Marketers and Mystics: How Worship is Reshaping Evangelicalism
A History of Contemporary Praise and Worship: Understanding the Ideas that Reshaped the Protestant Church - Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong (Baker, 2021).
I have not read a book that helped me understand the twentieth century Protestant theological landscape as much as this one in a long time. A good book of history describes something important; a great book of history opens up a whole host of important implications of the story it tells. This book is great because it describes changes in Evangelicalism that have far-reaching, even crucial theological implications for the future.
Will Evangelicalism Go Liberal?
In the late nineteenth century the main Protestant denominations were largely evangelical and orthodox, but by the mid twentieth century had become liberal and accommodated to the rapidly secularizing culture. After World War II there was a surge of evangelicalism fuelled by fundamentalists emerging from underground to re-engage culture and by refugees from the liberalizing mainline joining evangelicals in replacing the old mainline. That process is now almost complete as the old mainline denominations are fading away and have become irrelevant while the evangelical churches have now become the new mainline. The question I have been pondering recently is if the new evangelical mainline will also go liberal as well.
At first glance there would seem to be nothing to worry about. Evangelicalism is thriving numerically, although there are some clouds on that horizon. More importantly, the main characteristic of Liberal Protestantism, the denial of the supernatural, seems absent from Evangelicalism. Since the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy of the early twentieth century Evangelicals have been careful not to deny the virgin birth, miracles, atoning death, bodily resurrection and personal return of Christ. And the battle to affirm the inerrancy of the Bible seems to have been largely won. So, what would make anyone think that Evangelicalism is in danger of going liberal?
History of Worship in 20th Century Evangelicalism
In this book, “A History of Contemporary Praise & Worship” (hereafter HCPW), the authors describe two rivers of worship theology and practice that eventually merged into the Contemporary Praise & Worship industry that we have today. The great value of this book is the deeper understanding of the development of the changes in the twentieth century gained by the analytical precision the authors employ in distinguishing the two streams from each other.
The First Stream: Praise and Worship
The first stream originates in the Pentecostal revival of the Latter Rain in Western Canada beginning in 1948. In this stream, called in the book the “Praise & Worship” stream, there was a conviction that the key to good worship is to take Psalm 22:3 “But thou art holy, O thou that inhabits the praises of Israel.” (KJV) Reg Layzell, a Pentecostal revivalist at the centre of the Latter Rain movement, began in 1948 to interpret this verse as meaning that, even though God is omnipresent, God’s presence is nevertheless manifest in a particular way when his people praise him. He emphasized that praising God is a choice we make and work we can do. The result is that an atmosphere is created in which there can be a direct encounter of the soul with God. This, for Layzell, is worship. Praise prepares the way for worship; hence the phrase “Praise and Worship.”
Worship in this tradition, as it developed outside the mainstream of Evangelicalism and later gradually infiltrated it, is the direct encounter of the soul with God. This is a kind of mysticism. Carl Trueman points out that “mysticism is alive and well within evangelical circles” and “evangelical mysticism is not really distinguishable from traditional liberalism at the level of its understanding of what constitutes truth.” (Crisis of Confidence: Reclaiming the Historic Faith in a Culture Consumed with Individualism and Identity, 24) Trueman points out that the liberalism of Schleiermacher was a kind of mysticism, rather than simply a denial of the supernatural. Certain strands of liberal theology, (if they did not take a turn toward reconceptualizing the faith in terms of “social justice”), were drawn to mysticism as a form of religion compatible with philosophical naturalism. Even as the old supernatural Christianity was emptied of meaning by naturalism, Christian words and symbols could be reinterpreted in terms of a mystical encounter with the Divine.
