Generations Style Now with Ryan Gaffney

Since the world seems very upside down these days, let us begin with an upside down story. Many people do not realize that most prestigious universities were begun with one of their primary emphasis being to train ministers. Harvard and Yale were Puritan schools. Harvard was named after a Christian minister. Yale was started by a clergyman. Princeton defined Presbyterianism for a long time finding its roots in The Log College designed specifically to train ministers. One only has to check out the old crests and latin slogans of many schools to discover the truth of this.

There certainly is an irony to the fact that most of these schools morphed into institutions overtly hostile to any version of classical Christianity. By the early 1900’s farmers having saved for a lifetime to send one of their children to college got back a confident faithless adult child. Soon Bible Colleges started to pop up, assuring parents this faithless transition wouldn’t occur there.

But now the story gets even weirder. Churches themselves started to imitate what happened in the colleges & universities. More and more traditional beliefs were falling away as sophisticated thinkers assured people that no one with a brain really believes many of the things in the Bible any more. 19th Century Philosophical Liberalism was turning into the story of 20th Century mainstream churches. Intelligence was being measured not by what one believed but by what they didn’t believe. Gone were the Sunday School stories of a Creation mandated by God, Moses and the burning bush, Jonah and the whale, Noah and the Arc let alone Jesus walking on water and a gravestone rolled away. We knew better now. 2000 years after the time of Christ we had it figured out. Those poor ignorant people who for 1900 years believed in a God who created something out of nothing and sent his son to redeem mankind just didn’t get the truth.

By the time the 1970’s rolled around churches were pretty well divided between those who were more “Bible believing” and those more what we will call “Progressive”. For many, these issues just weren’t doing anything for them spiritually, emotionally, or in any way really, and the decline of church attendance got momentum. It was boring, irrelevant, faithless and passé. 

But… then some young baby boomer church leaders decided that the issues weren’t so much intellectual ones as they were stylistic. Princetonian sermons with three alliterated points and a poem weren’t relevant to real life. Hymns and responsive readings were boring. Creeds in unison seemed meaningless. But what would happen if we took a biblically based message with relevant application for real life and combined it with music we actually listened to and dropped out the boring liturgy, maybe even throw in a drama or multi media show?

Orange County California had some of the first churches developed with many of these thoughts. The Chrystal Cathedral was a precursor of sorts to the movement and Robert Schuller a mentor to a few. Calvary Chapel certainly comes to mind. South Coast Community, now Mariners was another. Later on Saddleback took the lead. That’s the kind of church many Millennials saw as typical church. Let’s talk to one of them today.

Ryan Gaffney, Woodbridge High School Grad in Irvine and then Concordia University in Irvine and then Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. He now pastors College Park Presbyterian Church in Orlando, Florida.