Don: Culture is the set of the values, beliefs, ideas, customs, manual skills, arts, and traditions of a people, passed along to succeeding generations. Churches and families have cultures, just as whole societies do. These cultures exert a major influence on how and what we worship. Can, or should, culture and worship be separated?
Four forces influence congregational worship in any faith group. They are dynamic but relatively imperviousness to change in the short term.
- The founding culture of the church.
- The worship traditions of the church.
- The normative musical baseline. This is the most influential factor in successful evangelism.
- The size of the space available for worship.
Of these, the founding culture is perhaps the most difficult to pin down, because of historical developments. It has been asserted that the musical baseline is the most influential in terms of who will be attracted to a worship service.
Despite their great cultural differences, all congregations congregate primarily for the purpose of worship. For most, worship is the central spiritual practice offered to congregants, the most culture-filled, and the most critical component of the philosophy and the strategy for congregational growth.
Culture often defines ritual, and ritual is extremely helpful in setting the boundaries for a faith community. The more culture-bound our worship becomes, the more difficult it becomes to accommodate others who are not part of the culture—the sheep “not of this fold” as Jesus might say. The culture of a faith group is heavily weighted by group identity and exclusivity.
The Israelites of the Old Testament, who were chosen by God to represent him, were given extensive means to identify themselves and to limit the access of outsiders to their culture. For example, how they wove their dress cloth, what to eat and how to prepare and eat it, laws of ritual purity, and so on, were part of their culture, limited access to their culture, and had (at least then) great representative meaning. (They should not weave dress cloth from a mixture of wool—a native product of God’s creative act in the form of sheep, and linen—an imported product of man originating as hemp cultivated and turned into linen fiber in Egypt.)
But much as culture influence worship, worship also influences culture. Good worship begets good culture, the OT suggested. When Israel sinned against God, it was usually the result of bad worship—such as becoming idolatrous and worshiping other gods. How and who they worshiped defined, in a major way, the culture of Israel. Worship shapes the worshiper into that which is being worshiped, thereby shaping entire nations and their ideas, beliefs, and traditions—their culture.
Faulty worship not only breaks God’s laws; but also, in substituting a false god for the true God, we tend to become like the false god.
Israel, for instance, decided to substitute a theocracy for a king, and made demands for that king:
And it came about when Samuel was old that he appointed his sons judges over Israel. Now the name of his firstborn was Joel, and the name of his second, Abijah; they were judging in Beersheba. His sons, however, did not walk in his ways, but turned aside after dishonest gain and took bribes and perverted justice.
Then all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah; and they said to him, “Behold, you have grown old, and your sons do not walk in your ways. Now appoint a king for us to judge us like all the nations.” But the thing was displeasing in the sight of Samuel when they said, “Give us a king to judge us.” And Samuel prayed to the Lord. The Lord said to Samuel, “Listen to the voice of the people in regard to all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected Me from being king over them. Like all the deeds which they have done since the day that I brought them up from Egypt even to this day—in that they have forsaken Me and served other gods—so they are doing to you also. Now then, listen to their voice; however, you shall solemnly warn them and tell them of the procedure of the king who will reign over them.” (1 Samuel 8:1-9)
Samuel went on to tell the Israelites of the changes to their culture that would result from their change in worship: The king would conscript them into the army; put them in front of his chariots; make them work and till the soil for him; make weapons of war; take their daughters for perfumers, cooks, and bakers; take the best of their land and vineyards; and so on.
Jeremiah tells of the consequences of all this from God’s perspective:
Therefore thus says the Lord God, “Behold, My anger and My wrath will be poured out on this place, on man and on beast and on trees of the field and on the fruit of the ground; and it will burn and not be quenched.”
Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, “Add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices and eat flesh. For I did not speak to your fathers, or command them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices. But this is what I commanded them, saying, ‘Obey My voice, and I will be your God, and you will be My people; and you will walk in all the way which I command you, that it may be well with you.’ Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but walked in their own counsels and in the stubbornness of their evil heart, and went backward and not forward. Since the day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt until this day, I have sent you all My servants the prophets, daily rising early and sending them. Yet they did not listen to Me or incline their ear, but stiffened their neck; they did more evil than their fathers.
“You shall speak all these words to them, but they will not listen to you; and you shall call to them, but they will not answer you. You shall say to them, ‘This is the nation that did not obey the voice of the Lord their God or accept correction; truth has perished and has been cut off from their mouth.
‘Cut off your hair and cast it away,
And take up a lamentation on the bare heights;
For the Lord has rejected and forsaken
The generation of His wrath.’
