In September we introduced you to Mark Wingfield and Brent Barry, two local pastors interested in sharing their thoughts on topics of faith in our community.

Ranking right up there with politics, religion is a topic often avoided in polite company.

Fear of stirring the pot can sometimes keep people from discussing it at all.

However, it's hard to escape the fact that religion plays an important part in the lives of many here in Lake Highlands. Maybe it has to do with upbringing, our history, our family traditions.

And that's got us wondering, are these traditions ones that bind or comfort us?

Are we setting out to forge new roads, far from the convention of our past – or looking to return to what we view as long-held truths?

This month, we pose the questions, "What is mainstream in today's religious community?" and "How do you define traditional beliefs?"

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"Everyone looks at the world through his own knothole."

"That sage advice was passed on to me by a friend I knew when we lived in Georgia years ago," says Mark.

"And I think it gets right to the heart of figuring out what’s 'mainstream' and who’s espousing 'traditional' beliefs."

According to Mark, your perspective depends on where you’re standing.

Brent agrees, and he uses the analogy of music.

"It's like when somebody says they want to hear the traditional old hymns in a worship service," says Brent.

"I want to ask 'whose traditional hymns?' One person's traditional hymn is another person's new hymn."

"In fact, many of the hymns thought of as 'traditional' were originally bar songs that our mothers and fathers in the faith used to express biblical themes."

For Mark it seems a peculiar way to define a church as either conservative and liberal.

"While most members of my own church (Wishire Baptist) would consider our theology to be progressive, visitors often label us as 'conservative' because we offer a 'traditional' worship style," he says.

"By that, I mean we sing hymns out of a hymnal, and have no praise band or big screens with words projected over seasonal backgrounds."

"I’ve often joked that by adhering to a traditional worship style, we now have become an alternative worship place."

In moving away from the analogy of hymns, how can we apply these themes to the "larger theological spectrum found in American Christianity," as Mark describes it?

"In our denominational context among Baptists," he says, "people might have heard there's been a schism over the last 30 years or so."

"Within the Baptist universe, there appears to be a vast gap between the right wing and the left wing and everything in the middle."

"But what most people fail to see is that when viewed from outside the Baptist bubble, our left-to-right gap covers only a small portion of that larger spectrum."

For Brent labels like 'traditional' and 'mainstream' aren't any more useful than labels like 'contemporary' and 'emergent.'