"Yo, God is so ill," shouted Adam Durso, youth pastor at Christ Tabernacle Church in Glendale, Queens, New York, using a hip-hop term of praise. Hip-hop worship for the hip-hop generation? "The only way to make the gospel relevant to them is through hip-hop," reports a Chicago youth pastor to the New York Times.1 "Cowboy churches" for cowboys? Indeed. Participants come to church dressed in Cowboy gear. New converts are baptized in an 8-foot circular blue plastic horse trough. The floor of the church is dirt-brown sand, "so you can come to church straight from riding or feeding your stock," says Pastor Gary Morgan of the Cowboy Church of Ellis County, south of Dallas.2 The Ten Commandments are reinterpreted in cowboy twang: "Honor yer Ma and Pa; No telling tales or gossipin'; Git yourself to Sunday meeting; No foolin around with another fellow's gal;" etc. The benedictory song is often Roy Roger's "Happy Trails to You."

Six months after this development was reported in USA Today, a similar article in Christianity Today described the same phenomenon with a straight face, seemingly oblivious to the silliness of some of these innovations, and especially to the unfeasibility and divisiveness of this philosophy if universally accepted.3 When the advocates of "contemporary worship" promote its implementation they cannot be urging for a single thing because there is no one contemporary culture. Instead, they argue for a thousand times a thousand different approaches to worship, each catering to individual cultural preferences based on age, affinity, or ethnicity, and at the same time excluding all the rest. Sally Morgenthaler finds it necessary to devote nearly 40 pages to distinguishing the worship that appeals to "Boomers" to that which appeals to "Busters."4 Being "contemporary" isn't enough. One must determine which contemporary constituency one wishes to reach and tailor one's services to its tastes. Saddleback now conducts four services simultaneously on Sunday mornings: "traditional" Saddleback, rock, gospel, and classic hymns and choruses. "How will we respond to the new tribalism of worship and music?" asks Michael S. Hamilton, in an article otherwise favorable to the new diversity in worship. "How can we keep our sectarian worship from becoming a sectarianism of the soul?"5 "In today's climate," argues Gene E. Veith, "if a church seizes upon one particular style of popular music, then that will privilege those whose music is chosen and alienate everyone else."6 What is the answer to this fragmenting of the church? A fresh appreciation of its catholicity.

Reformed Protestants have always affirmed the importance of the church's catholicity and apostolicity, though they have tended to define these doctrinally and spiritually rather than institutionally.7 Anabaptists were criticized by the Reformed as schismatics who ignored or even disdained catholicity of doctrine and practice. The Reformers showed little patience for the individualistic and idiosyncratic. They affirmed the priesthood of all believers (collectively). They did not believe in the priesthood (or preacher-hood) of every believer.8 Catholicity, and its regular companion, unity, were esteemed. Reformed Protestants have seen themselves as practicing a reformed version of Catholicism, which, though reformed, is nonetheless catholic. William Perkins (1558-1602), a father of English Puritanism, wrote in 1597 a work entitled Reformed Catholic, claiming for the Reformed church a true catholicity over against Rome's false claims.9 John Owen, Richard Baxter, and mainstream Puritans embraced the titles of "reformed catholic" or "mere catholic."10 Their argument was that the novelties of doctrine and practice that developed in the Middle Ages were discontinuous with the Apostolic and Patristic doctrine and practice that had preceded it. The Reformers attempted to establish unity in ministry and doctrine with the Apostolic and Patristic church, as well as all that was sound from the Middle Ages. Rome, with its normalizing of Medieval innovations, had broken ranks with the catholic church, the church of the Apostles and Fathers with whom the Reformers were joining hands in fellowship. The Reformation, in this sense, may be regarded as an argument over which church would be regarded as normative, the Medieval church as it had evolved or the Patristic. The Protestant Reformers "anchored their case" for reform "in the patristic period . . ." says David Wells, "arguing that the Reformation was really a contest between patristic and medieval Christianity."11 Nevertheless they respected and borrowed generously even from the medieval church. "The Reformed churches . . . intentionally harvested the best theology, piety and practice of the Eastern and Western church," as Scott Clark points out, "from the fathers through the Middle Ages" (my emphasis).12 Continuity with the past in both doctrine and worship has always been a serious concern of Reformed Protestantism. (to be continued)