I recently interviewed Ken Myers, founder and editor of Mars Hill Audio, for our resource Being a Counter-cultural Church. In this expanded excerpt from that interview, Myers explains why he thinks we should reconsider our assumptions about being formal or casual in worship and church life. Do you agree with him?
Myers: I think that formal rhetorical speech is regarded with suspicion by most Americans now. Anything formal is regarded with suspicion–more suspicion than it was, say, 30 or 40 years ago.
Avery: It’s not “genuine.”
Myers: Yeah. It’s not “authentic.” And that’s an interesting framework, to assume that the genuine and the authentic are the instinctual and the intuitive rather than the cultivated. That means that when we behave instinctually, we’re most authentically human. If we’re not true to our gut instinct in the way we express ourselves or carry ourselves in public, then we’re being phony.
Well, that’s a different view than has held for most of Christian history. For a long time it’s been argued that our instincts are perverted and that we have to learn to behave in a way that’s most fitting for our humanity. And that requires tutelage. That requires discipleship, submitting to discipline of some kind and having our affections and intuitions and imaginations shaped in a particular way by those who understand reality better than we do. Our instincts are not infallible. To be authentically human is to acquire the right instincts. So I’d love to recover a really good definition of authenticity.
I think that formal expressions in poetry or language or music or dance or…
Avery: Congregational prayer…
Myers: …congregational prayer, all sorts of things, may be the most authentic thing we could do in certain settings, because it might most fully and honestly express that reality.
Now the intuitive or gut-instinctual expression might convey personal energy and person commitment, but there’s a lot more to the expression of reality than just commitment. To convey something transcendent or holy, for instance, may require patterns of articulation that are extraordinary.
That’s why I think weddings historically have been a very formal expression–joyful but formal–because of the fact that there’s some great mystery that we’re conveying here. There’s something remarkable that’s being conveyed in the joining of this man and this woman. Every culture has known this at some level. Only modern American culture in particular has assumed that even weddings can be done somewhat casually. But even that’s still pretty rare. Weddings and funerals usually end up being the threshold at which people realize, yeah, we’ve got to keep something formal here.
One of the things about good poetry is that it has a concision about it, a formal intensity in which more is being expressed than is expressed in casual speech. Now the conventional idea of authenticity today is to suggest that intensity is raw. Well, yes, that is one kind of intensity. But a deeply crafted expression, like a poem, or a Bach fugue, has intensity about it, too. It requires a kind of attentiveness to it in order to perceive the intensity. But once you’ve figured out how it works, it actually has more power than some cry from the heart filled with existential intensity.
