The Template Church

At the company where I work, we serve several market niches, one of which is churches. In a meeting a few weeks back, we were reviewing a pricing spreadsheet for the church niche, and one of the guys showed the rest of us how it worked. At the top, it read: Church of the [Template]

And I thought... that's it!! That's what I have struggled with in my evangelical church experience (well, one of the things, anyway). Evangelical churches today tend to not be "purpose-driven" churches, so much as they are template-driven churches.

There is a template derived from church growth seminars, from district denominational conferences, from seminary classes, and from "how we do it" workshops at successful mega-churches. The template you choose says a lot about your philosophy of ministry. There is a template for "seeker-friendly" churches, one for "bible-based" churches, another for "spirit-filled" churches, and yet another for "socially relevant" churches, or churches focusing on "reaching the lost" or "young families" or "urban professionals", etc., etc.

This goes for not only the programs you must have in place, but how the worship service is structured as well. Week after week it's really the same service, you just change the songs and rotate in other singers/musicians. Honestly, when worship is reduced to a repeatable pattern, how much different is it from a liturgy? Very little different, I think. At least when you go to a liturgical church you know what you're getting. You're getting a pattern, yes, but a time-tested, theologically-vetted, historically-connected pattern that changes very little over time or across cultures. It is meant to unify globally.

When churches who have purposely and determinedly abandoned liturgy, confession and creed as part of worship, wind up doing essentially "the same thing, only different" (as my Dad used to enjoy saying), doesn't it confirm that these acts and words held in common have a good purpose? They unify, bring a sense of belonging, and we gravitate to these unifying patterns whether we call them liturgy or not. Sometimes I think that Protestants are like teenagers who insist they won't grow up to do what their parents did, and wind up with similar behaviors and values anyway.

As Shakespeare wrote: "A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet." C'mon, evangelicals... stop and smell these heirloom roses, huh? Put some creed and common prayers back into your template. Your parents in the faith may have known something useful after all.