Church Experience #19 – May 15, 2011

The Mission Chattanooga

Traditional vs. Contemporary

Recently during a small group meeting we were discussing all of my various church visits this year, and specifically, what type of service my wife Laura and I liked the most out of all the ones we had visited.  This discussion was, of course, drilling down into the traditional worship versus contemporary worship debate, with a layer of complexity added by spreading the topic across denominational lines rather than just examining it from the perspective of one church or one denomination (yes, our small group goes there).  I have noticed during the ChurchSurfer project, that there is not much shared space between the traditional service and contemporary service camps.  What I mean is, the traditional services I have attended are very traditional, and the contemporary services are very contemporary.  There is very little resemblance of one to the other.  While we were on this topic, I expressed the desire to find a church whose service had pieces of both, because I believe there is an ideal blend in there somewhere that would produce an awesome result (for me at least, but hopefully for others also).  That is when The Mission came up.  One of the group members recommended that I visit this church, believing that it might be just what I was describing.  So I looked up their website to find out more, and did not get a single answer to any of my questions.  But what I did get was a mysterious and intriguing gobbledy-gook of descriptions and information that left me even more interested in visiting the church in person (which had to be on purpose).  For example, under the “Essential Beliefs and Values” page it states:  Read more...