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LIKE MANY EVANGELICALS, I grew up in a church that objected to "tradition," which we associated with dead orthodoxy. A furor erupted in the church office when the new, young associate pastor suggested that the Sunday worship folder contain a minimal order of worship. We disdained formality and embraced the spontaneity of the Spirit in worship. Or so we liked to think. The associate pastor's suggestion was rejected on the ground that printed orders of worship led to liturgy and liturgy was tradition. Some in the congregation whispered that the associate pastor was losing his zeal by attending seminary. The young minister yielded, but he pointed out that he was giving in to their tradition of rejecting liturgy and embracing informal, unplanned worship. He also said that since our worship services were pretty routine, we should help visitors by printing our normal order and then allow the Spirit to move within it.

The associate pastor's argument didn't sway the congregation, but it planted new thoughts about tradition in my mind. Had we developed our own traditions, including a tradition of rejecting whatever we perceived as the traditions of other churches that were not "full gospel" (as we called our type of church)?

Like the church I grew up in, numerous evangelical churches like to think that tradition is a Spirit-quenching fire extinguisher. But the matter of tradition is more complex than my home church imagined at the time, and I have come to appreciate much of the tradition handed on to us from the church's past. Nevertheless, I am troubled and remain concerned when evangelicals start touting "tradition" as a way forward in our faith, as many are doing today.

Let me be fair: I recognize that a completely traditionless Christianity creates more problems than it solves for the church. Evangelical suspicion of tradition and a yearning to live simply by the Bible go back to the Reformation. But especially in America after the Great Awakenings, a profound distrust of everything "traditional" set in. Many evangelicals now use tradition as shorthand for "having the form of religion but denying the power thereof."

Evangelicals have lost their memory of the Great Tradition of Christianity before the rise of revivalism and their own free church (less emphasis on creeds and liturgy) movements. We are like people who have forgotten our family tree and our cultural past—rootless wanderers without landmarks from our past to guide us. Is it any wonder, then, that so much of our preaching and teaching is shallow and that we keep repeating the errors of the past? New forms of the heresies that bedeviled the churches in the generations immediately after the apostles' deaths repeatedly appear in evangelical circles. Too many evangelicals accommodate to the therapeutic mindset of the culture and reduce proclamation to self-help tips. Christianity becomes compatible with too much and loses its cognitive shape. Evangelicalism is in danger of being reduced to a folk religion with little or nothing to say to the world out of its great intellectual heritage.

There is now a new Protestant attention to tradition that holds great promise for renewal of authentic Christianity in churches weakened by doctrinal pluralism and cultural accommodation. United Methodist theologians Thomas Oden and William Abraham, among other mainline Protestant conservatives, herald a revival in the Protestant mainstream through drinking deeply at the wells of the church fathers, through faithful adherence to the early creeds and through submitting to the received declarations of the undivided church's ecumenical councils.

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November 2003, Vol. 47, No. 11