Chaos, cosmos and the ‘grunge church’
Chaos is descending on us as the boundaries of decency and even personhood are ripped away. The battle between chaos and cosmos is raging everywhere.
Major arenas of spiritual warfare are the Church, the family, the courthouse and educational systems. If our civilization is to survive, all these centers must be engaged at their best.
The most important is the Church, especially in its locality where it touches people directly. When churches fall into chaos, and become disheveled the whole begins to collapse, because, as the poet Yeats, put it, “the center cannot hold.”
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Worship and proclamation bathed and energized by prayer and the work of the Holy Spirit are the most important weapons of churches. If these weaken and fall into chaos, then chaos will advance even more rapidly across the whole of society.
If proclamation becomes trivialized chit-chat rather than declaration of bold biblical truth, and if worship becomes the slave of fallen culture, chaos sweeps in.
Admirably, many churches adjust their style to better communicate with a grungy culture, but too often the grunge sweeps off into and onto the enculturated church.
Two factors should drive style in worship and proclamation: the glory of God and the effectiveness of proclamation to needy human beings.
Excellence should prevail, and the style of one should not detract from the other.
Years ago, I was on a ministry team serving in an inner-city rescue mission. I was shocked one cold Friday night when a woman on our team came in wearing a lavish mink coat. She explained that she was meeting her husband at a high-end restaurant after the rescue mission service.
The people reached by the rescue mission were grungy dressed because they had nothing else. The fur-clad woman was almost a mockery of them and their poverty, and greatly marred the worship and proclamation that evening.
Grunge Church music teams are usually called “worship leaders,” but instead are often performers performing performance music unknown and unsingable to people in the audience who don’t listen to secular grunge music and wonder why they must sing it in church.
Sadly, the Grunge Church often drives people away because it is also a high-decibel Church. The assumption seems to be that the louder the half-million-dollar sound systems, the greater the manifest presence of God. Instead, churches should put the focus on the worship of the Most High God and the decibels will take care of themselves, sometimes from voices shouting spontaneous praises and songs of the Lord — music He loves to hear — and He is not deaf.
The Grunge Church is also the Church of Cool, so much so that even some retirement-age senior pastors attire themselves in the Grunge platform uniform, believing this will make themselves really cool in the eyes of the young.
Yet the greatest spiritual crisis of our age is the loss of the sense of the transcendent majesty of God. Excellence in appearance as well as tone should characterize adoration of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Rather than a trivial performance, there should be a sense among those who come into the “temple.” That inspires reverent worship and joyful praise that befit His Character.
Transcendence includes the realization that we are accountable to Him in every way. This is why the Old Testament emphasizes beauty and excellence in the worship itself and its garb.
So, I speak here as an old curmudgeon, full of years and probably too much indignation.
In 2015, I visited King George Chapel at Windsor Castle in England. The docent on duty heard that I had co-authored God and Churchill, a spiritual biography of Sir Winston Churchill, with his great-grandson, Jonathan Sandys.
The docent came out from the workroom where she carefully tended the accoutrements of the Chapel. She pointed out to me the seat that was long ago designated for Winston Churchill. His coat of arms hung on the wall at that spot. I couldn’t believe it when she beckoned me to come up and sit in that place which the great former prime minister had occupied and from which he prayed and sang worship songs throughout the Second World War whose immense burden was on his shoulders.
I realized I was experiencing one of the greatest five minutes of my life. I had not earned the right to sit in Churchill’s chair, but it was my privilege to do so.
The experience called for excellence, not grunge of mind, body, or dress. There was no place in those fleeting minutes for the trivial. Our family members traveling with me and watching this extraordinary event did so in wonderment. There was no flippancy, even though we usually kid each other a lot.
But that was no moment for anything other than awe and reverence in that Chapel built centuries ago as a house of worship of the living God by the royal family and their government officials and guests.
He is the same God we worship now.
And sometimes that praise of Him will arise from grungy-dressed people who are by no means grungy in person. In fact, one of the greatest revivals in history, the astounding Welsh revival of 1904-1905, sprang in the depths of the earth from dirty, dusty coal miners led by a fellow dusty, dirty man barely out of his teens — Evan Roberts.
So, if grunge is the best you’ve got, wear it and worship in it. In other words, always approach the Lord Yahweh and His Son, Yeshua, and the dynamic Holy Spirit with the best your heart can bring.
Wallace B. Henley is a former pastor, daily newspaper editor, White House and Congressional aide. He served 18 years as a teaching pastor at Houston's Second Baptist Church. Henley is author or co-author of more than 25 books, including God and Churchill, co-authored with Sir Winston Churchill's great grandson, Jonathan Sandys. Henley's latest book is Who will rule the coming 'gods'? The looming spiritual crisis of artificial intelligence.
