The Worship Problem isn't just a Worship Problem

You walk into a coffee shop on a Tuesday morning. The barista knows your order. The lighting is just right. There is a particular chair by the window where the sun hits at the perfect angle, and the playlist matches your mood. You leave feeling refreshed, encouraged, ready for the day. And then one morning, the place is rearranged, the chair is gone, the music has changed, and your favorite drink is no longer on the menu. You leave annoyed. You consider trying the place down the street.

Now ask yourself an uncomfortable question: is this how you approach Sunday morning?

We live in a culture that has trained us, with the efficient cut of a sharp razor, to be consumers.

Everything is curated. Everything is personalized. The algorithms learn what we like and feed us more of it. Our social media feeds, our streaming services, even our news—all of it is designed to deliver an experience tailored to the individual self.

And so it should not surprise us that this same posture has crept, often unnoticed, into the way we approach the sacred.

We come to church asking, what will I get out of this? We leave asking, did that speak to me? And if it did not, we move on, looking for a place that does.

There is something deeply wrong with this, but the wrongness is subtle because it wears pious dress.

It looks like devotion. It speaks the language of a "personal relationship." It hides itself in earnest hymns, modern worship anthems, and fervent prayers. But underneath, it is what Augustine said describes the condition of the sinner: incurvatus in se, the self curved in upon itself.

The soul bent inward, taking even the holy things of God and bending them toward the gravitational center of “me.”

This is not merely a problem for the seeker-sensitive church or the high-church traditionalist. It is a human problem, and while it is not “new,” it is particularly pronounced today.

It infects the traditionalist who gravitates toward liturgy, incense, or historical aesthetics not because he is being drawn into the great communion of saints across the centuries, but because those forms please his intellect or sensibilities.

It infects the charismatic and the evangelical who chase the emotional high of a perfectly mixed worship set.

It infects the quiet contemplative who treats prayer as a kind of spiritual spa for the interior life.

The forms differ. The disease is the same. We have made worship about ourselves.

 

The Strange Geometry of True Worship

Consider what happens at the heart of true Christian worship when we gather around the Table of the Lord and the Word is proclaimed. We are invited to receive Christ. But notice the direction of the movement.

We do not receive Christ into ourselves so that He might become part of us, the way food becomes part of the eater, with the “eater” merely nourished. Augustine, in a line that’s easy to miss in his Confessions, hears the Lord say to him: “I am the food of grown men. Grow, and you shall feed upon me. Nor shall you change me into yourself, as bodily food, but you shall be changed into me” (Confessions 7.10.16).

Reflect on that a moment.

You shall be changed into me.

The whole logic of consumer worship is reversed. We do not metabolize God into our preferences, like a little “aid” to help us along.

He metabolizes us into His life.

Communion—whether we call it the Eucharist, the Lord's Supper, or breaking bread—is not a spiritual supplement we add to the existing self. It is the dissolution and reconstitution of the self into something larger, older, more enduring, and infinitely more glorious than the small kingdom of “me.”

This is why Saint Paul can write what he writes in Galatians: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

This is not poetic exaggeration. This is the actual telos, the actual end, of Christian existence.

The “I” that began the sentence is not the “I” that ends it.

Something has happened. Something is happening. And it happens in the gathering of the saints, in the slow and patient surrender of the self curved inward to the Christ who calls the self outward, upward, and finally beyond itself.

 

The Cloud of Witnesses

There is a moment in the Letter to the Hebrews that should reframe how we walk into church on Sunday morning. The author has just finished an extraordinary catalogue of the faithful, naming Abel and Enoch and Noah and Abraham and Sarah, and on and on, the great chain of those who lived by faith. And then he turns to us and says:

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us” (Hebrews 12:1).

We are surrounded. The Greek word is περικείμενον (perikeimenon), and it carries the sense of being encircled, hemmed in, cradled by a great encompassing reality. It is the word often used of those spectators gathered in a stadium to watch what’s happening below. But the cheers of the crowd are, in a sense, a participation in the event unfolding below.

Remember how odd it was when sports leagues put “fake people” in the stands during the pandemic? Remember how some stadiums were piping in fake “crowd noise”? It didn’t work very well. Because the fake people, the recorded noise, didn’t participate in the game the way a real crowd does.

This is the truth of every true gathering of the Body. The walls of the church building do not contain the worshipers. They open onto something vast. The angels are there. The saints are there. The faithful departed are there. The Church on earth and the Church in heaven are joined in spirit, and the song that is sung is older than time and will outlast it.

