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A Conversation on the Contemporary Church and Traditional WorshipBuchanan: Back in the 1960's a psychiatrist by the name of Eric Berne took the intellectual and religious community by storm with a new therapeutic methodology called Transactional Analysis, "TA" as we learned to call it. One of the TA school, Thomas Harris, wrote a best seller called I'm OK—You're OK. The book was required reading for clergy and the source of countless sermons on grace and unconditional love, and, after its underlying thesis was examined more carefully, the source of some pretty good humor. "I'm OK—You're Not So Hot, Actually," for instance, or "If I'm OK—and You're OK—Why is it That I Still Can't Stand You?" Eric Berne's more substantial contribution was Games People Play, in which he proposed that in interpersonal relationships we play carefully structured games with rules—although we are not conscious of it. The purpose of these games is to allow us to talk about what concerns us, and to derive satisfaction from airing our grievances, hopes, pains, and needs, without ever having to do anything about them. The game I remember most clearly is, "Ain't it awful?" It requires at least two players, but can be played by an entire group, or colloquy as the case may be. The first player states the subject with a comprehensive declaration about how bad things are in whatever arena has been chosen: the quality of public education, the President's foreign policy, General Motors marketing of SUV's, violence on television, or the declining quality of public worship in the mainline Church. "Ain't it awful..." Other players join in by taking up the theme and adding other anecdotal material of ascending awfulness. "You think that's bad, let me tell you about what's happening over at Westminster Church." I've been a participant in a fair number of games of "Ain't it awful" about worship, and my hope is that we will not waste our time today with another round, or with the opposite and even less attractive game—"Aren't we wonderful," for being so smart, so tasteful, and so classic compared to those dull, shallow evangelicals with their praise bands and praise choruses. The truth is we have a problem, and people like us haven't been very good or helpful in dealing with it. The problem is that a seismic cultural shift has happened, and is still in process, and our very best thinkers are struggling to understand it, name it, and describe it for us. There are a thousand ways to define it. One of them is ecclesiastically, or theologically. In a recent issue of Context Martin Marty quotes a new book about what is happening to Christianity in Europe—the old Christendom. The late Henri Nouwen, whose name still resounds around the Yale Divinity School, made a melancholy trip before he died to his boyhood home in the Netherlands, where in one generation Roman Catholicism had faded to a quaint ritual. A few months before his death, Nouwen spoke to a paltry crowd of thirty-six students at the seminary he had attended, once bustling with hundreds of eager candidates for priesthood. Not long ago ninety-eight percent of Dutch people attended church regularly; today it's under ten percent. Almost half the church buildings in Holland have been converted into restaurants, galleries, condominiums, or have been destroyed.1 |
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