Multiple styles of worship?

I found these two insights at The Worshiping Community in a thread about churches having multiple styles of worship for different services. We see it here in our town -- churches having a "traditional," "contemporary," or "blended" services. Intuitively I've never liked the idea. Here's some real-world experience having their say. Worth pondering.

By the way, when pushed to describe our music/worship style, I say "eclectic." Never liked "blended" -- sounds like some kind of jello and whip cream concoction.

Russ Hutto writes,

What a lot of larger churches that serve up buffet style worship are seeing a generation later is that segregating the church based on worship preference is successful in 2 things:

1) Dividing the church.

2) De-emphasizing the family.

Lemleroy writes,

I found this quote from J.I. Packer pertaining to multiple worship styles. I thought it'd be appropriate to post as a followup to my original post. This is an excerpt from Shane Rosenthal's "An Interview with J. I. Packer: The State of Evangelicalism" in Modern Reformation. J. I. Packer is the author of the Christian classic, "Knowing God".

Shane Rosenthal: "What do you think about a niche marketing approach that has by virtue of the different worship styles - teen pop, alternative, and adult boomer - created generational segregation?"

J. I. Packer: "We have separated the ages, very much to the loss of each age. In the New Testament, the Christian church is an all-age community, and in real life the experience of the family to look no further should convince us that the interaction of the ages is enriching. The principle is that generations should be mixed up in the church for the glory of God. That doesn't mean we shouldn't disciple groups of people of the same age or the same sex separately from time to time. That's a good thing to do. But for the most part, the right thing is the mixed community in which everybody is making the effort to understand and empathize with all the other people in the other age groups. Make the effort is the key phrase here. Older people tend not to make the effort to understand younger people, and younger people are actually encouraged not to make the effort to understand older people. That's a loss of a crucial Christian value in my judgment. If worship styles are so fixed that what's being offered fits the expectations, the hopes, even the prejudices, of any one of these groups as opposed to the others, I don't believe the worship style glorifies God, and some change, some reformation, some adjustment, and some enlargement of spiritual vision is really called for."

Because of Mercy,

David