If John Calvin were an 'Xer'
Worship in the Reformed Tradition
Scot Sherman
January 1, 1997
Seven years ago I left the serene campus of Princeton Seminary to become involved in the start-up of a new Presbyterian church on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The congregation that developed was primarily single baby-boomers who had come to New York City to become rich and famous or to escape something. The church eventually caught the attention of the Wall Street Journal, which called us "a church yuppies can have faith in."
After a few years, several of the younger members began talking about seeing another church started that would be decidedly Generation X and downtown in its focus. So in January of 1995 I began leading worship services in a school auditorium in Greenwich Village. We called ourselves "The Village Church."
This was a very different crowd from the Upper East Side. They were what the trendy Village clothing store Urban Outfitters calls "Yubbies"--Young Urban Bourgeois Bohemians--"twenty-something" refugees from middle-class suburbia who came to New York to make it. After the first worship service, I was cornered by a guy looking like Jack Kerouac with bleached blonde hair. He eyed my Protestant clerical uniform (a business suit) and told me with savvy Gen-X authority, "Lose the tie, dude." I remembered a famous photograph of the missionary Hudson Taylor wearing traditional Chinese clothing, and then and there decided that I would invest in a wardrobe of black clothes (the Puritans would approve), and would lose the tie. I realized then that I was only beginning to struggle with questions of what else I might have to lose if our worship services were to be relevant to these people. More importantly, I was beginning to struggle with what to keep if I was truly to bring the spirituality of the Reformation to ...
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