Curiously, the converse occurred in the Orthodox Church.
In the seventeenth century Nikon, the Patriarch of Moscow, in face of fierce opposition, carried through a reform of the Service Books. The Raskolniki--literally "schismatics," sometimes called Old Believers--, led by Avvakum, seceded from the Church rather than accept the changes. The origin of Russian Dissent is, therefore, the exact opposite of the origin of English Dissent. The Raskolniki afterwards themselves split into more sects, some having a priesthood and some without. Some of these sects degenerated into oddities, and indulged in the strangest excesses. But the more sober element among the Old Believers incorporates some of the best of the Russian religious spirit and character.582
A contingent of one of the strange sects, in fact, settled in Eugene at one time, the Dukhobours. Dukhobar Road in Eugene is named after them, and one can see still standing one of their old barns. They believe in Jesus but not in the Bible. One of their distinguishing customs has to do with their belief that we are all naked children in the eyes of God. That gets them in the news every now and then. In Canada a judge decreed that they would have to wear clothes. Their response was to immediately disrobe right in the courtroom. Pretty odd!
But people with religion tend to live out their beliefs. I was going to a mainline Protestantchurch before I came to the Restoration church I atend now. That church had officially adopted the NIV. After a few weeks I went right back to my KJV. Bound in the spirit, one might say.
I have a pretty tolerant preacher. If he were a Dukhobour preacher, he'd give us a sermon every Sunday, just not out of the Bible. Say, I showed up one day and asked him, saying I notice that this congregation wears clothes. I don't feel comfortable wearing clothes. Would I have to wear them?
No, he tells me, I don't have to wear clothes if I don't want to. I can use my KJV if I don't want to go by the NIV.
By and by, I notice that we have a traditional service in which we sing all the old traditional Russian songs. But they all wear clothes anyway. I point this out to him, and he replies that there's good reason to wear clothes these days.
Well, maybe there be very good reasons to wear clothes, but that hardly qualifies this as a traditional service, the traditional hymns notwithstanding.
Then we might want to look at the Quakers.
THE QUAKERS583 Why, if the Quakers saw themselves as reformers in the same tradition as the Puritans, did Quaker doctrine appear to have within it the potential to destroy Puritanism? At its very basis the disagreement was theological. In spite of their common impulse toward reform, the Quakers and the Puritans espoused radically different theologies of the divine and the human. Whereas the Puritans preached a depraved humanity and an omnipotent sovereign God who had revealed himself through the Bible, the Quakers believed in the possibility of human perfection and in a deity who was made known through the religious experience of the individual. For the Quakers there were no creedal prerequisites, no clergy, no sacraments through which the experience of the divine would be mediated--at the heart of Quakerism there was just the individual experience of the Inner Light--the Quaker term for the in-dwelling presence of God.
The Quaker belief led to their insistence on the equality of each person. To reflect and emphasize that equality, the Quakers radically simplified their lives in every aspect--from worship to dress and speech. They wanted to eliminate all those manifestations of rank which appeared to indicate that some people were better than others. Quaker worship took the form of a meeting, the word also used as the equivalent of congregation. The meeting was regulated by no set ritual, nor was it celebrated by a member of the clergy. Members of the meeting sat in silence together, opening themselves to the experience of the Inner Light. When a member was moved to speak, he or she did so. Further, it was the Quakers, not the Puritans, who wore plain, unadorned clothing; and their use of thee and thou instead of you, which today seems merely quaint, served the same purpose as simple dress--to minimize rank and social status. According to Margaret Bacon, common people in the seventeenth century were expected to address their betters as you whereas thee and thou were more intimate forms, and the Quakers refused to comply with this linguistic form of ranking. For this same reason of equality, Quakers did not remove their hats to authorities nor did they take oaths, since that custom seemed to imply two standards of truth, the oath being for special occasions.
Far from being merely irritating to the Puritans, Quaker beliefs and practices appeared to threaten the very foundation on which society was built: the acknowledgement of and submission to authority and leadership, whether it be in the government, the church, or the family. Thus, the Puritans perceived Quakerism not only as a competing religious system but as a threat to the entire social order. But in spite of Puritan efforts to stop it--in some cases going so far as execution--Quaker membership grew steadily during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and one might have guessed that Quakerism today would be among the mainstream churches of America. On the contrary, Quakers now number about 120,000 in a population of more than 230 million.
There are several factors that account for this. One is the series of divisions and schisms that occurred in American Quakerism during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which resulted from disagreements over rigidity of doctrines, evangelical forms of worship, abolition, and the establishment of foreign missions. Another theory is that of Rufus Jones, Quaker historian, teacher, humanitarian, and mystic, who speculates that as long as the "tragic collisions" with Puritanism persisted, the Quakers experienced a dynamism and unity that resulted from their need to establish their identity and resist persecution. When freedom of religion was established, fervor diminished. Even more telling, according to Jones, was the Quaker predilection, developed early, to see themselves as a "peculiar people," a people set apart to preserve a universal truth that the rest of the world refused to accept. As a result, the Quakers turned in upon themselves, paralleling the trap that many other dissenting religious groups had fallen into: "The living idea organizes a definite society for the propagation of it, and lo, the Society unconsciously smothers the original idea and becomes absorbed in itself!"584
...
Some Quaker groups have adopted a more typically Protestant form of worship with hymn singing and Scripture reading; some groups have pastors as well, and refer to their groups as "churches."
Okay, let's see, we don't have any special name for our church, but we still call it a church. We have a preaching minister as opposed to a "pastor". And we follow the "typical Protestant forms of worship with hymn singing and Scripture reading." That and we incorporate the Lord's supper in the service. How can we implement a traditional service and only make the hymns traditional, but not the scripture reading? The whole idea of the Restoration Movement was that the Protestant churches hadn't gone far enough in following the Bible. And now we call a service traditional but use the most popular version of the day rather than the established traditional one. And nobod seems to care so long as we follow the crowd. Isn't that like, "The living idea organizes a definite society for the propagation of it, and lo, the Society unconsciously smothers the original idea and becomes absorbed in itself!"?
To help compare the King James Version's lesson of Paul being "bound in the spirit" (Acts 20:22) with the New International Version's being "compelled by the Spirit," I am going to quote a story of a man being bound to commit an act that otherwise he would not do under any compulsion:
bibles.n7nz.org