I recently interviewed Ken Myers, founder and editor of Mars Hill Audio, for our resource Being a Counter-cultural Church. In this expanded excerpt from that interview, Myers explains why he thinks we should reconsider our assumptions about being formal or casual in worship and church life. Do you agree with him?
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Myers: I think that formal rhetorical speech is regarded with suspicion by most Americans now. Anything formal is regarded with suspicion--more suspicion than it was, say, 30 or 40 years ago.
Avery: It's not "genuine."
Myers: Yeah. It's not "authentic." And that's an interesting framework, to assume that the genuine and the authentic are the instinctual and the intuitive rather than the cultivated. That means that when we behave instinctually, we're most authentically human. If we're not true to our gut instinct in the way we express ourselves or carry ourselves in public, then we're being phony.
Well, that's a different view than has held for most of Christian history. For a long time it's been argued that our instincts are perverted and that we have to learn to behave in a way that's most fitting for our humanity. And that requires tutelage. That requires discipleship, submitting to discipline of some kind and having our affections and intuitions and imaginations shaped in a particular way by those who understand reality better than we do. Our instincts are not infallible. To be authentically human is to acquire the right instincts. So I'd love to recover a really good definition of authenticity.