For the sons of Judah have done that which is evil in My sight,” declares the Lord, “they have set their detestable things in the house which is called by My name, to defile it. They have built the high places of Topheth, which is in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to burn their sons and their daughters in the fire, which I did not command, and it did not come into My mind.
“Therefore, behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when it will no longer be called Topheth, or the valley of the son of Hinnom, but the valley of the Slaughter; for they will bury in Topheth because there is no other place. The dead bodies of this people will be food for the birds of the sky and for the beasts of the earth; and no one will frighten them away. Then I will make to cease from the cities of Judah and from the streets of Jerusalem the voice of joy and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride; for the land will become a ruin. (Jeremiah 7:20-34)
These are dire consequences indeed.
In the garden of Eden before the Fall, worship and culture were essentially the same thing. This passage defined the culture:
God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to every thing that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so. God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. (Genesis 1:28-31)
The command Adam and Eve was essentially to cultivate the earth. The words “cultivate” and “culture” share the same Latin root cultus, which means to worship. That Adam was in direct, personal communication with God meant that everything he did was an act of worship. To consecrate the sabbath as holy time and to consecrate his tending of the garden was culturally to consecrate both his time and his space. There was no separation between culture and worship or religious duty. They were one and the same. But after the fall, a curse was placed on the ground that was to be cultivated, and culture began to separate from worship right up to today, when the gap has gown quite wide.
Can we identify the elements of our worship that are purely cultural versus those that are purely worshipful? What needs to be preserved ad what should be discarded? Can God be seen only through a cultural lens? Could worship be culture-free?
David: To me, true worship (which I have called “capital-W worship”) is culture-free. It is part of humanity, not part of culture. But the small-w worship we generally relate to is nearly all culture-laden and its cultural elements (music, for instance) are readily identifiable to the culture. I think culture inserted into worship does more harm than good, but at the same time it is almost inevitable because it is human! Perhaps converts into another religion (say, a catholic who becomes a Jew) are better worshipers insofar as their worship is relatively untainted by cultural elements they have not yet fully absorbed and identified with, though those same elements may be what attracted them to convert. Russian Orthodox chant, for example, is so attractive to me that I would attend their church just to listen to their music, if there were one nearby!
Donald: Too often, it seems to me, Sabbath school is about Adventism rather than about the Bible; about the church rather than about faith. I found Adventist culture described on a website as “insular and avoiding non-members.” The challenge of leaving the church is that one is therefore leaving friends and family—one is alone. The successful Willow Creek megachurch in Chicago was founded on a philosophy of reaching out to the “un-churched”—people who had left their original churches. One way they tried to do this was by abolishing all symbolic and iconic representations of church: No singing, no art, no offering, none of the things various religions have. Later, it did adopt some singing and an offering though not in the same way as other churches. The cultural pressure was perhaps overwhelming.
Kiran: Coming from a restrictive Hindu culture, my view of Adventist culture is positive. For example, the Hindu calendar is awash in auspicious and inauspicious signs (Mondays are god, Tuesdays are bad, certain days of the lunar calendar are good or bad, the sky constellation may be good or bad, depending on many factors, etc. etc.) Choosing an auspicious date on which to do anything was fraught with difficulty. Adventism freed me of these restrictions, so my new culture felt liberating, but it is still necessary to have a culture, I think, as a means of being helped to behave in a way that maintains our connection with God. It’s always possible for a culture to grow over-restrictive, though.
Jay: Small-w worship is probably the only kind of which we are capable. Culture is ingrained in us, it cannot simply be cast aside. If that is so, then can culturally embedded small-w worship be used as a stepping stone towards capital-W worship? It sounded as though Kiran might have experienced some of this when he converted Adventism. The problem is that we tend to attribute our personal feelings of liberation and better worship to the rightness of our adopted church and its culture and its worship, and think we are justified in promoting the divine rightness of our church versus the wrongness of all others.
Kiran: Don’t we have to accept some claim to rightness, or at least some recognition of the impossibility of stripping worship of its culture, in order to justify imposing our form of worship on our children?
Jay: It’s easier to have a relationship with people in our own culture; people who think like us. For that reason, Adventists tend to seek Adventist spouses. That is the easy way out, but I don’t think it is what God is asking us to do.
David: God wants us get away from the divisions caused by culture but not by shutting them out. The Good Samaritan could (and surely would) have helped anyone—Samaritan, Jew, anybody—and his action would have been capital-W worship regardless of differences in culture. Any culture does indeed help its members to get along with one another. Conflict generally occurs at the interface between cultures, and surely all mainstream religious cultures would agree that God does not want conflict, so…!
