“The experience of worship should be different from anything else we do in our lives.  A reliance on technology and digital visual imagery is so much a part of our culture, that a respite from it immediately feels different.” –C. Sorrells

It’s a recurring scenario in America’s Christian congregations. As members grapple with their church’s future — eager to increase attendance or renew spiritual energy — one suggestion inevitably emerges.

It’s time to start a contemporary worship service.

The assumption that guitar- and drum-driven worship songs and a casually dressed preacher are essential to vibrant churches goes largely unchallenged in American Protestantism. And so is its corollary: Churches that retain traditional worship will decline and die.

About half of Protestant churches in America use electric guitars and drums in worship, up from 35 percent 12 years ago, according to a 2011 study of more than 10,000 churches by Faith Communities Today. That figure approaches 60 percent among evangelical churches generally and among all churches in the South, reported the multi-faith research group associated with the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at Harford (Conn.) Seminary.

But is the assumption — contemporary worship as essential to success — invariably true? Some American churches are saying no and are proving it with vibrant, creative traditional worship. No form of worship is inherently superior, they stress. The key to a healthy church is finding a mode of worship for which each congregation is uniquely equipped and carrying it off with excellence. Done well, traditional worship remains effective, they add.

“Style is not the end-all issue,” said Mark Wingfield, who tackled the issue earlier this year in his book, Staying Alive: Why the Conventional Wisdom about Traditional Churches is Wrong. “The issue is, can you be competent and relevant where you are? And changing your worship style may or may not help that.”

The terms “traditional” and “contemporary” are slippery, admits Wingfield, associate pastor at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas. In his book, Wingfield defined traditional churches as those which adhere to the generally accepted liturgy of their denominational identity. For Baptists, a simple indicator would be primarily singing hymns rather than praise choruses.

George Mason, pastor at Wilshire Baptist, draws this distinction: Contemporary churches identify the needs of the culture and craft a religious experience to address those needs, while traditional churches begin with historic creeds, hymns and liturgies, and invite people to join the ongoing stream of faith.

“Every church has a tradition,” Mason said. “And every tradition can become stale and routine. The point is not to serve the tradition but for the tradition to serve the church.”

Other observers — including author and musician Marva Dawn — think the choice is largely a false one.

“A lot of the tension between contemporary and traditional arises because we didn’t have enough theological muscle to hold them together,” she said in a recent video interview. “We need to realize that every service is contemporary because we’re doing it now, and every service is traditional because we’re based on the faith of our forebears .… I believe that we can use the music of the whole church for the sake of the whole world.”

But while definitions of contemporary or traditional worship may be elusive, most American churchgoers probably believe that, like the infamous Supreme Court justice who attempted to identify pornography, they know it when they see it. And at first glance, what they see seems to suggest success.

Every city and town has at least one contemporary church whose size and energy is attractive. In fact, the study by Faith Communities Today found a nearly 60 percent increase in attendance in churches that adopt a contemporary style of worship.

Context

The problem, leaders of strong traditional churches insist, is that some congregations simply don’t have the human resources necessary to conduct quality contemporary worship but often do have highly skilled members capable of creative traditional worship. More importantly, not all the needs of churches’ surrounding communities can be met by contemporary worship.

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