Jackson is associate pastor at First United Methodist Church, Orlando. In October 1998 he received a $9,000 grant from the Louisville Institute’s Study Grants for Religious Leaders Program to conduct a one-year study of successful church starts among all denominations.

The following article contains some of the conclusions Jackson reached.

ORLANDO — The greatest area of conflict within churches over the past 15 years has been worship.

Some have steadfastly held to the notion that the best worship is the worship mainline denominations have known during the past 40 years, which was based on inherited European worship from the middle of this millennium. Others believe that worship involving any instrument resembling an organ, piano or classical music of any form is at best outdated and at worst antithetical to trying to reach people for Christ.

After visiting many churches around the country that are doing tremendous jobs reaching people outside the Christian faith I’ve concluded that worship has nothing to do with contemporary versus traditional styles and everything to do with context.

The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection is a church in the southern suburbs of Kansas City, Mo., that has not reached its 10th anniversary. Yet, every week more than 5,500 people gather for worship. Sunday morning worship is traditional. Music is played on an organ, members sing hymns, and the pastors wear robes and follow a traditional United Methodist liturgy.

The Saturday and Sunday evening services are contemporary, but they play a secondary role compared to the traditional Sunday morning services. Because the majority of the population of the Overland Park area of Kansas City comes from a traditional church background, Resurrection knew a traditional music and worship style was the one that would engage their culture and context.

In urban Seattle, the culture and context is dramatically different. Church at the Center is a six-year-old Presbyterian church with an expressed intent to reach out to the unchurched of urban Seattle through the culture with which the people are familiar. The church’s members worship downtown in a movie theater in the Queen Anne section of Seattle. The worship is a mix of urban rock and grunge, a music style native to the Seattle area, which includes multimedia presentations that appeal to the area’s computer-industry professionals. The focus of the church isn’t whether traditional or other forms of worship are "correct," but how a church legitimately worships God in such a way that unbelievers in their community will respond to the Gospel.

On the western edge of Washington, D.C.’s, beltway is Frontline. The goal of Frontline’s members is to be "an accepting, friendly environment where those aged 18-35 can experience God in a fresh, new way."

To make this goal real, the church has created a style of worship that is above and beyond most other definitions of contemporary. The church band is similar to the Irish rock band U2. The service includes extremely professional and polished multimedia presentations. Because of these and other unique and contextual forms of ministry, young people from around D.C. crowd the sanctuary, experience God and grow in their faith. For many, this is the first time to experience God.

In the LowerTown district of St. Paul, Minn., is House of Mercy, a new American Baptist church where worship has a unique flair. The style of worship its people relate to is a blend of "Hee Haw" and Benedictine monasticism. The church worships in an older American Baptist building that seems on its last legs. Yet, the church has opened its doors to a ministry that reaches people who have long been on the church’s doorstep, but to whom it never made inroads.

Contextual worship for this part of St. Paul involves a band with a southern, country twang, combined with votive candles and incense that wafts through the sanctuary and out the front doors. It is a combination that has truly tapped into a subculture of St. Paul that no other church is reaching.

The great struggle for mainline churches today is that although there are a multitude of efforts to begin alternative worship services, the vast majority of primary worship services are still traditional. That is successful in parts of the country where a traditional style of music is the dominant context, but cultural shifts of the past 30 years are changing the dominant context in most of the country’s population centers. We are seeing microclimates in each city making static style of worship over small parts of the city infeasible.