You're Not Here to Create an Experience

There's a particular kind of confusion I didn't have words for until I started studying worship theology formally, and it happened to me more than once.

I'd lead a set I felt good about. The playing was tight, I was present, I meant every word I sang — and afterward I'd watch the congregation's faces and feel like I'd missed them. They were somewhere else. Other nights it went the opposite way: I'd walk off stage feeling like I hadn't connected with God at all that morning, distracted, going through motions — and people would come up afterward and tell me it was the most meaningful service they'd had in months.

For years I didn't know what to do with that mismatch except feel vaguely guilty about it, in both directions. If I felt good and they didn't respond, I must have misjudged something. If I felt empty and they were moved, I must have been wrong about what was happening inside me. Either way, the assumption underneath was the same: my state — or theirs — was the thing that determined whether worship had actually happened.

It wasn't until later, sitting with what worship theologians call the question of who the primary actor in worship actually is, that the mismatch stopped being confusing. The grace wasn't coming from me. It wasn't coming from them, either. Whatever happened in either of our bodies that morning, the offering had already been made — in Christ alone — and it had already been accepted. If that's true, then a night where I felt empty and people received grace anyway isn't a contradiction. It's exactly what you'd expect.

The Scottish theologian James B. Torrance gave this confusion a name: unitarian worship. Not unitarian in the sense of denying the Trinity — almost nobody in church actually denies the Trinity. Unitarian in a quieter, functional sense: worship that operates as though the Trinity doesn't really matter, as though we're each individually responsible for closing the distance to God through our own sincerity, focus, or skill.

Listen for it and you'll hear it everywhere, usually in well-meant language. "I want us to create a space where people can feel God's presence tonight." "Push through your distractions and really connect with him." "It didn't go well — I don't think we built the atmosphere we needed." Every one of those sentences assumes worship is something we generate. The Spirit's job, in that picture, is to help us do better what we're already trying to do on our own.

Torrance's alternative isn't about feeling less, or trying less. It's about where the weight sits. In Trinitarian worship, God is the one acting first. The Father is who worship moves toward. The Son — and this is the part that actually changed things for me, not as a doctrine I could recite but as something I had to sit with for a while before it landed — has already offered, in his own human life, the worship we were created for and cannot produce. Not as a permission slip that lets us in the door, but as an offering already made and already accepted. The Spirit's role isn't to help us manufacture an encounter. It's to draw us into what Christ has already done. We're not climbing. We're being brought in.

There's a diagnostic question buried in that distinction, and it's the one I had to ask myself about those nights. When worship feels flat or strange, what's your first thought? If it's "I wasn't sincere enough, focused enough, present enough" — that's unitarian logic, even if nobody ever taught you that word. If it's "I came to receive what Christ has already given, and I trust that was given whether I felt it or not" — that's the other thing entirely.

I want to be clear about what this isn't saying, because it's easy to hear it wrong. It's not saying your attention and sincerity don't matter, or that effort is somehow suspicious. It's saying they're not the foundation. They're a response to a foundation that was already laid before you walked in. That's a different thing than not caring.

This isn't a problem that belongs to musicians. I used to think it was, because I encountered it first from the platform. It isn't. The same unitarian logic just relocates depending on which culture you're standing in — and both versions deserve equal weight here, because I've watched each one do real damage.

In music-centered worship, it shows up exactly the way it did for me: the conviction that if the band is engaged enough, if the room is led well enough, the Spirit will show up — and if the room stays flat, something failed on the platform. The success or failure of the service gets quietly assigned to the quality of the performance up front.

In sermon-centered worship, I've watched it work even more invisibly, because the room doesn't usually name it as a performance question — it names it as a content question. I sat through a service once where the sermon ran long enough that you could see it on people's faces — restlessness, glances at the clock, that particular stillness that isn't attention but endurance. And the preacher, reading the room correctly but diagnosing it wrong, used some of that overrun time to address the congregation's posture directly — told them, in effect, that their attitude was the problem. Not the length, not the structure — them. The assumption underneath that correction was the same one I'd been carrying as a worship leader: if the room isn't responding, someone failed to deliver something well enough, and someone needs to be held responsible for it.

And I've heard the other side of that same coin often enough, from enough different people, that it's not really one memory anymore — it's a pattern. "That sermon was so good, I really felt God's presence today," said with real conviction about a week where the content happened to land well rhetorically. I don't doubt what any of them felt. But notice what's quietly being measured: whether the preacher's delivery succeeded in producing the encounter. And from other people, other weeks — after a sermon that didn't land as cleanly — the opposite verdict: they didn't experience God's presence at all that day. As if presence were contingent on homiletical skill rather than on Christ having already done what he did, whether anyone preached it gracefully or not. That's unitarian logic with a pulpit instead of a stage. It's just quieter, because it sounds like praise for good preaching rather than a verdict on a performance. It still is one.

So what does this actually change, depending on where you serve?

If you lead music or plan a set: your job isn't to manufacture an atmosphere that makes the Spirit show up. The Spirit is already present, already drawing the room toward Christ, before you play a note. Your faithfulness is in serving that — leading clearly, playing well, not because excellence is irrelevant, but because excellence is offered as a gift in response, not produced as a precondition.

If you preach: the same applies on the other side of the platform. A sermon that doesn't land doesn't mean the encounter failed to happen. And a congregation's restlessness during a long sermon isn't necessarily a verdict on their hearts — sometimes it's just information about the sermon. Worth hearing as that, before reaching for a verdict about anyone's spiritual state.

If you sit in the pews, intercede, or serve in any other capacity: you're not exempt from this either. The instinct to measure whether "today's service was good" by whether you personally felt something — and to quietly blame the platform when you didn't — is the same unitarian logic in a different seat. What was true that morning didn't depend on whether it moved you.

None of this lets anyone off the hook for preparation, attentiveness, or care. It just relocates where the weight sits. You're not here to create the encounter. You're here to serve people into one that was already made possible before you arrived.

Think of a time worship felt like it "didn't work" — for you, or for the room. What was your first explanation for why? Where was the weight sitting in that explanation?