What If Worship Is Meant to Be Boring?

What Decades of Performance-Based Worship Did to Our Expectations

No one wants to attend a boring church, right? At least that is the assumption behind a lot of what happens on Sunday mornings. A mutual friend on Facebook, Morgan Lester, posted something recently that really resonated. He wrote that over the last thirty years, most churches across denominations adopted a style of music best described as performance-based. Mood lighting, trance-like movements, praise teams, top-40 hits. He predicted that within the next decade, due to a return of younger Christians to traditional worship, that many of those same churches will quietly drop their praise bands and change their lightbulbs, not because they had convictions about music, but because they need to stay in business. It was never really a matter of preference, he argued. It was always a matter of pragmatism.

Photo by Matea Gregg on Unsplash

I cannot verify Morgan’s prediction about the future. But his diagnosis of the present is hard to argue with, and it raises a question I have been sitting with since I left a contemporary evangelical church late last year to start worshiping at a Presbyterian church. What if worship is not supposed to hold our attention at all? What if it is supposed to be boring?

How We Got Here

To understand the state of worship in most churches today, you must understand two powerful forces that reshaped what evangelicals do on Sunday mornings: the Church Growth Movement and what is now referred to as the worship industrial complex.

The Church Growth Movement grew out of the missionary movements of the 1950s through 1970s. Donald McGavran published The Bridges of God in 1955, the first book to suggest that churches should study why some congregations grow and others do not. McGavran, a missionary to India, argued that churches should reach people without destroying their cultural identity, and that Western individualism was a hindrance to evangelism. He made his case from a good place, and it is a compelling one.

In the 1970s, leaders like C. Peter Wagner built on McGavran’s missiology and applied it to how churches worship. Until then, congregations primarily asked whether a given worship practice was rooted in their theological tradition. The Church Growth Movement added a new question: how can our worship practices best reach the unchurched? This became known as the seeker-sensitive model. It did not just argue that worship should be accessible to believers and non-believers alike. It argued that the elements of worship are flexible, designed not primarily to draw us into wonder, but to draw people through the door.

Liturgies had already been simplified or abandoned following the evangelistic fervor of the Second Great Awakening and the rise of restorationist movements like Pentecostalism and Mormonism. The Church Growth Movement accelerated that trend. Responsive readings, vestments, public confession, creeds, and the liturgical calendar fell away in church after church. Traditional hymns gave way to praise choruses. Choirs were replaced by praise bands. Eventually video screens, smoke machines, stage lighting, and choreographed dance entered the picture.

Sermons changed too. Instead of working through biblical texts verse by verse or following the church calendar, sermons increasingly addressed everyday concerns: how to be a better parent, how to cope with anxiety, how to build healthier relationships, how to find purpose.

Excellence became a ministry value in its own right, meaning the flawless execution of the Sunday service from the parking lot to the pew. Churches invested heavily in signage, hospitality, media, theater seating, and technology.

Where the Church Growth Movement overlapped with charismatic renewal, worship increasingly aimed at producing an experience of God’s presence. Longer musical sets, spontaneous prayer, and emotionally expressive singing became standard. Once-traditional Baptist and Methodist churches began to look and feel like Pentecostal churches on Sunday morning, minus the tongues.

The Worship Industrial Complex

You can always follow the money. The pragmatism the Church Growth Movement introduced was eventually monetized by what I call the worship industrial complex: the network of churches, music publishers, conferences, record labels, streaming platforms, technology companies, influencers, and celebrity worship leaders that has turned Christian worship from a local ecclesial practice into a global religious industry.

The cycle works something like this. A large church writes and performs original songs. The songs are professionally recorded and marketed. They spread widely through streaming and licensing. Conferences, tours, and social media amplify the artists. Other churches adopt the songs to stay current. Royalties and brand recognition fund the next round of production. Over time, influence concentrates in a small number of churches and organizations whose music and practices shape worship around the world, regardless of denomination or theological tradition.

This is the machinery behind the music playing in most American sanctuaries on a given Sunday. It is not a conspiracy. It is an economy. And economies, once established, tend to protect themselves.

Leaving the Machine

I left the sweat and fervor of Pentecostalism to join the frozen chosen, and I could not be happier. One of the things I value most about my Presbyterian church is its commitment to the regulative principle of worship: we use only the practices affirmed in Scripture and the earliest Christian traditions. This stands in contrast to the normative principle, which holds that any element not explicitly prohibited in the Bible is permitted. If it works, use it.

We do not go to church to be entertained. We go to glorify God, pray, read Scripture, confess our sins and our faith, sing congregational songs, hear the Scriptures preached, and receive the sacrament of communion. Is it boring sometimes? Yes. Do I have a strong emotional reaction to every element of every service? No. But I leave feeling fed, and I see the effects of that feeding through the week that follows. There is something edifying about the simplicity of the service, the ease with which everyone participates, and the beauty of its imperfections when we engage simply as fellow humans rather than as an audience pursuing performative excellence.

The Tyranny of the Practical

My conception of worship was first challenged years before I left Pentecostalism, ironically by Pentecostal scholar Chris Green. I once heard him speak at an academic conference on the subject of worship, and he suggested that worship should be an escape from the noise and busyness of the world. Modern worshipers, he argued, do not need more stimulation to stay engaged. They need something to quiet their minds long enough to reconnect with their souls. He described long, unhurried, even boring church services as a spiritually formative practice for Christian disciples.

Years later, Green challenged me again. This time he argued that sermons themselves should not be practical. I cannot recall his exact words, but the substance was this: sermons should call us to contemplation, and contemplation is a protest against the “tyranny of the practical.” Worship, he said, should move us beyond thinking of God as merely useful. Contemplation is not trying to solve a problem. It is delighting in God for God’s own sake, and for ours.

That phrase has stayed with me. The tyranny of the practical. It names something true about American Christianity, and not just its worship style. We have come to expect that everything in church should be useful, should produce a measurable outcome, should help us in some identifiable way. Worship that asks nothing of us but our attention, and offers nothing back but the presence of God, starts to feel like a waste of time.

What If Boring Is the Point?

In response to Morgan’s Facebook post, I asked a question of my own: what if church is supposed to be boring? The responses ranged widely. Some said boring would be a relief compared to the low-grade anxiety of coercive, high-energy services. Others said they preferred quieter, more reflective worship. Still others insisted that worship has to be engaging and “anointed,” using the Pentecostal term for emotionally charged singing or preaching, in order to hold people’s attention.

I am not questioning anyone’s preferences. But I want to ask whether worship was ever supposed to be about our preferences in the first place. What if true Christian worship operates at a very low level of stimulation by design?

So what do we make of the churches that are bombastic and highly entertaining? Clearly they produce results. People come to Christ there. Churches grow. I have no doubt disciples are made. But is it worship? Is it the mystical engagement of human beings with the divine through the receiving of Word and Sacrament? Would you still show up if all that remained was Scripture, song, prayer, and fellowship, stripped of spectacle? Or is that not enough?

I think those high-energy services have a place. I would describe them as a kind of Christian concert or motivational event, a convergence of self-help and religious teaching, well suited for people who need and want that level of emotional stimulation. Even I need and enjoy that at times. Spectacle has its place.

But for me, that isn’t biblical or traditional worship. Sunday worship is not meant to be evangelistic, though it will still draw those the Spirit is calling. It is not meant to entertain, but to call us into wonder. It is not meant to be practical, it is meant to form us spiritually in ways nothing practical ever could.

That is what I need on this leg of my Christian journey. And apparently, so do a growing number of others.