Back to the Ancient Future

Let me bring you up to speed. There is this new philosophy that is kind of postmoderny that is being referred to as “ancient future”. You see it a lot in worship circles and it translates a lot into theology on ones personal walk. My understanding of the basic premise of the idea is that people today are hungry for the foundation that the church was built upon. They love our new methods, but need the stability of a religion that has been around of a couple thousand years. In ancient future circles you will see more hymns in worship. You may catch people studying the writings of the ancient theologians such as Brother Lawrence, or even as far back as Augustine. I have been putting a lot of time and thought into this movement, and I am not sure exactly where I fall in regards to it. Let me be clear – I have no problem if it works for you, I am just not sure that I buy into it. Here are a few reasons why:

1. It has never worked for me. I can honestly say that I have never had an intimate worship time to a hymn. I am not saying that it cannot happen, I would not put God into a box that way. It could happen, I just find hymns to be to wordy and archaic in language. When compared to the worship songs of today, they require too much theology to understand how one ought to worship. I feel like I spend my whole time interpreting the meaning, and not giving the Lord his due glory. The books of old have yet to work for me as well. Maybe I am just a little dense but I feel like it takes too much thought to comprehend their meaning. I am a plain meaning kind of a guy.

2. The church of old had major problems. The church today is by no means pure, not even in comparison. My thought though is that there is a reason that the church is the way it looks today. It is because the practices of old were replaced by more effective ones. A little bit of the past is ok in our services, but we must remember things like hymns evolved into what we know today because the newer songs were more effective. We did not become what we are today by accident.

3. The most important reason for having a hard time with the ancient future movement is that it lacks something. That thing namely is the power of the Holy Spirit. Tragically the Holy Spirit and it’s miraculous power were not the mainstream in church for thousands of years. It was clearly present in the early church, which we can see in scripture, but it somehow tapered off. This is not to say that believers did not have the Holy Spirit living within them. I am just explaining that his manifest presence is conspicuously missing for almost 18 centuries. The Holy Spirit was there, it was just rarely given a place in worship, or in groups of believers all together. These ancient future principle do not take into account the fact that Jesus himself said that we would do even greater things than he did. Not until the Pentecostal revival of the early 1900s did we find our way again. I for one refuse to let this power fade. The teachers of old, along with the songs of old, have little if any space for the most powerful tool of all for ministry – the Holy Spirit.

I think this ancient future church has to go into Jimmy’s picture from his site. It crosses out the phrases – be the emerging church, be the post modern church, be the gen x church. Finally it says in bold print – be the church. That is what this is all about. Lets quit with the idea that people on the outside might like us more if they could only hear ancient future worship. Lets cross that one out and just be the church. None of our ideas are working so hot. Lets just be who we are, and when I speak for myself I can tell you that I am man after god, and empowered by the holy spirit.