Give me that old-time religion. This new and improved kind ain't good enough for me.
Leslie A. Turvey: Have you ever noticed that "New and Improved" products seldom work as well as the original?
When you add to the truth you subtract from it. The original product was perfect for what it was designed to do, else the company should not have marketed it. Yet eventually the product is labelled New and Improved.
It's not only laundry detergent that's 'New and Improved'. Nor is it just your favorite hair spray, or frozen dinner, or kitty litter. It seems every manufacturer produces a New and Improved product. The same goes for perfection. We even have New and Improved Christianity.
Old-time Religion
The North American nations were built around the church, and the church taught the old time religion. It wasn't the wheezing, sweating, praise-the-Lord religion, with the preacher prancing around the stage, making a mockery of Christ by glorifying the religion of television and money. It was the Original and Unimproved religion that praised God through effectual prayer and humble preaching.
It was the religion of the farmer behind the team and plow, and of the housewife who hung her clothes out to dry. It was the religion of friends and neighbors who joined together for barn-raisings, and weddings, and newborns, and who cried with each other at funerals. It was Christianity at its finest. It was the old time religion of simple folk who loved the Lord.
But today's farmer sits in an air-conditioned tractor, and his wife takes her clothes from an automatic washer and pops them into a dryer. She nukes the family's supper while her husband watches the sports report on television.
Marketing the Faith
Modern technology isn't wrong. It's made life easier, and in many ways more profitable. Yet there's something special about seeing the Amish in their simple clothes, going about in their horse-drawn carriages.
With modern technology came modern marketing experts telling grocers how to pry a few more cents out of their shoppers' pockets. Cars are no longer for transportation, but are 'Made for drivers', the implication being that speed and power is the important thing. New and Improved marketing methods entice us to buy everything from a particular brand of underwear, to refrigerators, to personal items that shouldn't even be advertised on family television.
And modern marketing experts have gotten into the Christian religion, but for all the wrong reasons. They've convinced churchgoers there's something special about gushing things like, "Isn't it wunnnderful to know Jeeezus," and to use strange expressions that no sensible student would write on an English exam.
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"If one used Isaiah's thought [chaps. 1 & 29] as a basis for reforming contemporary worship, one would try to make worship more theological rather than less so. Beginning with the inherited tradition, it would celebrate what God has already done for the community of faith, but in the process worship would try to express who God is, what God's goals are and what God demands of his followers in articulate enough fashion that the individual worshipper could come to know this God personally, recognizing God's directions for his or her life in all of life's complexity. In short, an Isaianic reformation of worship would focus on God and what pleases God, not on the masses of the unchurched and what is purported to attract them." J.J.M. Roberts, "Contemporaray Worship in the Light of Isaiah's Ancient Critique" in M. Patrick Graham et al., Eds. "Worship and the Hebrew Bible" JSOT Supplement 284. |
Modern marketing has added rock bands to the churches to attract the young people. It's put gymnasiums in the churches for the same reason. Hymnals have been written and rewritten until the old standby hymns of praise to God have been obliterated by songs designed to titillate our New and Improved senses.
Product Failure
But the New and Improved Christianity isn't working. The guitars and drums and amplifiers haven't cut down on the crime wave plaguing our nations. In fact, the crime wave seems to have been amplified with the beat that's been added to today's Christianity. Educator Joyce Minor wrote after the Columbine massacre, "What has changed in America is not the accessibility of guns, but the character of man."
There's a bygone hymn that says,
"Give me that old time religion.It's time we brought back the old time, Unimproved, Christianity that cultivated honorable, old time character.
Give me that old time religion.
Give me that old time religion,
it's good enough for me."
To comment on this article or request more information, please contact James McBride by e-mail at the comment form below.
For PDF or mailed copy, see CGOM. Excerpt from New Horizons Vol. 5 No. 3, May-June, 2001. Edited by James McBride of the Churches of God, United Kingdom.
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