One recent evening, wandering a local river town on a date with my wife, we stumbled into a little thrift shop. Among piles of useless books and stoneware, I found a treasure.
Leather Lederhosen.
They were green and glorious, thick and robust at the seams, with fat buttons for suspenders. They looked just my size, too—Emily, seeing a familiar shine to my eyes, laughed and dared me to buy them. (I should have.)
I stood there for a while and admired them. I’d always thought of Lederhosen as a rather silly Swiss accessory—cute for yodeling blonde boys with an Alpenstock and a St. Bernard. But up close, I saw the strength and practicality of them. They were a garment made for the mountains—strong, gusseted crotch wide for free movement, sturdy and breathable. These weren’t the antiquated floral shorts I’d always thought, they were practical. They had a purpose. Theirs was a technology perfected for their environment, fierce, spare, sturdy, dependable. I climb mountains from time to time—and as I compared my well-worn REI climbing pants to these … well, I preferred these.
I saw in that moment that a foreign tradition I’d dismissed as quaint, silly even, had profound purpose and streamlined practicality. And the train of thought left the station. It went something like this:
Well, my Western people have a similar garment for our land—the denim blue jean. It’s perfect for our grit and woods and work and terrible laundry habits. And I suppose every people’s national costume has the same practicality behind it somewhere. But these days—well, my people’s costume has won the world. Blue jeans are everywhere. New Delhi to New York. There are probably more blue jeans worn in Switzerland than Lederhosen these days. Our garment is conquering the world. But as it does, the world loses something.
Globalization is the slow, steady process of sameness. And that sameness, in a generation or two, can undermine the careful local practices of centuries. The blue jean eats the Lederhosen up, gobbles the mukmuk, the sarong, the kilt, the knee-breeches.
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You see where this is going. Our old practices of worship, our staid ecclesiological habits, our various local traditions and diversity of practice are often seen as missional Lederhosen—cute at best. Quaint. But outdated, out of pace with “the culture.” So, we so quickly swap them for ministerial blue jeans—the practices in style that have gained popularity, that “work.”
But we forget that good Lederhosen can climb mountains, withstand the abrasion of Alpine stone. That they pass on a tradition of activity as well as a tradition of appearance. That sometimes, a wise and tested function follows their form, perfected over generations.
I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard a Christian leader proudly tell their story of questioning “how we’ve always done things,” but it’s a lot. Such questioning can be very healthy. At its best I have nothing at all against it. It can be exciting, necessary. But it can also be like a child ripping out the homestead garden with no idea at all how they will replant it, often with little idea of the names, or functions, or stories of the heritage roots and heirloom bulbs pulled up and exposed to the killing sun.
Many of us have not a drive for innovation, but a bitter need for the new—feeling that our significance is found not in faithfulness but in freshness. In such cases, deconstruction can be destruction. To our loss, and to the loss of our communities.
It is true that a changing culture demands creativity and fresh expressions of our ancient faith and practice. But it is a small step from that good thing to the lie that our significance is in freshness rather than faithfulness.
This is how we forget that good Lederhosen can climb mountains, withstand the abrasion of Alpine stone. This is how we forget that we pass on traditions of activity as well as traditions of appearance. That sometimes, a wise and tested function follows form, perfected over generations into something strong—something that once lost can take generations to replace.
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For a while, I led worship in the oldest Protestant church still standing west of the Rockies. It was built like a good old Oregon barn—hand-sawn and hand-hewn everything, all from the ancient cedar and fir that settlers started felling in the 1840s.
In summer, I would bike for miles down a dusty gravel road from my house, and walk the rows of graves that surrounded the little white church. I kept them all mowed, their falling stones upright. The southwest corner, folks said, was a native burial place, its markers long gone, though I tried to surround it with a simple circle of stones. Those first peoples were joined in death there by the first white child born in Portland, by the leader of the first wagon train over the Cascades, by the Imbrie clan (rich frontier Freemasons remembered by a massive red obelisk) by dozens of cheaper gravestones carved only in German.
Immense shuttered single-pane windows light the building in the endless misty gray (you rarely needed lights), and the bell in the squat steeple cuts through a damp morning to hill after rolling hill that surrounds.
I wish you could hear how a few voices can fill that one room. You could whisper the Scriptures from the pulpit and still hear it in the back. Sing a hymn—the clarity and timbre of the place makes you shiver. What looks like a primitive pioneer building is actually carefully built for the needs of a community. Built for lamp-lit songs, for preaching without a microphone, for sitting close to one’s neighbor in a room whose windows offer relief from the dark pioneer farmhouses of those years before this land was a United State.
The place had purpose—the traditions of New England settlers mingling with the needs of our fog-bound frontier. It became something special, something unique, a wordless tradition that held values of worship and togetherness.
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I don’t ever want the church to stop growing, developing. But I question the pastoral wisdom of compulsive innovation. I question our need for the new. I question our ministry motives in looking ever over one another’s shoulders for what’s working over there. It has a disconnected restlessness to it that I distrust.
I question the growing culture of globalized ministry that through screens and podcasts and Pinteresting branding and blue jeans seems to be conquering the world as inexorably as the iPhone. I question it all, thinking back to the simple beauty I have felt when my people and my place were integrated in worship. Innovation has many gifts, but integration does too, and the world needs more prophets of the latter.
At the end of all things, I am told, every tongue, tribe, and nation will be gathered before the throne of the Great Lamb. I do not know what I will wear or what song I will sing, but I believe with all my heart that my clothes, body, and song will feel and smell and look and taste like the hills of Helvetia, Oregon. A song that only my people in my time in my place could have. How wonderful it will be to hear the other voices. How wonderful it will be to hear my voice, in the happy knowing that it is me, as only me as I could be for the glory of my Maker.
I know that I will see you there too. What will you wear? What song shall you bring to represent your people?
I urge you to gaze back at the local traditions that make up your people’s unique expression of Christianity. For you to remember your oldest worship songs, your antiquated things, the out-of-date practices of your ancestors. I call on you to ask God to show you their function, the wisdom of them, their hidden beauty.
Think for a moment. What are the songs of your folks? Appalachian hymns? Jesus-people choruses? Orthodox chants? Try to hear them for the first time. Try to love them again. What are the vestments of the ministry? Suit and tie? Robe and stole? Ron-Jon’s T-shirt? Try to understand the tradition—what is valued, what is necessary, what is communicated.
Innovation can be wonderful. But it can also be child’s work. Sometimes maturity means rediscovering the wisdom of the old paths. Or the old pants. The beauty of the Lederhosen—laughable until you see it rightly.
We make the traditions for generations that will follow. I pray that we will find the best of the past to bring with us, and not, in our pride or insecurity, hand down only the same old blue jeans that can be found in the rest of the world. In this day of globalized sameness, we need more leaders in Lederhosen. Take off the blue jeans—even if only for an afternoon—and try on the old pair.
Unless, like me, you come from the native land of blue jeans. In that case, let’s skip among the sage and silver mines, along the snaking deer trails to our little wooden churches, and keep that perfect denim tradition alive for our children.
Paul J. Pastor is a writer and grassroots pastor in Oregon, and author of The Face of the Deep: exploring the mysterious person of the Holy Spirit.
