keeping baby while throwing out bathwater

jason clark on tradition:

1. So often we play with these traditions picking the ones that are immediate and most accessable. I am sure we are missing out on much of these traditions by just taking the easy bits we like.

2. We get people who have tried something once on a retreat to teach us how to use liturgy, when maybe we should be getting people whose life is this, and history to teach us (to avoid more of number 1!)

3. We must not make the same mistake an throw off all our traditions, just as the low church forms threw of everything. By this I mean I hear of churches abandoning their evangelical charistmatic worship experiences wholesale to embrace a completely new way of worshipping, seeing their old way as invalid. Sounds like the same mistake we made when we abandoned much of the church traditions in the first place.

4. If we don't take these cautions we are on a never ending cycle of re-inventions, superficiallity, and of being faddish, and missing out on the real value of tradition.

5. I suspect the real value of traditon is not to be 'cool', 'relevant', but to anchor us to something that confronts our consumerism (as much as I am refreshed by these traditions that are new to me).

jason gives us some helpful thoughts on tradition.