This morning, while I was doing some sermon preparation I came across this passage from Brother Isaac Watts:

O may our feet pursue the way
Our pious fathers led!
With love and holy zeal obey
The counsels of the dead.

It struck me as being very similar to what another Englishman of a later generation, G.K. Chesterton, had to say about tradition. He described it as a democracy of the dead where those who have gone before are given a vote.

I'd often reflected on that notion in connection to political matters. When proponents of homosexual marriage, for instance, prevail with a slight majority they yet remain a fractional minority in the context of history. If there could be a referendum of the grave matters would be very different. As it is, when I go into the voting booth I take with me the weight of a thousand ghosts who will get no other vote than mine, where the brave new thinker goes into the same booth weighed down with nothing more than his tremendous ego and an inflated sense of his own importance. I stand on the shoulders of giants; he prefers to trample those shoulders down.

But this morning Dr. Watts got me thinking for the first time about how this democracy of the dead might apply to the life of the church. Our own little church has seen some dramatic changes take place over time and there have been not a few innovations in just the last six years. But I wonder what would get vetoed and what would get ratified by those who've gone before.

And then there are the trendy churches which are so aggressive and deliberate about eschewing the established things. It always begins with a resistance to established patterns of worship and service, or with a renaming of things (the "pastor" becomes a "team leader"). But the toxic disdain for the worship and attire of our predecessors almost always becomes a disdain for their piety and doctrine in time.

Just something to think about.