The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
October 25, 2009
Vol. 12 no. 41

Everything But...

What did the original Protestant Reformers think they were doing? Did they believe they were making a permanent fix to the Christian Church, fixing the failures and transgressions of the Roman Catholic Church, or did they understand that they could never be reformed, only be in a continual process of reforming?

I have been in the ministry long enough to have experienced more changes than I have wished to see. The church around us today is not the church of my youth, and the one in which I was called and educated for the ministry. Have things improved or declined, or is the church simply in the process of reforming?

Many vehemently point to our decline - fewer in worship, less money, a general malaise of spirit - as indication of our basic un-reformed-ness, that we are failing, and so what we are doing is no longer right. I believe that we are caught in a far more complex situation and era of reformation in which old sins and failings are addressed and new successes and sins are being created. We won’t really know what has happened until it has happened for a good while longer.

The heralded growth of the evangelical wing of the Christian Church has shown itself at many points to be more of a conservative social movement than a properly religious one and it is starting to empty out. “Contemporary worship” is frequently empty of, well, worship. The 16th c. Reformation was theological at its best, when the reformers changed things for good reason. Our current Reformation needs always to have good reasons and ideas upfront, realizing that newer ideas will be needed pretty soon. We are never reform-ed, just in a perpetual state of reform-ing.