What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.

Like many churches these days, my church is in a worship war. I might be the hero for some, and the enemy for others. I usually just feel caught up in the middle of something difficult to sort out. Almost one year ago we changed our worship schedule. There were all kinds of reasons we did it. Trying to create space in the late service and trying to be more relevant to non-Christians while were some of the big ones in my mind.

So with any church change there are growing pains. And man are we feeling them here. I expected struggles like families being pulled to worship in separate hours, being without ideal Sunday school offerings at both hours, and just being short on volunteers in general. I expected for each of the new worship services to have a sort of identity crisis as they struggled to find their niches, but I never expected the nastiness we’ve experienced among our members as a result of some changes.

Why will the body of Christ not communicate with one another? I KNOW that deep down the desires of the hearts of the young people and the older generations in our church are the same. But lately I feel our perspectives are completely clouded with personal preferences and misunderstandings. I’m guilty too. I don’t know how to reach everyone best with my ministry. I often lean too far in the direction of message driven music and do not master the art providing the backdrop for multi-generatinal worship. But dialogue simply IS NOT HAPPENING between the generations in our community. Young people perceive the music of the past as irrelevant and uninspiring. Older generations think everything we do is a performance and that we’ve thrown out the richness of our faith in favor of trying to be cool. I sense this is true across the country and the world.

How can we begin to see each other’s point of view? We’ve got to communicate.

Edit: This post was in part sparked by the discussion of Cool Hand Luke on the Steelehouse Podcast. Check out the movie starring the late Paul Newman if you’ve never seen it. It’s definitely a favorite of mine that I’d forgotten about.

Tags: Communication, Cool Hand Luke, Heritage, Relevance, Steelehouse Podcast, Worship