I’ve been seeing a lot written about why Evangelicals are leaving “the Institutional Church” in droves.  I find the stories interesting, given that most the people sharing their stories tend to be my contemporaries, and yet their tales also fale to capture my heart.

I really don’t need convincing that a good number of the clubs we call “churches” have the spiritual depth of a mud-puddle.  I’ve been a part of too many of them to think otherwise.  When you talk about Jesus’ teachings with people who stare at you like you’ve uttered something in another language – you know the Church has kinda left the building behind.  On the other hand, largely because of my spiritual “upbringing” at LMH and Eastern, the fact that the Church has a Tradition that isn’t found in Scripture doesn’t cause me the amount of angst that it seems to creat for many of my contemporaries.

Tradition is unavoidable, and when Tradition is landed squarely inside the story of the Church and Scripture it can actually be a healthy thing.  The Trinity is part of Tradition, so is the langauge used to describe the Incarnation.  These are core beliefs which actually create the most widely accepted boundaries of Christianity.  Creeds are part of the Tradition (actually, the firmly established the Tradition).  The Church calendar, which tells the story of Jesus’ life and the establishment of the Church, is part of Tradition.  These are good.  I can’t see myself being part of a Church that was openly hostile to these things (which is why I have huge problems with the Baptist Tradition at the moment).

As I’ve said before, the Churches that claim to have been freed from the “shackles of tradition” actually set themselves up for the exodus they are now encountering.  Instead of a living, breathing, tradition which deliberately connects people to the faith of the Church – they end up with a rigid tradition with the creed, “We’ve always done it that way.”  When people who want to be deep in the faith come ask about these “little t” traditions they end up being disenchanted by the shallow answers they get in response.  When they find out that the “big T” traditions may have roots in practices common to the first century (or older for the OT), questioners tend to freak out a bit.

To be fair, while this problem looms large in congregations which have been freed from tradition it is also common in “traditional” settings as well.  Really, whenever tradition becomes non-breathing people end up trying to keep people from pointing out that no one knows why they are doing what they are doing anymore.  Though what I’ve found is that most people who come from “High” congregations that have lost touch with the depth of their own Tradition end up heading to low-Church Protestant Churches than to radical “non-institutional” congregations.

I think Jaroslav Pelikan said it best, “Tradition is the living faith of the dead.  Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”

Frankly, once people from any Tradition forget the distinction between Tradition and traditionalism (as defined above) – they become ripe to turn inward and start feeding on themselves.  Not being in an “institutional church” is no defense against that very real risk.