“Ideas are not true because they are old, though they may be old because they are true. The paradox is that how long a given idea has been around is of no use in proving its truth, and past staying-power is not cause for something to continue to stay.

Tradition is not self-certifying evidence of truth, but a testament to those who passed along what they believe to be true.

. . . in the long run, the truth itself — the dogma or theory — may remain relatively untouched, but be understood and expressed in new ways. The best and most vital doctrines — the deepest truths — are capable of such costume changes.”

Read the whole thing over on his blog. I’m thinking this over as I contemplate a post on when & why liturgical change should & shouldn’t happen.

Whereas in this our time the minds of men are so divers, that some think it a great matter of conscience to depart from a piece of the least of their Ceremonies, they be so addicted to their old customs; and again on the other side, some be so new-fangled that they would innovate all things, and so despise the old, that nothing can like them but that is new: It was thought expedient, not so much to have respect how to please and satisfy either of these parties, as how to please God, and profit them both.

Thomas Cranmer, “Of Ceremonies, Why Some Be Abolished and Some Retained,” 1549 and 1552 Prayer books.

The frame of the debate sounds pretty familiar. Of course the specifics of what is abolished and retained have changed since Cranmer’s time. I’d like to think that Cranmer himself would probably approve of this.

His first two points I largely agree with–although I would also add that I think there are reasons beyond aesthetic that projection screens are not generally a good idea in a worship setting (more on that in another post).

His third point I think needs more discussion, however, partly because it echoes an objection I see pretty often especially in regard to liturgical innovation. Here’s the point he makes:

3. New is not necessarily better. When drawing together a diverse group in worship, incorporating prayers and/or music that everyone will recognize will unite the gathering and bring in those who feel displaced by liturgical innovations.

I agree to a limited extent with the general intention here; this is, for example, why I am sometimes hesitant about using musical settings of the Lord’s Prayer–because if someone without much church background knows one single prayer, that’s the prayer it’s likely to be.

It as absolutely true that new is not necessarily better; at the same time it is also true that older is not necessarily better, either. Older liturgical materials have been around long enough to be tested and filtered so that (perhaps) much of the really bad has been filtered out. But everything old was new once; more important is finding what is good, what works. This is sometimes a process of trial and error. It seems unsurprising to me that someone would take the opportunity of a large conference of folks at an Emerging Church conference to try out a whole lot of new stuff with a group that has self selected to be fairly receptive of new stuff.

More important, however, is the question raised in the second sentence–what is the best way to bring together a diverse group in worship? I think the assumption that there are specific prayers and hymns that everyone will recognize is an increasingly hazardous one to make, particularly as the diversity of the group increases. One approach to this problem is to try and identify different subgroups and make sure that each will find something that is familiar to them. But even this can be a an assumption dangerous to evangelization; there are a great number of people for who are not familiar with any of our prayers and music. We hope that some of them will find their way into churches, and keep coming back.

It is a great danger to our ability to be hospitable, to our ability to welcome strangers into our midst, if we become too comfortable in what is familiar. It may lull us into assuming that everyone knows the same things, comes from the same background.

This is particularly important for those who plan and lead worship. IF we assume that everyone knows the prayers we are using, the music we are singing, we may forget to teach, forget to lead. We may even forget how to open what is familiar to ourselves so that we can be joined in it by those for whom it is new. Indeed, most of us never learned how to do this in the first place. But it is vital that we do so.

It is, of course, entirely possible to use new material in ways that are closed and opaque to outsiders. I suspect that is at least in part what happened in the liturgy that inspired Father T.’s rant. This is as much, or even more of a problem, as when it is done with traditional liturgy. But such an experience can be instructive, if it helps us remember what it is like to be a stranger, to be experiencing something new and unfamiliar for the first time.

And better yet, working with new material may remind us of the care we must taken to open all liturgy to anyone who may come, and remind us to take as much care with the old as with the new–and that, I think, is what will really help unite a diverse gathering, and bring everyone in.

I ran across this article a while back that made mention of what it refers to as one of the fundamental rules of the internet (Calling it “the Google Rule”):

“Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it.”

I might rather call it the “Green Eggs and Ham principle,” but the basic idea is that a great deal of useful energy and resources might be saved by just trying things, instead of spending a lot of effort advocating for and against a proposed change based on a lot of unknown “what if’s”–provided sufficiently low costs to trying.

This expresses something I have wondered about liturgical change and congregations. I know there can be real (and often difficult to enumerate) costs to introducing liturgical change to a congregation. There are also hoped for benefits in introducing a change. But what are the costs of the process of deciding whether or not to try something? And how do these costs compare?

Green eggs picture based on a picture by Stewart Johnson, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license.