The Intersection of Faith and Culture
“Order” is not a word that we relish all too much. It comes with images of armies marching all apace, of monotony and rigidity, like a cultural straight coat. Order seems to ruin all the fun, sticking us in the same old place, doing the same old things, the same old way we’ve always done them.
As a future church planter, the prospect of designing a worship space excites me. And I’ll be the first to confess that I’m a sucker for the hipster aesthetic of ‘authenticity,’ and that if I were planting in a vacuum, that’d be the aesthetic I’d shoot for. But that’s the problem: the minimalist, ‘authentic’ aesthetic is only authentic to a vacuum.
Worship wrests us from the stories of earthly kingdoms, and exposes them for the lies they are – whether it’s the story of Trump’s or Hilary’s America. Our public worship stands to destabilize the entire American empire – every empire. There is no more radical act than the worship of the Church.