For the Bible tells me so...

How much of what we do in the church is biblical and how much is cultural? I am personally convinced that much of what we do in church is cultural. Not that it is bad. It is just cultural. It is our expression of what we think would be most honoring to God (at least when its not "the way we've always done it"). Other cultures long ago or far away don't do life the way we do, so in some way they won't do church the way we do.

You come to conclusions about these things by asking a series of why questions? Why do we sing the way we do? Why dress this way? Why have this person speak this time and that person speak that time? You get the gist.

I used to quip (defensively)... for the Bible tells me so. But then I looked into the Bible and I didn't find much about how to do church, just a few descriptions (not prescriptions) of a few early churches....who even differed a bit on how they did things.

If this talk scares you, my next advice won't...look in the Bible for yourself. See how little the Bible prescribes for the church. The Bible tells us many important things about man and God and Jesus...life and death things, but it tells us little about how to do church. To further push on the issue of our cultural expressions of the church I sugges Dan Kimball's recent blog post Pews, Pulpits, Pastors, Preaching and other things that can get in the way of the church "being" the church.