Raise up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it, teaches Proverbs. For me, this has been the case regarding worship. I was raised a Lutheran, in an older, established congregation belonging to what would become the ELCA, First Lutheran in Minot, ND. I imbibed the ambience of the Lutheran liturgy as most Sundays we used Setting One from the Lutheran Book of Worship, the organist, cantor, and choir leading us in powerful, traditional settings of the Kyrie and Gloria, the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei. And the glorious hymnody . . . I still get the chills I felt in childhood when I hear “Lift High the Cross.” The high point was Holy Communion: Congregants would process up, take a small silver chalice from the table, and kneel at the octagonal rail encircling the altar, and receive the elements kneeling. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but my experience of good liturgy shaped me, even as a child, both doctrinally in the ordinary, propers, and hymns, as well as experientially, as I encountered the mystery of God in the ambience of our beautiful worship.
But a funny thing happened on my way through the liturgical forum. I got saved as a teen, after a few years of concerning myself chiefly with hockey and heavy metal and dropping out of confirmation in junior high. In brief, I had a profound healing experience relieving me from a severe depression. From that point on, I began taking my faith very seriously, which was good. While remaining active in my Lutheran congregation, I also began to hang out in Baptist and Pentecostal youth groups, wherein traditional liturgy was often disparaged as “dead ritual” or something similar. Given my mad skills on guitar and bass, honed by hours in my basement memorizing every song Iron Maiden, Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, and Ozzy Osbourne ever recorded, I took an interest in what’s called “contemporary worship” right about the time (the early 1990s) many congregations affiliated with mainline denominations of longstanding liturgical tradition were experimenting with worship bands. Obviously we weren’t playing Metallica’s “Creeping Death” when the Old Testament reading concerned the exodus, but we were playing music in my Lutheran church as well as my evangelical churches that was peppy and pleasing, modeled of course after the typical 3:05 pop song.
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