From Michael Spencer, A Contrarian Manifesto for the Church Growth Debate: “Don’t haul a video screen into my church and tell me that if I don’t show clips from The Matrix, I’m not communicating.”

Just add Last of the Mohicans, Shrek, and Braveheart to the list of movies, plus a couple of U2 songs about following, and a slew of Easter Season Purpose-Driven sermons, and you get the “high-energy contemporary postmodern worship” atmosphere I experienced at a certain PCUSA church in Baltimore two years ago, which had me fleeing for shelter to the brick walls and traditional liturgy of Old Otterbein UMC.

Contemporary worship is not evil, wrong, or necessarily shallow, but beware tapping too deeply into a pop culture which is fleeting, materialistic, and ephemeral by design, lest those aspects of the culture be transferred to the church’s sharing of the Gospel.