Somewhere in the last few decades, without a vote being taken, we rearranged the furniture of Christian worship. The lights came down over the congregation and up over the platform. The hymnal, which had put the same words in every hand, gave way to a screen we watch. The volume rose until the only voice you could hear was the one coming through the speakers. And slowly, without anyone intending it, the people of God became the audience of God’s professionals.
I want to name this gently, because the people who built these rooms love Jesus and meant well. The instinct was evangelistic: make the service excellent, accessible, undaunting to the newcomer. But excellence has a hidden cost when it is applied to worship, because worship is not a product to be consumed. It is an act to be performed, and the one who is supposed to perform it is the gathered congregation, not the band.
The old image, going back to Kierkegaard, is worth recovering. We are tempted to think the congregation is the audience, the ministers are the performers, and God is the prompter offstage. But it is exactly backward. The congregation is the performer. The ministers and musicians are merely the prompters, helping the people do their work. And God is the audience, the One to whom the whole offering is addressed.
We have inverted this almost completely. We now evaluate a service the way we evaluate a concert: was the music tight, was the speaker engaging, did it move me. These are the questions of a spectator deciding whether the show was worth the ticket. They are not the questions of a worshiper, whose only real question is whether God was glorified and whether the people offered themselves.
The symptoms are quiet but everywhere. We sing more quietly than our grandparents did, because we can barely hear ourselves and we assume the professionals have it covered. We arrive late and leave early, the way you might a movie. We church-shop for the best production, migrating to whichever room offers the better experience, and we call this discernment when it is mostly consumerism.
What is lost is not nostalgia for old songs. What is lost is participation, and with it, a particular kind of formation. When you sing the faith with your own voice, in a room full of others doing the same, you are not being entertained. You are being trained. You are putting truths into your body that your mood does not yet believe. You are joining a chorus older than you and refusing, for an hour, to be the center of it. A spectator is shaped by none of this, because a spectator does nothing but receive.
The correction is not to stage a worse show. It is to stop staging a show at all. Turn the lights back up over the people. Choose songs the congregation can actually sing, not just admire. Lower the volume until you can hear the person next to you, slightly off-key, meaning every word. Let the silence return. Trust that a room of ordinary people, offering ordinary voices to God, is more beautiful than any production, because it is the thing the production was only ever pointing at.
Worship was never meant to be watched. It was meant to be done, by you, badly and sincerely, to the only audience that has ever mattered.
—Sunny