In a recent sermon, I heard a minister make a point that we become stagnant in our faith if we are continually looking back in the past. This point can be critisized on various points. Scripture is constantly looking back on what God has done in order to build faith. Each juncture of looking forward also involves looking back at God's work in the past--that history is what allows us to live in the present.

However, in many churches, at least in America, the minister's point is necessary in order to keep up with the many initiatives popular in the church today. We can't look to the past if we are going to grow in numbers, keep up with technology, change our services to the newest ways of doing things, and (most dangerous of all) completely ignore the history of the church. While the minister's point certainly wasn't biblical or keeping in line with the Church, it certainly lines up with the direction the church has been heading for the past few decades.

Related to this point is another phrase I hear often in the church: changing the medium doesn't change the message. Putting songs up on powerpoint doesn't change our songs or the theology. Removing a pulpit simply modernizes our stage. Changing a style of music doesn't change our worship.

In 1967 Marshall McLuhan famous stated in his book of the same title: The Medium is the Message. His book was an early reflection on the electronics age. Having never read the book, I can't tell you if he was right or not, but I do think it provides an opposing viewpoint to what is so often stated by the modern church.

What I would be more apt to do is to take the middle ground: the medium changes the message. We are naive to think that the modernizing changes we make in the church are simply that: modernizing. They are also reflecting a new theology and change the way that Christians begin to think about God. For many old order Mennonites and Amish, they ONLY sing in accapella unison. They don't sing in harmony because this would reflect a disharmony among the people of God. To change even the way they sing would change their theology of the Body. When communion is taken with invidividual wafers and little glasses (shot glasses I often amusedly think!) rather than a single cup and broken bread, we are changing the message of the Eucharist service. More so are we making changes if we take juice instead of wine--each have their different meanings. If our icons exist in the form of powerpoint images that flash before us rather than the stained glass images that are hundreds of years old--they too convey a different meaning.

I'm not arguing that we should never make changes in our mediums. Afterall, we can never go back to the first century church exactly--we have other cultural meanings to deal with--and they had their problems too. And when would we decide what period to go back to? Even the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, albeit seeped in ancient traditions, have made changes in their worship to suit time and place. But to pretend or argue that making changes to our medium does not change our message is at least naive and in its worst case dangerous to our Churches and our theology. We need to consider what changes are being made to our message when we change the medium. What does it say about us, about God, about our world? Does it look to the past and to the work our Lord has done? Or is it simply keeping up with the world?