Let us review what we’ve been saying over these months about catholicity and the communion of the saints.

First, if catholicity is to be preserved, the church must recognize its own ecclesiastical culture of order, format, music, and language which transcends individual and group cultural tastes and preferences. Reformed worship should not be understood as the worship of any one group. Reformed worship may not be dismissed as an expression of eurocentricity. Reformed worship has the shape it does primarily because of the Reformers’ study of Scripture and the church fathers, a claim well documented in Hughes Old’s Patristic Roots of Reformed Worship. In other words, it is as the result not only of the Bible’s teaching, written over a period of nearly 1500 years by men in diverse cultures, rural, urban, and nomadic, but also the influence of the church fathers whose homelands included Africa, Egypt, Asia Minor, Palestine, and Europe. The worship of the “Ancient Church” (borrowing Calvin’s phrase) was not based on cultural preferences but the Bible. The same is true of the Reformed Church which self-consciously mimicked it. In a remarkable statement Old finds a root of Scottish Presbyterian psalm singing in the Egyptian desert Fathers, whose monastic communities enthusiastically sang psalms. The Reformers knew of this ancient practice as they reformed medieval worship.2 The forms of historic Reformed worship and ministry are not culturally relative but biblical and normative and conducive of catholicity and the communion of the saints. The traditional liturgy, says Mark Galli, “does not target any age or cultural subgroup. It does not even target this century . . . Instead the liturgy draws us into worship that transcends our time and place.”

Second, if the communion of the saints is to be preserved the church must reject a multicultural approach to worship. We’ve looked at generational churches (e.g. Hip Hop) and affinity churches (e.g. Cowboy). What about ethnic churches? Do they require their own music, language, content, and format? Would the attempt to establish historic Reformed worship in ethnic communities amount to a kind of cultural imperialism? Are Hispanics and Africans genetically or culturally programmed for “emotionally expressive” services, as they are sometimes called? Are churches, whose heritage and conviction is one of emotional discipline, wasting their time if they attempt to establish an emotionally restrained approach to worship in ethnic communities? Thomas Sowell points out that culture, broadly considered, is to an important degree chosen. He cites the examples of eighteenth century Scotland and nineteenth century Japan as peoples who saw the deficiencies of their indigenous cultures and made conscious choices to embrace beneficial characteristics of other cultures in order to improve their own. Sowell reminds us that some cultures are more conducive to educational advancement and material well being than others. Similarly, we would argue, some ecclesiastical cultures are more conducive to growth in biblical knowledge and spiritual well being than others. Sowell warns that “clinging to a counterproductive culture in the name of group pride” does no one any good, whether that culture is contemporary American pop culture, Australian aboriginal, historical Anglican, or “traditional” African-American.

The question ethnic churches as well as Reformed missions committees should ask is, would the biblical content and emotional discipline of Reformed worship and ministry be beneficial for these minority communities? Would, for example, the natural gifts of preaching and singing found in the African-American churches be enhanced by wedding them to lectio continua reading and preaching, metrical psalmody, and classical hymnody? Would these historic forms not multiply the sanctifying impact of African-American worship services even though their use would require a restraining of emotional expression? (to be continued)