The Church Needs Tradition

A church ought to be making sure, in some small way, that the generation after it does not have to re-tread every inch of the same ground. While every generation has to encounter the gospel for itself, that does not mean it should be doing so without help. This is exactly where tradition helps. The pastor in the pulpit now ought to be doing his work so that the church he leaves behind does not have to re-examine everything he taught, decide whether any of it was true, and start over from the foundations.

The word for what happens when that handoff fails is "deconstruction," and every few months another story goes around. Sometimes it is a pastor's kid or a twenty-six-year-old with a microphone. More often it is a man in his forties or fifties airing out a midlife crisis on the church, announcing how much he has "had to unlearn." What most of them describe is a man who never learned enough to survive the question, which is a different complaint from the one he thinks he is making. He was given the phrases and never the reasons behind them, and when the question came, the phrases went over.

That is not always his fault. A lot of it belongs to the church that raised him sending confusing messages.

The Question Is Coming Tomorrow

Deuteronomy 6:20 assumes the question. When your son asks you in time to come what the testimonies and statutes and rules mean, Moses says, this is what you tell him: we were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt, and the LORD brought us out with a mighty hand. The Hebrew behind "in time to come" is מָחָר, which just means "tomorrow." Translators render it loosely because the idiom covers any future day, but the word Moses picked treats the child's question as a scheduled event, close enough to plan for, and he gives Israel the answer before the child is old enough to ask.

The same formula shows up in Exodus 13:14 about the Passover and again in Joshua 4 about the stones pulled out of the Jordan — when your children ask tomorrow what these stones mean, you will tell them the water stood up so Israel could cross. Israel is told in advance, in three different books, what the next generation will ask and what to say back.

Moses could have scripted a proof of God's existence or a case for why the law is reasonable. Instead, he says the son is told that his people were slaves and God brought them out, and he is given a place in that story, which was true before he asked about it. That is what a tradition is at bottom, and it is the piece the modern church keeps dropping.

Psalm 78 runs the same handoff out four generations — fathers, children, "the children yet unborn," and their children after them — so that each one would set its hope in God and not forget his works. Judges 2:10 shows what the failure looks like in a single verse: Joshua's generation was gathered to their fathers, and there arose another generation after them who did not know the LORD or the work that he had done for Israel.

The verse does not say anyone argued them out of the faith, and there is no hint in the chapter that Canaanite apologists were the problem. The generation that had seen the Jordan stand up died, and nobody had told the next one what the stones meant in a way that could outlive the people who stacked them. The rest of the book is what re-treading the ground looks like when the ground was never handed on.

The Institutional Church Knows What It Is

The non-denominational churches feel alive. Walk into one and the average age is thirty years younger than the church down the road, the band is good, and the young people who go there are excited about Jesus in a way that is not faked. For now, at least.

But the vibrancy is a property of the people in the room, not of the church's convictions, and people age. Non-denominational churches feel vibrant because the wise in the room see young people that way. Non-denominational churches, in a generation or two, will be "institutional," because that is what a church becomes when it survives long enough to have a history.

The Jesus People of 1970 are in their seventies, and Calvary Chapel, which came out of that movement with almost no structure at all, is now an association of churches with a written statement of its distinctives.

What should worry the non-denominational pastor is that when his church becomes institutional (and if it survives long enough, it will), the next generation's excitement will get turned against his own teaching despite how biblical it may be. The good ideas he holds now will be the passé ones, the old-fashioned ones, the things the twenty-five-year-olds of 2060 are eager to be free of, for exactly the reasons he was eager to be free of the denomination he grew up in.

Vibrancy as an organizing principle guarantees that the next generation cuts you down, because vibrancy is the one thing a church cannot hand on. What it can hand on is what it knows, which is why what it knows had better be worth something.

This is the strength of the institutional church, and it is simply that it knows it is the institutional church. It has been the exciting new thing and become the boring old thing, and it has learned, if it was paying attention, that the excitement was never the point. When the institutional church has an identity crisis, society suffers.

What should survive the cycle is the confession, the catechism, the answers to the questions that arrive every generation on schedule. A church that knows what it is can stop competing on energy and begins to compete on depth, which is the only contest it can win and the only one that matters to the kid who is going to ask what all of this means tomorrow.

What the Young People Want

The institutional church does not always use the strength it has, and I watched up close as one denomination selfishly threw it away to the exclusion of the faithful. When I was still United Methodist, the leadership was perpetually using "what the young people wanted" to justify decisions endorsing all kinds of nonsense. These mythological "young people" became a shadow army that could be ridiculously invoked to give excuses to bishops and other leaders to make all kinds of flatly stupid changes.

Some leaders believed they understood what the young people wanted; overwhelmingly, it just looked conveniently like what they themselves wanted. It, among other dishonest tactics, led to the collapse of a movement that used to have nearly a third of all Americans as claimants.

I was a young Millennial at the time, and I hated it. Everyone was trying to figure us out. Now I am in my forties and feel mildly vindicated, because the Millennials took a few sips of "calm the hell down" and acted a great deal like their parents did, which is exactly what Gen X did before us, and I suspect Gen Z and whatever letter comes after will do.

It was terrible reasoning to begin with, for two reasons.

First, what idiot builds his house on the shifting sand of young desire? Jesus ends the Sermon on the Mount with two builders who heard the same words, and the one on the rock was the one who did them.

Second, and this part is built in, youth do not stay youth. The young people the leadership was chasing were going to be forty within the decade, and adults eventually become seniors, so a church built on what the young want is built on a foundation that is guaranteed to move.

