Elevation's Pastor keeping it edgy and real

International man of mystery, Doug Beaumont, clued me into this video from Elevation Church‘s “Code Orange Revival”.

The woman giving the sermon, Christine Caine, laudably works to fight human trafficking (something the Catholic Church has worked effectively at for a long time, in spite of the Administration’s removal of funds from the Church’s program). Caine is a leader of Hillsong Church in Australia.

One of her main premises is that churches and people have to be vigilant for how God is moving today (which may be quite different from how He moved yesterday or last year). If a church doesn’t keep up and stay attentive to the Spirit’s current work, they will die.

There is a kernel of truth in what she is saying. But there’s also confusion and error. Just after dismissing churches that still sing songs that were popular five or fifteen years ago–God has moved on from those songs she tells us–Caine says:

We keep going back to our Creeds and our Bureaucracies and our Institutionalized Ways of doing things, but the manna has ceased!

She’s referring to the manna in the desert ending after (about) forty years and how the Israelites had trouble adapting to the new thing God was doing.

Notice how the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds are equated with “bureaucracy” and “institutionalized ways of doing things.” The takeaway of course is that these are all bad (or at least old) things that God no longer works through.

But of course the Creeds are ageless truths that didn’t stop becoming relevant because Hillsong wrote a few gold-selling songs that topped the CCM charts. This is the “religion vs. relationship” false dichotomy in all its oblivious splendor.

In her zeal to keep up with what (she thinks) God is doing today, she throws out the baby (the Creeds) with the bathwater (rigid man-made bureaucratic institutionalizations).

The only way to keep from going the way of the dodo, we understand, is to “keep up,” “stay relevant,” “anticipate the next move of God and be there.” How long can any church keep that up? Not long. Soon Hillsong and Elevation will get older and less hip and less able to constantly change with what’s popular to the ecclesial consumer (which is easily mistaken for being the same as what God is doing). And they’ll disappear, displaced by newer and more edgy churches.

As John Senior said in The Restoration of Christian Culture:

Through the courts, in think-tanks and research institutes, in activist ideological organizations such as Planned Parenthood, the Humanist Society and the Civil Liberties Union, we have become victims in our public life of a mass agnosticism unknown anywhere in history, and worst of all, this spirit of relativism has paralyzed the Christian churches themselves, whose bewildered and diminishing flocks huddle in the fenceless folds while wolves in shepherd’s clothing explain from the pulpit that the essence of tradition is change.

The alternative is to encounter God in the ever ancient, ever new liturgy that the early Church celebrated, where the Creed is always recited–as true 1,700 years ago as it is today–and just as powerful. God’s Word is read and the Eucharist is confected. The liturgy is not a man-made creation, but the way God has shown that He is to be worshiped in spirit and in truth.

So while God does indeed move in new and unexpected ways in every age, in every year (just look at the growth of Christianity in the Global South, or at the tapestry of saints who uniquely lived their God-given charism in each epoch of history) some things never change, including the truths of the Faith found in the Creed and the liturgy itself.