The Limits of Heritage

Since I’ve passed my sixty-fourth birthday,  I find myself doing what I swore I’d never do.  I am becoming nostalgic.  I love the music of the past, the items of the past, even the toys of my past.  Nowadays, the only place I find those things are in antique stores. 

That love of the past is nostalgia. It’s purely personal and depends on when I was born, where I was raised, and by whom.  

Nostalgia is a constant danger to Christians.  It is a form of perception bias that makes us think what we loved in the past is somehow qualitatively better than what there is today.  It causes us to judge more harshly the people and trends of today.

In one church I pastored, an old-timer shared a story he heard from his fathers about their church bought their first musical instrument—an organ.  There was a long, hard, and angrily debated.  When it was over, one of the elders shouted, “you can keep the Devil’s squeezebox!” and stormed out of the church, never to return. Today, the thought of an organ being a worldly instrument is far out of their minds—its music has been sanctified by nostalgia.

The old songs of today were the new songs of yesterday and were opposed by the people who thought they were dangerous innovation. Isaac Watts was savaged by his contemporaries for ruining the metrical psalms.  Choirs were looked upon as sinful by many churchmen of the Middle Ages.  Perception bias based on nostalgia keeps us anchored to the past and prevents our moving in the Spirit.

Think of tradition as the tail of a kite. It gives weight and stability in a hard wind, but if it is staked to the ground the kite will never soar.  Think of it as an anchor. An anchor is very important, but we must raise it to move. It’s important to understand the difference between a living heritage and pointless sentimentality.  Tradition is an enrichment to our faith. Traditionalism is an idol and competitor to faith. 

Tradition worship is a constant danger to Christians.  Those who worship tradition seldom realize they are doing it, or that there is anything wrong with it.  Traditionalism is when we cannot tell the difference between the house we worship in, and the church itself.  Traditionalism is when we believe all worship music must be in some traditional style, or that church building must have the same architecture, or that people should dress a certain way in worship.   It confuses cultural bias with faithfulness. It is when we cannot imagine that someone outside of our tradition can love God as much as we do, or that God can be pleased with people who look or sound differently.

We shouldn’t assume, however, that this is a problem only with “traditional” churches.  The tendency to confuse form with faith is at least as pronounced among “contemporary” churches as it is among the old-school churches.  The contemporary “seeker-sensitive” church has already become a tradition, and those who have grown up in it naturally assume that their worship style is “blessed” while old-fashioned traditional churches are not, based on their own biases and prejudices. In many contemporary churches, worship style is as heavily regimented as it is on old Protestant churches. 

Music is the language of the heart, but it is not a universal language.  If we use a musical language that is not understood or appreciated by those who listen, we may as well be praying in tongues.  We need to constantly remind ourselves that just because we understand or appreciate a musical or worship form does not mean it is bad, nor should we insist that people who cannot understand our musical language to be required to agree that ours is better.  To say that traditional or contemporary music is more “godly” is like saying that English is a better language than Spanish.  Our insistence on the spiritual superiority of whatever we enjoy is the sign of spiritual immaturity.

No matter how much we love the past, we still must live in the present. That means sometimes we must leave there safe place of our heritage and start something new, or reform it. Traditionalism can sometimes lead us to hang on too long to a church we should have left.   If our denominational has changed, or if we have, it may be to our mutual advantage to part.   The argument that “this has always been my church” is a weak one since the church never did belong to us.

A man once approached Jesus and offered to become a disciple.  He said he would follow him anywhere, once he had buried his father. Jesus’ response was gruff and brutal.  “Let the dead bury the dead, come and follow me.” Jesus wasn’t being unloving—He was just clarifying priorities.  If we cannot love God more than our past connections, we cannot be His disciple. Most of us may never be called upon to leave our family behind, or even the comfort of our church, but if we are we must be willing to go.  Our heritage and our faith may travel far together, but sooner or later our paths will diverge. Sometimes God will say, “leave your father and mother, and follow Me.”  When He does, we must throw aside nostalgia and be ready to go.

Do you lean towards the past or towards the future?  Are you ready for new things, or do you want to hold on to the old?  

How do we separate what is actually God’s working in the past from our feelings of nostalgia?  Are you willing to embrace new thoughts and ideas?

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