive times.

Fashion can never properly form the foundation of a lasting culture. Therefore the philosophy of contemporary worship inexorably ends up becoming self-defeating precisely in relation to the goal it aims to achieve. It cannot sustain itself because it can never truly arrive at the starting point from which to establish its own existence, which is to say CoWo can never truly be or become contemporary, or communicate a meaningful identity. Tragically, in focusing on the times instead of the timeless, it trains consciences according to imaginary norms established outside the Church. It thus slowly but surely acts like a Trojan Horse for worldly values, persistently desensitizing the people from their received culture and tradition, rather teaching people to be suspicious of them.

Instead of beginning with Christ and His Church in order to bring Christ to the world through the Church, as a philosophy of obsolescence CoWo rather begins with the world and tries to add Christ as an ingredient to shape the Church according to the world in order to make the Church palatable to the world. In doing so, contemporary worship, by nature dull and passe according to the measure of its own internal standards, sets itself up to conform the Church to the world by always looking outside of the Church for cues and directions as to how even to be itself. Through friendship with the world, CoWo's very nature is to train the user to look to the world for direction, and seek obediently to be pleasing to it. It thus must fail in being a viable option for faithful, Confessional churches. Rather, Confessional churches must stand on faithfulness to what was delivered to them from their most faithful generations.