As many studies have shown, communal worship is in decline. Many of those who were raised in the church no longer regularly attend what the church offers as worship services.
Yet many of those who no longer attend still seek for meaning and still have spiritual lives. It's just that our worship services often tend to fail to both emphasize a communal experience of God and to connect attendees to something larger than their individualism.
This perhaps isn't surprising - given that we have worked on the how of worship often without ever addressing the why. The failure is ours as the church.
It's inarguably true that experiencing moments of transcendence and being a part of efforts that make a difference in the world can happen in places other in than in church services; perhaps even in better and more authentic forms.
So then why do we gather together to worship?
We do not praise God to bargain with God, so that isn't the reason.
We do not praise God for God's own sake, so that also isn't the reason.
Praising God should driven by our humanness and our hardwiring for connection and community because we are oriented for that interrelation with God in our being. Praise is just one mood of this relatedness.
Our thriving as humans depends on our interconnectedness. We are not simply animals designed to rut and reproduce, because we have this x in the equation; our souls. We see evidence of this mysterious x in art, in sacrificial love, and in that part of us that soars toward God and toward the other (the other beyond one's own family/tribe, for even thieves take care of their own).
And so we act out our praise of God - and of the way in which we are hardwired toward connection God - in community, in acts of communal worship which are moments of doubling, of tripling, of giving and receiving; a threefold relationship of self, other, and God. This is why no worship that is about meeting my individual needs will ever be real worship.
Worship can involve transcendence, can speak to changing the world, can give you the tools to get through next week, and can give you comfort when you need comfort and challenge you when you are stuck, but it does so properly only when it aligns with being toward God and toward God-as-experienced-in the other.
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