I get very disappointed when I hear a church complain that it feels hopeless because it has no young people. If you have a lot of seniors coming in, you have a vibrant church, unless for some reason you believe there is a shelf life on the Holy Spirit. Stop trying to lure your caricature of what you believe the young want and do what you are called to do; likely, it isn't chasing the halcyon days of youth.

James 1 mentions true religion, and what is that? Widows and orphans, older and younger. Churches filled with seniors do themselves a disservice always chasing youth, when people age into being seniors every day, one year at a time.

The Democracy of the Dead

G. K. Chesterton called tradition "the democracy of the dead," and meant by it that tradition gives a vote to the people who are no longer here to cast one, rather than leaving every question to "the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about." Most of the questions that are alive now were worked through by people who are dead, and a church that refuses to consult them has disenfranchised the majority of its own membership while congratulating itself on being brave.

I can hear the objection: "Jesus fought the Pharisees and their traditions!"

The Greek word for tradition is παράδοσις, and it needs some defense, because most evangelicals hear it through Mark 7, where Jesus condemns the Pharisees for holding to the tradition of men while setting aside the commandment of God. Scripture does not always use the word negatively.

The same word is what Paul uses when he commends the Corinthians for maintaining the traditions as he delivered them, and when he tells the Thessalonians to hold to the traditions they were taught by word or letter. The word itself is neutral, which means the only question that ever needs asking about a tradition is what is being handed on.

Does a tradition co me from God, or was it invented for the purpose of trying to get around God?

Rome treats tradition as a second source of revelation standing beside Scripture, and that is not what I mean by the word; the difference is roughly the difference between being a Protestant and not. Tradition in the sense I am using it is the church's memory of reading Scripture — the record of which questions have been asked, which answers held up, and which ones were tried and thrown out. The Reformers leaned on that memory constantly.

Calvin cites St. Augustine more than any other writer outside Scripture, and the case against Rome was that Rome had wandered from the older tradition, not that tradition was the enemy. A church that keeps its tradition sets its roots deeper, because it has the faith of the people before it to answer the questions that are already nagging, and Jeremiah 17 says a tree with roots like that does not get anxious in the year of drought.

The nineteen-year-old who wants to know why God would have to become a man is asking Anselm's question, and St. Anselm answered it in 1098.

The one who wants to know how the Son can be God without there being two gods is asking St. Athanasius's. The one asking why a good God permits what he permits is asking St. Augustine's, and Job's before him.

None of the answers is easy and some of them do not fully satisfy. Some answers are objectively bad, but there are good answers. They have existed for a long time.

A church that has cut itself off from the men who wrote them has to reconstruct them on the spot, live, with a college freshman across the table and a semester to do it in. It usually can't, and the freshman concludes that nobody ever could.

Cutting the Roots to Move the Tree

The denominations, unfortunately, have mostly not been paying attention or they have unethical leaders - I've seen both.

For a couple of decades now, denominations have been suicidal, and the method is always the same. The name comes off the sign — First Baptist becomes The Journey, Grace Presbyterian becomes Grace Church. The affiliation moves to a footnote on the website. The confession stops being taught because it sounds divisive, and the catechism stops being used because the church down the road doesn't use one and catechism sounds like an old, boring church word.

The whole operation is an attempt to look like the vibrant church, on the theory that what the vibrant church has is a set of surface features that can be copied.

The mainline did the same thing a century earlier and at a deeper level. It cut the roots at the doctrine — the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, the atonement as something that actually happened — to sound credible to a modern man who was never going to join anyway. The tree looked green for two generations, and the mainline has been losing members every year since the mid-1960s.

The evangelical denominations are running the same experiment at the level of identity instead of doctrine, and they should expect the same result on a delay. It won't end well, because it is focused on an identity that is not a shared identity in Christ.

Paul warns the Gentile believers in Romans 11 not to be arrogant toward the branches that were broken off, and the reason he gives is that it is not they who support the root but the root that supports them. A denomination that thinks its confession is dead weight it can shed to reach a younger market has the direction of support backwards.

Chesterton has a fence for this too. A reformer finds a fence across a road, sees no use for it, and wants it cleared away; the more intelligent reformer tells him that if he cannot see the use of it he certainly may not remove it, and to go find out why it was put there first. Every clause in a confession is a fence somebody built after something went wrong.

The clause about the two natures of Christ is there because of Nestorius and Eutyches. The clause about justification is there because of a specific argument that split Europe. A denomination that pulls those fences down because nobody remembers the fight has freed itself of nothing except the memory, and a church with no memory is the church in Judges 2, one generation from not knowing the LORD or the work that he had done.

None of this is a call to end denominations — if anything it is the opposite. I believe the calls that "denominational is dead" have read the room entirely room. There are denominations that will die; some need to. But denominations will continue. The cry is for denominations to remember what they are and stop trying to be what they aren't, which in practice means teaching their own confession to their own children, on purpose, before the question comes, so that when it comes it lands on something.

A denomination exists because, at some point, a group of Christians believed something specific enough to organize around, and that specific belief is the root: an accumulated answer to a set of questions, written down by people who are dead, which the vibrant church down the road does not have and cannot buy.

Hebrews 13 tells the church to remember the leaders who spoke the word of God to them and to imitate their faith, and then, without a pause, that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. The faith does not have to be re-derived every generation, because the one it is about does not change, and the roots are still there for any church willing to dig down and check.

God bless, everyone.