And we walk in worried about whether the music is to our taste.

The author of Hebrews continues, and the picture grows even more staggering:

“But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven” (Hebrews 12:22-23).

This is what is happening. This is where you are. The “personal worship experience” is, in this light, almost laughably small.

We are being invited into the festal gathering of innumerable angels, and we are checking to see if the sermon moved us.

The historical rhythms of worship—whether expressed through formal liturgy or the shared order of service—are there for a reason. They bind us up together into a singular motion. The shared postures of the body train the soul. Entering into corporate worship is not about finding some personal expression that resonates with you uniquely; it’s about losing oneself in the great chorus and choir of the body of Christ. It is about incorporation, not self-expression.

Even when our traditions vary, the trap remains. Because performing our preferred style of piety perfectly—whether that's strict liturgical precision or spontaneous hands-raised praise—can easily become a way of satisfying one’s own “desire,” holding us at arm’s length from the true movement of communion.

 

The Loss That Is Gain

There is a paradox at the heart of all of this, and it is the paradox that runs through every page of the Gospels. Jesus says it more than once, in different forms, but always with the same shape: “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

The self that grasps for itself loses itself. The self that releases itself into Christ finds itself. This is not a clever inversion. This is the actual structure of reality, the deepest logic of the universe God has made.

And it explains why the consumer approach to worship is not merely impolite or shallow but spiritually catastrophic.

It is a refusal of the very thing worship is meant to do. It is showing up at the wedding feast and asking for a private table.

Christian mystics and theologians across the centuries have long pointed to this truth. They write of a stripping away of every attachment—even the attachment to spiritual consolations, even the attachment to the emotional felt presence of God—until the soul is empty enough to be filled with God Himself.

The "dark night of the soul" is precisely the season in which we are weaned from worshiping our own experience of God and learn, painfully, slowly, to worship God Himself—not as an isolated observer in pursuit of a purely private encounter, but as a participant in the covenant body.

The soul that demands to “get something out of it” is a soul still in the early stages of the journey, still mistaking the lights on the path for the destination.

 

What This Looks Like in Practice

So what do we do with this? How does this reshape the way we walk into worship next Sunday, or tomorrow morning, or tonight in our private prayer?

First, change the question you ask. When you walk into church, do not ask, what will I get out of this? Ask instead, what am I being drawn into? The shift is subtle but seismic. The first question places you at the center. The second places Christ at the center, and you in the great encircling crowd of the redeemed.

Second, resist the consumer impulse. When the music is not to your taste, when the sermon is poorly prepared, when the person next to you sings off-key, when someone stumbles over reading the Scripture, do not let your interior monologue catalogue the failures.

These things are the texture of the actual Body of Christ, which is not a curated experience but a living, breathing, imperfect, glorious communion of sinners being made saints. The annoyances are not interruptions of worship. They are the very material of it. Offer them up in patience.

Third, practice the prayer of self-forgetfulness. Before you enter into worship, whether public or private, take a breath and consciously release the demand that the experience meet your specifications. Pray something simple: Lord, let me lose myself in You today. Let me forget what I want and remember what You are doing.

This is harder than it sounds. The self does not surrender easily. It will keep rising up, demanding to be the center. Each time it does, gently set it aside again.

Fourth, cultivate awareness of the great communion. When you pray, remember that you are not praying alone. When you break bread, remember that you are not doing it alone. The whole Church, past and present, is lifting its voice with yours. The believer suffering in a closed nation, the saint praying in a country you have never visited, the angels who never cease their song—all of them are part of this grand reality. You are never alone in worship.

The “personal relationship” is real, but it is the personal relationship of a hand or a foot connected to a grand Body, not the relationship of an isolated consumer with a divine vendor.

Finally, let the loss become gain. Trust the paradox. The self you surrender in worship is not destroyed; it is found. The “I” that disappears into Christ is the “I” that, for the first time, becomes truly itself. The empty seat, the soul that has stopped asking what it can get and started simply being present, becomes part of a crowded heaven, full of angels and saints and the very life of God.

This is the strange and wonderful movement of grace. We give ourselves away, and we receive ourselves back, transformed. We lose, and we find. We die, and we live. And somewhere in that great exchange, the self that was curved in upon itself is unbent, straightened, and finally lifted up into the fellowship it was always meant to enter.