1. There is very little in the New Testament about the forms and style and content of corporate worship. Following Old Testament forms too closely contradicts the obsolescence of the wineskins. God must mean to leave the matter of form and style and content to the judgment of our spiritual wisdom—not to our whim or our tradition, but to prayerful, thoughtful, culturally alert, self-critical, Bible-saturated, God-centered, Christ-exalting, reflection driven by a passion to be filled with all the fullness of God. I assume this will be an ongoing process, not a one time effort.

2. One way to describe the differences in how people approach worship is to speak in terms of fine culture and folk culture. By "culture" I mean a pattern of life including thought and emotion and speech and activity. By "fine culture" I have in mind the pattern of life that puts a high priority on intellectual and artistic expressions that require extraordinary ability to produce and often demand disciplined efforts to understand and appreciate. By "folk culture" I have in mind the pattern of life that puts a high priority on expressions of heart and mind that please and help average people without demanding unusual effort.

For example it's the difference between classical music and blue grass (or easy listening or rock or show tunes or oldies or country western —all of which are "the music of the people", though I realize there is a continuum rather than a neat box for all kinds and qualities of music.)

Or another example would be the contrast between a Shakespearean drama at the Guthrie and "The Empire Strikes Back" at a theater.

Or one might think of the difference between reading Gerard Manley Hopkins' Poem "The Windhover - To Christ Our Lord".

"I caught this morning's minion, kingdom
of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing.

Or on the other hand reading the homespun poetry of Edgar A Guest,

It takes a heap o' livin' to make a house a home.

3. We should not pass judgment on fine culture or folk culture per se. There are caricatures of the excesses in both that are easy to condemn. That is not our purpose. It is more profitable is to consider the strengths and weaknesses built in to both of them so has to avoid the weaknesses and affirm the strengths in both. Fine culture and folk culture have intrinsic vulnerabilities to sin and unique potentialities for God-glorifying goodness. They are redeemable.

4. Intrinsic vulnerabilities of high culture include elitism and snobbishness. In demanding high levels of intellect and skill, it easily inflates the ego of those who succeed in it, and tempts them to look with contempt on folk culture with its simpler achievements. It easily isolates technical expertise from the larger issues of life and attempt to give it intrinsic value instead of defining its value in relation to other, more important spiritual and personal realities. It is inevitably less accessible to average people and therefore tends toward performance rather than participation, and this performance orientation carries again the tendency toward an atmosphere of aloofness and distance.

5. Intrinsic vulnerabilities of folk culture include a laziness and carelessness. There is an intrinsic drift toward increasing indifference to simple disciplines that define excellence at the most rudimentary levels (for example, using bad grammar in worship songs like "you reigneth" or having "you" and "thou" in the same line. This is not like the word "ain't" in "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog." It's like singing "Thou ain't nothin but a hound dog."). Folk culture, with its intrinsic anti-intellectualism tends to short circuit the mind and move the emotions with shortcuts. Thus folk culture is not generally a preservative force for great Biblical doctrine.