On Worship and the Individual

“I can worship God on the lake.”  “I can worship God on the golf course.”  “I can worship God in my room.”  Are these statements a reflection of a healthy expansion of the definition of worship, or do they rather reflect a spiritualizing of the mundane, a trivializing of worship, and an increasing desire in Western culture to avoid being held accountable to a community of faith?

Perhaps they are both.  On the one hand, worship, literally speaking, is to ascribe worth to God.  In that sense, both the public and corporate gathering on Sunday (or any other day) as well as individual devotion are acts of worship.  But when we emphasize the individual over the corporate and reduce worship to only these, we do an injustice to the Body of Christ.

Why?  Because worship is linked to mission.  An individual act of worship, when separated from the communal whole, lacks connection to the larger Church and therefore accountability.  When we become spiritually isolated from each other, we cannot encourage one another’s worship, stretch one another’s worldviews, challenge one another’s biases, and grow into spiritually well-rounded disciples.  Without the community, we have no sharing in the focused and local efforts of the Church to meet the needs of the immediate community.  Mission is reduced to the routine of our daily lives, with the exception of those individuals who go out of their way to minister to the needs of the community in as many ways as they can.  It is all to easy to simply go about our lives, worshiping in our own personal space apart from the community of faith, and never being more fully confronted by the living God manifested in the body of believers in the corporate act of worship.

But this is not a narrow-minded critique of personal and private piety.  Certainly there are congregations whose corporate worship achieves the same goal: everyone comes to worship and is enabled to avoid meeting God.  This can be said equally of so-called “traditional” or “contemporary” worship, when either style becomes turned inward on itself at the expense of any other expression of faith.  Then we as worshipers are allowed to drag our sinful selves into worship and avoid being killed and resurrected.  We leave no different than we entered.

Scripture has scathing critiques of this sort of in-grown, self-centered worship:

I hate, I despise your festivals,
   and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings,
   I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
   I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
   I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
   and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.  (Amos 5)

When worship is turned into an excuse to avoid our calling, it is insincere at best and idolatrous at worst—we worship a golden calf made in our own image.
To what extent has worship, in your experience, enabled complacency?  What can be done to renew the prophetic message of our worship?  How do we avoid the prison that both “traditional” and “contemporary” worship can lock us into?  When is personal devotion appropriate or inappropriate?