My vision and dream for what church can and should be come from my memory of Long Beach Christian Reformed Church where I grew up. Time and distance from that setting probably give me a bit of an overly optimistic perspective of those years, but the memories of what church is and acts like are deeply rooted in those early experiences of my life.

• Sunday night song services when I got to ask for a song, even at a very young age.
• Prayer requests solicited from the congregation, even the kids.
• Learning and saying the Apostles Creed together.
• Communal punishment by any and every mom in church.
• Having chances to share from the front in musicals, programs and youth services.
• Reciting liturgies and readings from the bulletin or hymnal.
• Connecting and reconnecting with Sunday School teachers year to year and having them as a regular part of life.

These are all part of the long list of experiences that built my comfort, inclusion and participation as a child, teen and young adult as part of MY church.

I very much felt that it was MY church–not exclusively mine, but inclusively mine. It was where my family and I lived out life almost as much as we did in our home.

When it came to the hymns, creeds, Sunday School lessons and other resources and opportunities, nobody ever said these are the things that will help you understand community. Nobody pointed out the Apostles Creed and the reading of the law would be ways to share and defend my faith as I grew older. They were just part of our weekly experience together at church.

Recently I have come to realize that when we threw out or replaced the bathwater of classical or traditional church, we lost more than we might have imagined. Not every church has done this; not everything was thrown out; but in many cases, we are now finding that we are missing something significant.

Many of the elements of liturgy and worship that are a large part of our shared experience in the Christian Reformed Church, the foundational things we grew up with–the reading of the law, prayer of confession, reciting of the Apostles Creed, preaching of the Heidelberg–shaped us and gave us a worldview and handles for our understanding God, church, relationships and the world. It’s not that our parents, teachers and pastors didn’t know what would take place, but those of us under their care didn’t see or understand the big picture. However, we can see the effects of the loss. Now in many places, those elements seem to have been put into the supply closet in the back of the church and are only pulled out for special occasions–such as the nativity set, Easter cross or communion supplies.

Here is the problem: These elements of worship and liturgy were not only ways for us to praise and worship God and put Him in His proper place, but they also are the elements that help us express and understand our faith in deeper ways. Unfortunately, I don’t think many of us realized how foundational and formational those elements are until we saw the effects of eliminating them.

Anyone reading this who knows me, is probably choking right now over these words. I’m not traditional; I’m not liturgical; and I am a big fan of a casual and contemporary places of worship because of the freedom they can bring for people to reconnect with Christ through the church.

I’m not saying that everything from the church of the past was perfect. In my experience, there was a healthy dose of unnecessary guilt. Grandma always used to say, “You main’t do that may you?” when she thought there was something we should be doing. There were plenty of taboos in the church that weren’t necessary but definitely important enough to shape how we interacted with each other. We didn’t share struggles as freely; we didn’t always know how to enfold new or different people; and we certainly didn’t always come at issues of conflict with the grace and mercy that would have been beneficial.

However, I am starting to realize I’m not wild about removing all off the creeds, confessions, worship liturgy and the rest for our new open and welcoming church at the expense of growing generations of something less than Christians. There needs to be a way to have both.

I’m not talking about blended worship, the bane of churches in the past few decades that led to our worship wars and splintering of congregations.

Christian Smith nailed it when he coined the idea that we are raising a generation of moral therapeutic deists. Maybe by removing many of our liturgical and confessional ties to our past, we’ve removed the depth and understanding of what a true and orthodox faith in Christ Jesus is all about. It’s certainly not always being passed on to this current generation of children and youth.

I heard Don Postmus once speak about tradition. He shared that we need to understand and respect the traditions of the past and what they meant, but allow the young to reshape and reform those traditions in ways reach out to God and help them express their understanding of Him. So it’s time to take those liturgical and confessional elements of our reformed heritage back out of the closet and allow them to be re-examined, reshaped, reimagined and re-formed for Christians today.

What can we do individually in our spheres of influence, as well as corporately as church and churches to restore some of our biblical and confessional heritage in fresh and dynamic ways to our churches, youth groups and times together as God’s people?

• Re-Examine: What were the formative things of your faith development? How did you come to know about Christ, Scripture, God’s plan for the world and all the other foundational things of your faith? What is it that those formative creeds, confessions, etc. were teaching you?

• Reintroduce and Reimagine: What can be brought back into worship in fresh ways? How can we introduce our children and students to the richness of our reformed theological thinking? Can we say the same things as the creeds and confessions teach in a way that has power and impact to this generation? How can technology and immagery help communicate truth?

• Request: Have conversations with your pastoral staff, worship leaders and other leaders at church to ask questions about how we can begin. How can we make this something that conversations develop around? Who should be gathered to think about this in our churches?

• Resolve: Make a commitment personally to take a fresh look at our creeds, confessions, hymns and the Heidelberg to see how they speak to you again. What do you find God saying to you? What questions do they raise in your mind? What messages do they communicate to you about God’s truth? What ideas come to mind about how these can be brought back into the regular life of the church and our educational ministries?

Is this an exhuastive list of questions? No! It’s a start, and starting is important. There is a growing list of resources and people who are interested in embracing a new day for our churches while graciously renewing our commitment to the blessings that our reformed biblical worldview and theology gives us as a foundation.