The interesting thing to note is that while liberal Protestants, having had their supernatural faith undermined by evolution and higher criticism, needed mysticism to make sense of continued religious practice, Pentecostals presumably had no such need. They cheerfully accepted the reality of the supernatural, yet they embraced mysticism anyway. The embrace of worship as an encounter of the soul with God that is not mediated by the Word (on the basis of an interpretation of a Bible verse!) set them up to fit nicely into the increasingly relativistic postmodern culture of the late twentieth century. The worldwide explosion of Pentecostal forms of Christianity can be seen as a new form of religion that matches up well with wider cultural trends.
The Second Stream: Contemporary Worship
The second stream identified by the authors of HCPW is that of “Contemporary Worship.” Here the key word is “pragmatism” and the key verse is 1 Cor 9:22b “I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.” (KJV) Evangelicals like Ralph Carmichael became convinced that there was a gap between modern people and Christian music and that this gap was a barrier to the gospel. Carmichael believed that the gospel never changes but how the gospel is communicated (including the music used) much change continuously to keep up with secular trends. He argued that “all forms are morally neutral and thus potentially usable for proclaiming the gospel.” (HCPW, 207) He said that music is a language and just as any language can be used to proclaim the gospel so any kind of music can be used. This provided a rationale for liturgical pragmatism. Carmichael was supported by Billy Graham, who wrote a letter to him in April 1974 encouraging him in his composing work. (HCPW, 209) The idea that the primary purpose of the Sunday morning service is evangelism was widely accepted and so the music of worship was evaluated on the basis of how effective it was in evangelism.
This pragmatism in the service of evangelism was applied to worship “scientifically.” In the Church Growth movement headquartered at Fuller and the Seeker Sensitive movement promoted by Willow Creek this liturgical pragmatism drew on business models and sociological analysis to identify the target audience, the values held by this audience, and the best way to attract the attention of the audience. Contemporary music was seen by many mainline Protestants as a way to stem the declining attendance in their churches, but it was seen by Evangelicals as a way of reaching out and attracting unchurched people.
The final chapter of the book narrates how these two rivers, the Pentecostal/Charismatic Praise and Worship stream and the Evangelical Contemporary Worship stream, converged in the 1990’s into one gigantic river system that constitutes what we know today as the contemporary Christian music industry. And “industry” is the right word; it is a behemoth that cannot be ignored. As the subtitle of the book says these trends have indeed “reshaped the protestant church.”
Protestant worship underwent a major shift in the twentieth century from a Word-centered service in which there was a dialogue between God and his people to a mystical experience of direct encounter between the soul of the worshipper and God facilitated by contemporary music. The heart of worship was no longer a rationally exercised faith but rather a non-rational, emotional sense of connection. The mutation seems as drastic as the move from the medieval mass to Protestant preaching services in the sixteenth century. If doctrine follows liturgical practice, the long-term implications for Evangelical belief are still to be determined, but cannot be insignificant.
Marketers and Mystics Together
What is fascinating about these two streams is how they were able to merge even though superficially they seemed very different from each other. A business-oriented, marketing strategy would seem to have little to do with a mystical, emotional encounter with the Divine. Yet here we are; the marketers and the mystics lie down together in peace in the late modern kingdom of naturalism. The key to understanding how this could occur is to recognize that there is such a thing as functional naturalism, which is distinct from theoretical naturalism. In the former people just act as if everything in our experience could be reduced to natural laws and they do not take the supernatural into account. In the latter people pointedly proclaim that nothing exists beyond nature, so they believe there are no supernatural laws to consider.
As a result of the Enlightenment, Western culture adopted philosophical naturalism, which seemed to create an impenetrable barrier to Christian influence on culture. So, Liberal Protestantism adopted philosophical naturalism and immediately went into terminal decline. Evangelicalism rejected philosophical or theoretical naturalism, but adopted a functional naturalism, which made it compatible with the spirit of the age. Now what remains to be seen is if the functional naturalism of Evangelicalism will lead to secularization and the same fate as Liberal Protestantism. If the principle of “Lex orandi, lex credendi” (the law of prayer is the law of faith) turns out to hold for Evangelicalism, we may be looking at a looming catastrophe.