This article first appeared in Alpha Magazine, which is now known as 'Christianity and Renewal.'

Now and again somebody asks me what my own musical influences were and I have got into a habit of saying the Baptist hymnbook and the Beatles. It wasn’t of course just the Baptist hymnbook or just the Beatles but it certainly is true that I was strongly influenced by both the traditional hymns of my church upbringing and the popular music of the sixties. The period of time in which I was a teenager was not noted for its appreciation of the past.

 It was an era when builders were ripping out and smashing up beautiful Victorian fireplaces to the sounds of the Who singing ‘Hope I die before I get old’ on the transistor radio. The Cold War and its threat of imminent nuclear annihilation along with the first wave of apocalyptic predictions of population explosion leading to mass global starvation tended to focus attention on the present moment.

Along with many of my generation I seriously doubted whether I would safely reach the age of 30!

At the same time I was expending my creative energy trying to express my Christian faith in the terms of my own generation, and defining my place in what often seemed like an ecclesiastical time warp. It took me some years to even realize that I had a heritage as a Christian, let alone appreciate it.

As a worship leader during the first major wave of contemporary worship expression, I would avidly study what the Bible said about praise and worship but give scant attention to the way my spiritual ancestors had practiced it for the intervening 2,000 years.

I guess you have to live for a few years before you start to think very far either into the future or into the past. My friend Roger Forster was once expressing his enthusiasm for history when his son commented wryly, ‘That’s because you have become a part of it.’

There is a sardonic saying, ‘History repeats itself. It has to—no one listens.’

Without doubt an anti-historical stance has serious flaws. It is often based either in ignorance or pride or both, and it can trap us in our present culture and rob us of a rich inheritance. It increases the risk of repeating the mistakes of the past unnecessarily.

In fact the content, if not always the culture, of Christian worship always takes place within the dynamic tension between the past, the present and the future. The Early Church clearly had four basic building blocks of worship (Acts 2:22). These were: the Apostles’ teaching, the fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer.

Each of these can easily be seen in terms of past, present and future, but perhaps the most clear example is the breaking of bread. Whenever we take communion we do three things. First, we act out the historical event of the Last Supper with all its rich truth and symbolism. Second, we receive by faith the meaning, power and reality of those events into our lives now, ‘eating and drinking’ the full benefits of knowing Christ and his salvation.

Third, we anticipate the fulfillment and completion of Christ’s mission, culminating in another meal, the Wedding Supper of the Lamb as described in the Book of Revelation. We could sum this up in three words: re-enactment, realization and anticipation.

But there is another dynamic tension in which we live, and that is the need to contextualize the celebration of the past, present and future realities of our faith in order to make it understandable and vital in terms of the dominant culture and thought forms of the day The challenge is to do this without falling out of step with the authentic worship heritage of our ancestors and without falling into the trap of syncretism, compromising the truth of the gospel by absorbing contradictory elements from the surrounding culture.

Robert Webber, to whom I am indebted for the term ‘historical amnesia’, cites three current imbalances of worship due to the infiltration of rationalism, emotionalism and entertainment. Worship can be reduced to a lecture hall, a psychiatric couch or a stage. How can we be relevant and accessible to the world around us, but not be infiltrated by it that we unwittingly worship at its altars?

I am convinced that an appreciation of our worship heritage is a powerful antidote to those extreme swings of the pendulum which from time to time are a feature of church life.  It would be a tragedy if we forgot where we have come from and where we are going. It would also be a serious oversight if we forgot that the Church consists not only of the believers alive on planet Earth today, but of all those who have lived up to this point in time!

I wonder whether one of the features at Christ’s return will be the unique worship offerings of every generation that has ever loved him, at last united and combined in one time and place. Wouldn’t that be an extraordinarily rich offering of glory, praise and honor!

I do not know how the cultural distinctions of earth will appear in the perfection of heaven, but those who may expect it all to be Westernized could get a shock. After all, most of the Christians alive today are from the other four continents!

Jesus said that every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.  So how can we enjoy the heritage of the past when so much of it can seem musty and dusty? Many people are discovering ways to refresh the past, or create a fusion of old and new (though purists may shudder!).

Examples abound: Gregorian plainsong over a club-dance rhythm track, new tunes or contemporary arrangements of old hymns, lyrical revisions to remove archaic language, ancient liturgies interpreted via multi-media technology, reconstructions of biblical festivals or ceremonies appropriately interpreted and completed through New Covenant truth.

We should not elevate antiquity for its own sake and we must ensure that it is actually treasure that we are unearthing in the storeroom of the house of God and not old heresies dusted off until they sparkle again!

The worst kind of historical amnesia would be to forget the person for whom and through whom we worship. He has already given us the most potent antidote when he took bread and wine and said to his disciples, ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ [1]  

1] September 1995.  This article first appeared in Alpha Magazine, which is now known as Christianity and Renewal.

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