Sunday, February 10, 2008

Modernization of Religion?

Had an interesting conversation with a few friends over dinner last night that got me thinking a bit. As we all know, Christianity, or for the most part, all of the religions, has become more open/accepting over the years. But since I guess I'm most familiar with Christianity, I'll stick to that. There is alot of the "traditional vs. revolutional" discussion, ever since, forever. As secular culture evolves, it seems like the church follows suits. I guess most relevant example would be worship music - there are alot of debates for hymns vs. more modern worship music. While I will not take sides because it is not necessary for this discussion, but with this example, we can see that as the secular culture evolves, the culture at the church also evolves with it. While the "typical" argument would be that the church is simply providing people, mainly teenagers, something relevant and familiar to them, and thus does not discourage the congregation to come as they feel what they are doing is "old-school", but is that a religion evolving, or is that a religion modernizing itself to remain "relevant" to society. Are the true purpose of religion (or have the true purpose, or will it ever be) lost as the culture of the church continues to try to remain "relevant" to the secular society, and the continous attempt to appeal to the youth culture.

Probably sounded alot like a bunch of mumble jumble, but definitely something that got me thinking...

1 comment:

Albert said...

good thoughts man. Sometimes its sad that it doesn't work more the other way, where the Church (having the freedom in Christ) is on the front lines in creating culture where people may live uniquely at such a time and place we are in today.

However, that being said, could it also work both ways? The Church is not so much conforming to culture, but embracing a culture's uniqueness and understanding that the God we so worship is a creative God who embraces all kinds of way of living.

That being said though, we often embrace both the good and the bad, and we (The Church) forget where to stand up - and it just becomes relativism.