By RAY WADDLE

Any weekend, you can find a place of worship where the ushers wear flipflops and the neutral decor comfortingly reminds visitors of a shopping mall and the torch songs are right out of American Idol.

Or you can find a sanctuary that looks like a European cathedral where Bach is king and neckties are still the rage and the sermon commences week after week at precisely 11:36 a.m.

Is this a landscape of happy spiritual consumer choice or a theological battle to the bitter end? For four decades, “worship wars” have pitted generations against each other over sacred music and Sabbath-morning fashion -- all in the name of making religion accessible to easily distracted America. Should worship be formal or casual? With guitars or organ? Sanctuary, auditorium or strip mall? The questions convulsed congregations and launched the careers of many a church-growth consultant.

Vanderbilt scholars John McClure and Robin Jensen say: enough already. Cease fire. Time to drop the resentful stereotyping and discover that both sides are aiming for the same thing: authentic worship of God.
“Both sides are seeking ways to be deeply meaningful, faithful and God-centered,” McClure says. “There’s a lot we can learn from each other.”
McClure and Jenson, both professors at Vanderbilt Divinity School, lead a series of workshops, “Worship(ing) in the Converging Church,” from 7-8:30 p.m. Sept. 25, Oct. 2 and Oct. 9 at Second Presbyterian Church. Cost is $10 for all three sessions. Call 936-8453 for info.

Modern worship conflicts hardly carry the carnage of real religious wars of previous Christian centuries, which shed actual blood over differences regarding worship creeds and Holy Communion prayers.

But today’s clashes in worship style do represent a seismic shift in the way people relate to religious debate. It’s as if music, sometime in the 1960s, replaced theology as the vehicle for spiritual expression.

“Music became a basis for identify in ways it hadnt before,” McClure says.

Trench warfare set in. The mainline churches accused “New Paradigm” nondenominational megachurches of using pop music to cheapen worship. Megachurches retorted that mainliners presented a boring, irrelevant traditionalism.

New generations are impatient with these aging, well-rehearsed recriminations, McClure suggests. “Post-evangelical” young people, often the children of megachurch baby boomers, seek deeper experience in older traditions (liturgical prayers, chant) they never got before. Mainliner kids today expect more emotion and heart from the church they grew up in.

Behind the fight, seldom stated, was a quest for an appropriate image of God: is God accessible and near, or fearsomely majestic and distant? “Both” is the paradoxical answer of religious tradition. But no one could live with that paradox. They chose one side or the other. Adults and church professionals, veterans of the worship wars, will nurture scars and keep hostilities alive.

The future, though, belongs to the young, who are not so eager to preserve the graying arguments of their elders. Maybe the youngsters will embrace the paradoxes of worship and teach the world a lesson or two.