Words: "Contemporary"

The English language is a crock. Look, I'm not agitating for us to adopt a new language, though it wouldn't hurt for a large chunk of us to learn a bit more Spanish. (I'm pretty much limited to Mexican foods & some curse words my buddies in high school taught me, so I'm not the poster child for bilingual communication.) My problem is with how easy it is for words & terminology to shift in meaning - regardless of your language of origin.

Which makes our job that much harder when we try to come up with ways to quickly describe the upcoming NewLife @ Night worship gathering... and end up fumbling through words like "contemporary", "emergent", "emerging" (yes, there's a difference), "innovative", and "experiential". You see, nearly everyone has their own preconceived notions when they hear those particular words & phrases - notions that can cause you to envision something very different than what we're dreaming of for Sunday nights.

So, in the interests of good communication & actually getting some use out of my B.A. in English, let's take a closer look at this - shall we?

contemporary
In my addled brain, this sounds like a "hip" word from the 60's... I get mental pictures of the Monsanto house at Disneyland & those funky egg-shaped plastic chairs that hang from the ceiling.

In evangelical circles, this became the buzzword of choice when describing new services in the 1980's & '90's - in fact, you still see it today. A church will advertise "traditional" worship at one time and "contemporary" at another time. In general, what they mean is as follows:

• "traditional" - the same thing we've been doing for the last 50 years
• "contemporary" - we changed the music (sold the organ & do more praise choruses), but otherwise the service is pretty much the same

NewLife @ Night is definitely NOT a "contemporary" service.