How do we balance “tradition” and “reformation”?

Worship FAQs, part 8 – How do we balance “tradition” and “reformation”?

To help answer our question this month, I will share selected quotes from pages 58-60 of Marva J. Dawn’s book about worship titled Reaching Out without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for This Urgent Time.

“Tradition, along with its correlative authority, was once one of the strongest sinews that held Western society together. …

“[Quoting David Wells]’Tradition is the process whereby one generation inducts its successor into its accumulated wisdom. The family once served as the chief conduit for this transmission, but the family is now collapsing, not merely because of divorce, but as a result of affluence and the innovations of a technological age. … [Mass media and technology] now provide the sorts of values that were once provided by the family. And public education … has also contracted out of this business, pleading that it has an obligation to be value-neutral. So it is that in the new civilization that is emerging, children are lifted away from the older values like anchorless boats on a rising tide.’

“In its desire to hold on to the traditions of its faith and to pass them on carefully, the Church is, to some extent, alien to this new civilization. …

“The Christian faith has always been odd … However, when churches … [become] completely alien to the culture in sticking to traditions or celebrating them in ways irrelevant to normal life – then Christians separate themselves from the world in a [way that] … prevents ministry to the culture from which they remove themselves.

“[Opposite tradition] is the need constantly to revitalize the tradition, to express the heritage of the faith in new worship forms that are accessible to the world around the Church. The primary key for holding the two … together is education – teaching the gifts of the faith tradition to those who do not yet know and understand them and teaching those who love the heritage some new forms in which it can be presented to others.

“To accent either … without the other is to lose them both. To utilize only new worship forms without connections to the past heritage is to isolate only a few years out of the 3,500-year history of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Reformation always returns to and deepens the gifts of the original. On the other hand, without reformation the tradition becomes distorted, stale, or dead – or an idolatry.

“[Let us] balance … tradition and revitalization, old and new. [Let us] preserve the tradition of faith without letting it become … inaccessible. [Let us also] participate in the present culture without thereby losing our soul.”