What is "old?"

by the Rev. Dr. Delmer Chilton
Assistant to the Bishop, Southeastern Synod

I was talking to an old friend the other day, mostly about being old. (Today is my birthday; this is the sort of thing one thinks about on birthdays, at least those of us of a certain age.) Now according to my mother, who is 81, 57 is not at all old. According to my great-nephew, who is 15, I am old as dirt itself. The truth, as in most things, lies somewhere in the middle.

My friend and I were discussing our days as young pastors in the church of the late 70s; remembering the great ideas we had about how to improve and fix and correct all the mistakes made by those who served the church before us. Looking back from the vantage point of thirty-five years, we were laughing at how wrong we were about so many things. More than being wrong, we were just so not prophetic about the oncoming shape of the future.

And now, we are the elders, the old ones who have spent thirty plus years messing up the church; or at least that’s what we’ve been told by many of those younger than us. And we laugh, because we know two things: 1) they’re sort of right; and 2) their turn to be wrong is coming.

It is the nature of the church that many of the externals of who we are change with the culture around us. "Style issues" I guess you would call them. What the ministers wear, both in and out of the pulpit; the kind of music we play and sing; where the youth group goes on mission trips, etc. etc.

But it seems to me that in the midst of the new there is always the old. Filmstrips, movie projectors, video-tapes and TVs on carts or DVDs, laptops and multi-media projectors–it’s still the Gospel we’re trying to preach and teach.

The old Lutheran idea of adiaphora comes in handy here. Too often we think this old way of doing church is essential to being the church, we have to do it this way. Or, we sometimes think, if we don’t do it this new way, the church will just wither away and die. And the truth is, neither of these things is true.

What is essential to being the church is as old as the letters of St. Paul and as new as Twitter. We are the community who God has called together to love each other and the world. We are a people whose purpose is to praise and celebrate God and to invite all others to praise and celebrate God. As long as the old, old message of God’s love is underneath all that we do and say with each other and the world; then how we say it will be shaped by love. The new and old ways we teach and preach Christ will not be ends in themselves, but will be formed by a desire to reach everyone with the grace of God.