Feeling Good Is Not the Point of Worship

I’m starting to feel worse about feeling better after worship. Okay, mostly that’s a joke—and yet the more I eavesdrop on livestreamed worship services, the more sermon clips I watch on social media, the more contemporary Christian music I hear on Spotify, the more it seems to me that what many congregational leaders are aiming to provide their people is an incredible (worship) experience. Noble as such aims may be, I worry we’ve gone too far. When does worship become more about the worshipers than the one being worshiped? If weekend worship is designed primarily to be a sort of emotional therapy, do we really need God for it? No doubt, worship often leaves us feeling better. Sharing space with like-minded believers, opening God’s Word, singing hymns, partaking of Communion—how could such practices not yield beautiful byproducts? I hope my parishioners and I leave church better off than when we came in. Moreover, the emotional side of our lives is vital in worship (just read the Psalms). It seems to me that Christians too often forget we are embodied selves whose hearts are crucial to true worship, so emotional worship can be a welcome corrective. Even so, there are dangers of emotional excess in worship—in emotion sought for its own sake. Or, perhaps, more precisely, there are dangers in myopic and clichéd pursuits of emotion in worship. Evangelicalism has long emphasized the individual experience of faith. That’s not new, even if today’s emphasis appears in novel strains—in the forms of fog machines and preachers who say just every 11th word. I’d trace the roots back at least to Enlightenment philosophers and deists who were keen to emphasize subjectivism and religious experience. But whatever the history and good intentions, if today’s church lives at the end of an emotional cul-de-sac—circling the drive of our feelings again and again—it’s our own fault. We need worship that provides new highways leading beyond ourselves. Perhaps the real question I’m asking is whether any of this is working. Is the church that makes us feel better making us be better? What is the long-term fruit of experience-driven worship? Are congregations becoming brighter lights and sturdier bastions of faith in an increasingly dark and hostile world? Do these worship habits help Christians become more like Christ? Hyperfocus on feeling is a dangerous path to tread. Feelings ebb and flow. It is no knock on emotion to say it is not the foundation of faith, even if it often plays a significant role in our relationships with God and each other. What makes a song good for corporate worship What Makes a Song Good for Corporate Worship? “Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about,” C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity. “He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not.” And as for worship, the theologian Marva Dawn has that lovely phrase I’m thinking of now: worship as a royal waste of time. Such worshipful waste is as hard on us as it was on Judas (see John 12:1–8). So we find ways to make our worship “worth it,” to ensure it produces sufficient emotional response. Making matters worse, we too often fail to recognize that response for the emotion that it is. Have you have seen the work of the Holy Spirit equated with sensation? Next time someone in a pulpit or worship band says, “The Spirit is really moving today,” ask yourself what, specifically, that person means. Nothing in Scripture suggests you can tell you’re experiencing a movement of God’s Spirit if you feel positive affect and overpowering sensation. Rather, biblically speaking, the Spirit is the one who makes us more like the crucified Jesus, the one who leads us into sacrificial suffering, by whom we cry, “Abba, Father” (Rom 8:12–17). If we say, “The Spirit is really moving today,” we ought to be witnessing something closer to Good Friday than Woodstock. Don’t hear me wrong: Experience and emotion matter. These are good gifts from God and have their place in worship. But what we do at church must be far more than emotion and experience. related Hands holding up music notes. God Loves Our Middling Worship Music Kelsey Kramer McGinnis A globe with pictures of an Asian and African church worshiping Around the World in 11 Church Services Dean Flemming I know this fails as an “attractional model” of church growth. But I’ve been in enough leadership meetings to know that you can’t keep everyone happy. In fact, keeping people happy is a sorry goal in the first place. I’ve also learned that, as the saying goes, what you win people with is often what you win people to. Aiming at experience is a dangerous game to play. And putting the burden on ministry leaders to “make God happen” for hundreds of people week after week is a sure-fire route to burnout and a fundamental misunderstanding of the responsibility of the pastor and the na Worship is fundamentally about giving God his due, the glory and honor he deserves. We worship because God is God, whether or not we get anything out of it. Recall the words of the prophet: “Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior” (Hab. 3:17–18). In other words, even if I don’t feel anything, I’m here. Even if worship doesn’t regularly cheer me up, I’m here. And there is deep joy in that. To be sure, worship helps us. It helps us by placing us in a bigger story. We need to remember that the kingdom of God is much larger than our own little lives and the problems we face day by day. Victory is won whether our problems, including our internal and emotional troubles, are ever resolved in this life. This is not to dismiss how God cares for and attends to “the least of these.” He numbers the hairs on our heads. He loves us, so we cast our anxieties on him. But I believe that often what we need more than the God who meets our every emotional need is a God who calls us beyond ourselves. Sometimes our best medicine is getting out of the house for some fresh air. Worship is also a time of formation for the community of faith. It’s a time when the assembly trains to run the race of Christian discipleship. So as much as worship reminds us of God’s victory, if all we do on Sundays is the same victory lap, then it may not be long before we’re unable to do even that. Sunday’s services—to change the image—should work less like a sitcom episode that puts a bow on a tidy little story and more like a few pages in a Dostoevsky novel. Long books meander and progress in fits and starts. At any given place within the story, the reader may have more questions than answers and more confusion than clarity. Sometimes seemingly insignificant details, actions, or characters turn out to be just that: insignificant. Sometimes they become the linchpin that holds together the whole story. Sometimes it’s not clear just how such rhythms of worship contribute to our lives. Perhaps it’s only at the end that we can look back and see how any page fits with the whole. But we can have confidence that no page written by such a master will be wasted. It is part of a longer story about Christ that God is telling through our lives. Korean family reading a book together related Building the Habit of Family Worship Esther Shin Chuang Perhaps what we need in our hour of worship is just to worship. Perhaps what we need—in this age of self-infatuation and obsessing about our feelings—is to get the attention off ourselves for a few hours a week and onto the one who deserves it most, in the company of our brothers and sisters in Christ who need our love. If we leave church feeling better, praise God. But we ought not to expect or demand such pleasures every week. Worship is not the hour when paid staff manufacture spiritual happiness for us, nor is it the time to announce, “Peace, Peace,” if there is no peace (Jer. 6:14). Worship is where we honor God because he is God. It is where we see ourselves in a larger and better story. It is where we are formed into the people God has made us in Christ. And it is where we can wait on God’s healing, mercies, and goodness, in his ways, in his time. Matthew D. Love teaches preaching and ministry at Harding School of Theology in Searcy, Arkansas.