“To Serve This Present Age”: The Future of Worship in the Baptist Church

Abstract

In the early 2000s, I had a conversation with the late Rev. Dr. Granville Allen Seward, who was at that time pastor emeritus of Mount Zion Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey. It was during one of his annual visits to Trinity Baptist Church in The Bronx (my home church) as the Ash Wednesday preacher. The conversation with him took its usual post-preaching, post-service format: always brief, always theological. Good Baptist that he was, there was often a Scripture or a line from a hymn that were quickly recalled in service to his responses. I don’t recall what I said or asked him, but I will never forget his response: “Oh, I’m just trying to serve this present age, my calling to fulfill.” I have sung “A Charge to Keep I Have” countless times. Yet, this time the words “to serve this present age” were halting. The words had a visceral effect. It was as if I heard the profundity of those words, that phrase, “to serve this present age,” with an exhortatory-like invitation to do the same. That day was a pivotal marker in my life as a minister and a scholar because ever since then I have lived, worked, served, taught, researched, and written with the question that that phrase provokes: how does what I am doing, saying, and writing serve “this present age?” At every age and stage, the church has had to wrestle with the challenge of its present age. It has had to live in the tension of reverence and relevance: reverence for its past, its traditions, its theology, and its ecclesiology while being relevant to the people in its charge and care at the time. This has not always been done well, but this has always been a challenge present on the church’s doorstep. The question of how to “serve this present age” would be relevant today even if there had not been a global pandemic. Periodically, institutions and communities give reflection to where they have been and where they are going in order to plan for their future. The Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church is one example of this. The Coronavirus pandemic has made this question even weightier and more urgent. The pandemic has quickly, with next to no transition time, changed the way people around the world live, learn, work, and worship. Changes in how people accomplish ordinary tasks include changes in the ways that churches have had to conduct their ministries. One of the most familiar challenges that churches have historically faced has been people’s resistance to change, exemplified in the common response: “we’ve always done it this way.” The pandemic wrenched open the hands of traditionalism, wrested away the idol “we have always done it this way,” and smashed it. Clergy and congregations did not have the luxury of holding on to their practices and preferences because people