When my family moved from Boston to Central Florida several years ago we began looking for a church where we could worship and become involved in serving the Lord. We first attended a dynamic congregation with other family members and were blessed by the vitality of the worship and the variety of ministries offered. We attended worship and became involved in a small group. But it wasn’t home. It wasn’t what we were used to.
We began attending another congregation closer to our house after several months. The new church was older and more traditional in worship and ministry. We felt more at home even though the other family members weren’t in the church. Frankly, the new church did church the way we were used to doing it.
In the 1950’s Professor Peter Wagner, a former missionary, began writing and teaching what he termed the ‘homogeneous principle,’ the idea that people are attracted to people and places that are just like them. For church planters and other pastors this meant we needed to plan our worship and programs to match the needs and wants of the people we were trying to reach.
While Wagner’s principle attracted a lot of debate among religious professionals, you have to say his observations may have been more on target than we may like to admit. Anyone who has been caught in the ‘culture wars’ (to borrow a phrase in vogue today) of traditional verses contemporary worship, or contemporary music verses traditional hymns and Southern Gospel songs, or printed orders of worship verses unpublished “Spirit-led” worship, might tend to agree with Wagner that ‘birds of a feather flock together.’
Unfortunately those who have tossed the traditional for the contemporary are often times just as locked in to their new traditions as are the very people and churches they sought to change. We like familiarity. It’s just what we’re used to.
But sometimes God isn’t in the familiar. Holiness is not common, and uncommon is not familiar. The Lord says you can’t put new wine in old wineskins without something blowing up.
Oswald Chambers said, “If we have never had the experience of taking our commonplace religious shoes off our commonplace religious feet, and getting rid of all the undue familiarity with which we approach God, it is questionable whether we have ever stood in His presence. The people who are flippant and familiar are those who have never yet been introduced to Jesus Christ.”
If new things, strange things, make us uncomfortable, maybe we need to learn to get used to them. After all, compared to everything else, God is strange.
