Last week I ran an article by David Murrow that has been burning up the Internet. This week, a response from Adam Walker Cleaveland:
Now, let me start off by saying that I’ve certainly sat through services like Murrow did. A primarily traditional church that had a group of individuals who really wanted to pull off something more contemporary and…well, just didn’t quite make it happen. Maybe it was because they were doing “contemporary music” that was contemporary in the 70s, or the technology just failed over and over again…who knows. So I get where he’s coming from to some degree.
And I know that there are young adults and young families who really do connect with a more traditional form of worship, so I’m not trying to say that you have to try to pull off contemporary or modern worship to bring in young people. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the way we’re doing church right now isn’t connecting with a vast majority of 20-40 year olds. And I would argue that a lot of that has to do with our worship services.
So when I hear Murrow say “traditional churches should stick with traditional worship,” what I hear is “traditional churches should stick with traditional worship if they’re content with dying a slow death.”
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