Liturgy In the Local Community 2

The Recover of Historical Theology

What came first, Protestantism or the Early Church?

That question is a tough one for some people.  (For you who are still contemplating, the
answer is the Early
Church).  In the modernist quest for foundational truth
movements often take shortcuts and simply rebuild the foundation of
Christianity again in their own words and ideas, and the old foundation becomes
lost and forgotten.

We do not need to idolize the early church.  We do not need to name drop saints and church
fathers all the time.  But we do need to
know where we come from if we are ever going to build liturgy within a local
community.

I am a mutt.  I am an
Anglo-Mexican-Hungarian Jew brought up in the Lutheran faith, educated at a
dispensational university and participating in an emergent-missional church
plant.  My wife is Polish, German, and
Irish brought up in the Assemblies of God. 
We are not who we are because of our background, but we are part of
different communities based on our past history and the importance of cultural
events in our life.  I grew up on Mexican
food, not Hungarian food, so I readily identify as Mexican—quesadillas and
chicken mole are part of my food heritage, not goulash.  For my wife Sarah she has much more cultural
resonance with the Polish side of her family, and foods I had for the first
time with her were pierogies, sauerkraut, stuffed cabbage, and real kielbasa.  Our pantry and refrigerator evidences this in
the hodge-podge of canned black beans, stacks of tortillas, homemade salsa,
pieriogies, and so forth.

The local church is like this.  We are all descended from somewhere, the
early church, then the Western and Eastern Churches, and then maybe some
Protestant denominations and breakups thrown in the mix as well.  But since the foundations of the historic
faith have been cut off for most Protestants to the past 500 years (and
Evangelicals the past 80 or so) we don’t know how to connect our culture
heritage as Christians, historic theology, liturgy, and practice, to the
present day.

The way we must attempt to do this is to start at the
beginning.  We need to read the prayers
of the New Testament in church.  We need
to incorporate the wisdom of the early church fathers and saints into our sermons
and prayers.  We need to see the Roman
Catholic Church as a rich source of wisdom. 
We need to not shun the ways of our spiritual parents.

God asks us to honor our father and mother.  We might not always agree, but we must show
respect.  The same needs to go for our
spiritual fathers and mothers.  We can
not relegate them to the dusty pages of seminary libraries.  They are our heritage, our faith, our
foundation, our physical tie to Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith.