Searching for Common Ground

While on vacation with my family this past week we had the opportunity to visit Cades Cove in the Smokey Mountains National Park.  Cades Cove is an early American settlement, once occupied by the Cherokee Indians before the treaty of Calhoun signed in 1819 that removed the Indians to the Oklahoma territory.  At its peak Cades Cove boasted a population of 671 settlers; this was between 1820 and 1850. While there I had the opportunity to visit three very old, very ancient (by American history standards) churches from this era.  These churches were fascinating on multiple levels. I was particularly struck by one aspect of their design which was their simplicity.  Their construction spoke of their culture, their role, their place in history. Each church had a connected cemetery.  Many died young in the 1800’s.  The majority of the graves were dedicated to small children.  Survival was likely the main agenda 200 years ago.  So, in life and in worship they undoubtedly spent the better part of the day and week in work and labor rather than in play and leisure.  In contrast, we have more time on our hands, more food on our plates, more living space and more leisure opportunities than we can spare.
Sitting in the pews I pondered what worship must have been like in these churches.  What motivated the people of this Appalachian region to seek after God?  How did they go about doing this?  What did it mean to them to “attend church” each Sunday? What would it have been like to be called into the ministry during this era in American history?

Obviously, we worship the same God as these settlers did; however, one knows instinctively that the way we worship today differs in countless ways from the way they worshiped two centuries ago.  Given their lifestyle, one would suspect that the church focused far less on entertainment and attraction than on the most basic elements of the Christian faith.  I could not imagine them performing drama in church on Sunday for instance, or hosting a dinner theater, a car show (a horse show maybe!) or creating a youth or young adult outreach separate from the regular Sunday worship.  I do not mean to suggest that one era is better than the other, after all, I am highly invested in the modern era, but only that they are different.

Having considered the “many differences” between us, I also found myself grasping after our similarities.  We obviously have less in common with our ancestors than we’d care to admit with regard to life, family, mortality and leisure.  But does our faith unite us?  Is there something in the person of Jesus Christ that we share in common?  And more to the point of this post, are there certain practices in the church that we still engage in today that we share in common with them?

My bottom-line conclusion was this:  America has changed and the church has changed with it.
This reality begs the question: “What have we gained and what have we lost in over 200 years of development and evolution in the church and in culture?”