The basis of much worship ritual and symbolism, such as forbidden cloth and inauspicious days, is lost upon most worshipers. Such ritual and symbolism was perhaps not a bad thing when its basis was understood, but when the basis is forgotten, a symbol’s relationship to the thing symbolized is lost too! It becomes mere superstition and becomes subject to embellishment. Even when the basis is understood and unembellished, we have a tendency (well known to General Systems Theory) to believe that the map is the territory, that the symbol is the thing symbolized.
I tend to doubt that we can reach capital-W worship through small-w worship. I believe it can be reached only through the inner light, which is common to all Wo/Mankind and knows no culture.
Mikiko: Culture is a human intellectual construct. I think the achievement of true worship will change anyone’s culture.
Robin: All cultures think they are the best culture. We seldom look to the faults in our own cultures. In the Book of Revelation, the earth’s myriad cultures are obliterated through uniform dress, uniform symbol, and uniform song of praise:
After these things I looked, and behold, a great multitude which no one could count, from every nation and all tribes and peoples and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, and palm branches were in their hands; and they cry out with a loud voice, saying,
“Salvation to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.” (Revelation 7:9-11)
Later in Revelation, John wrote again of a common—worldly culture-free—setting in which all of Wo/Mankind will live at the end of time.
I saw no temple in it, for the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple. And the city has no need of the sun or of the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God has illumined it, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. In the daytime (for there will be no night there) its gates will never be closed; and they will bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it; and nothing unclean, and no one who practices abomination and lying, shall ever come into it, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life. (Revelation 21:22-27)
Since it is clearly the case that God accepts into his kingdom people of all nations, then it is equally clear that he does not value one culture over another: All are equal in his sight. So why not in ours?
The last passage also says the nations will bring “nothing unclean” into the new earth, which I take to mean nothing spiritually unclean. Does that include a rasher of bacon?
Donald: National pride is prevalent, and we are comfortable with our own kind. The latter is true of animals too.
Jay: Political correctness would dictate that each animal deserves unique recognition, but the Bible predicts that the lion will lay down with the lamb—their uniqueness will count for nothing—as it did not in the garden of Eden.
Donald: But let’s not forget that within cultures, and even within any given politically correct viewpoint, people often do differ and disagree.
Jay: To think of like-mindedness as the result of sin as opposed to as a good thing is to change one’s viewpoint. Since the Fall, the natural order of things is to clump together in cultures. Before the Fall, there was no clumping. We have still not recovered from the Fall, so culture is what it is and we must live with it. But recognizing all that surely changes (for the good) the way we look at people of different cultures, and the way we approach God and worship.
In Revelation, the diverse nations are unified by their “white robe”—which is probably a metaphor for God’s grace.
David: Culture is not conducive to love, grace, mercy, and compassion. Cultural clumping, banding together, was a response to the fear that entered the heart of Wo/Man for the first time when we Fell. Cultural clumping gives comfort but adds nothing to the sum total of love in the world.
I believe that true worship is innate to the individual, it is personal. But also, as a socialist, I support the idea of forming groups that offer protections to their members (national governments, for example) and abhor the rugged individualism espoused by the extreme right.
Don: How does, how could, and how should worship affect culture?
Donald: The Adventist General Conference, held every five years, ends with a “parade of nations”—people dress up in national costume. This is diversity dignified in a setting of capital-W worship, showing that the global church is in harmony with itself. This is very different from everyone wearing a uniform.
Chris: There was only one culture in the garden of Eden, until the snake was introduced. Location and language are among the many things that influence culture, which God surely knew when he inflicted language divisions on the Babelonians. They were all single-minded in their goal of breaching heaven, and by giving them multiple languages he destroyed their single-mindedness, as he surely intended.
Yet, there must be some value to us today in culture. If we could find it, perhaps it could reunite us.
Anonymous: Despite our cultural differences, we all find value in love. Since God is love, and since we worship God in different ways according to our cultures, we express the same love and worship God equally well, only, we do so in different ways. We love and worship in spite of our cultures.
Donald: The challenge, then, seems to be how to maintain church denominations without destroying them?
David: India has an over-arching national culture yet maintains multiple faiths which clearly affect culture at more parochial levels. In one state, a person who kills a cow (and thus offends Hinduism) can be sentenced to life in prison. This seems to me to be a worship-driven assault on Muslim and Christian culture, which treats cows as food rather than as sacred beings.
Anonymous: Yet they are united in their worship of God, though they express it so differently!
Kiran: Indian seems united yet it is so diverse.
David: If love unified them, then the Hindu would accept that the Muslim ate beef at dinner, and Muslim would accept that the Christian had bacon for breakfast. Such love may be possible at the individual level, but it seems to be more problematic at the cultural level.
Anonymous: When love is lacking in a culture, perhaps people start looking outside, to other cultures.
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