Dr. Jim Shaddix is Senior Pastor of Riverside Baptist Church in Denver. Prior to going there, Dr. Shaddix was professor of preaching at New Orleans Baptist Seminary. In a recent piece on the Christian Post website, Shaddix proffers the theory that, in essence, despite all of the fuss over worship styles that is actually not the crucial issue facing the church today.
Shaddix says that younger folks have turned away from the church not because they sing hymns - they sing hymns along with Chris Tomlin and David Crowder. It's not because the pastor wears a suit and tie - they watch Leno, Letterman and John Stewart wearing suits and they think they are cool. They turn away because of the "lifeless Christianity" they see in the people of the church.
Beyond the form of traditional churches and worship styles, young people, who are labeled as the future of the church, are opposed to the "fabricated Christian culture" within the traditional churches...This generation of young people "can see through" the emotionless expression during worship and the frequent listing of prayer requests but the little time allotted in services for actual prayer. "They can see through our hypocrisy," said Shaddix.
While I don't agree with all of Shaddix' conclusions - he denegrates the emerging church and pooh-poohs the need for relevance - the crux of his theory is spot on. It is not so much the traditional forms themselves that young people reject but rather the fact that those for the most part those forms are empty and meaningless. Put another way, it's not that we aren't hip, it's that we aren't real.
Shaddix urges his fellow Southern Baptists to give their young brethren an authentic church.
Read the entire article here.
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