From 1899 to 1906, a young priest in the Diocese of Liège ministered to factory workers. He belonged to a small society called the Aumôniers du Travail, the chaplains to labor, and his flock was the working youth of a Belgian city of coal and steel. The workers and their social problems marked him for the rest of his life.
So did what he saw in the churches. He later argued that Catholic piety had drifted away from the liturgy itself. At Mass, the priest prayed at the altar in Latin, and the people in the nave filled the time with their own private devotions. Two prayers ran side by side in the same building, and they rarely met.
In 1906, at thirty-three, he entered the Benedictine abbey of Mont César at Louvain and took the name Lambert. Three years later, at Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier’s request, Dom Lambert Beauduin stood before the National Congress of Catholic Works at Malines. On 23 September 1909, he delivered a paper titled “La vraie prière de l’Église”: the true prayer of the Church.
He built on a sentence Pope Pius X wrote six years earlier, in a motu proprio of 22 November 1903, which called the people’s active participation in the liturgy the primary and indispensable source of the Christian spirit. Beauduin took the pope at his word. He argued that private piety could never replace the assembly’s prayer.
His remedy was not a better show. It was a booklet.
The congress adopted his proposal to put the text of the Sunday Mass and Vespers into the hands of ordinary people, in Latin and the language they spoke, as a book of prayer. With the historian Godefroid Kurth, a layman he met at Malines, Beauduin drew up a plan to carry it out. Within a year, the monks of Mont César printed La Vie liturgique. According to one later account, the first number sold out in a fortnight, with 150,000 copies.
The workers of Liège did not need a grander Sunday. They needed their own part.
A century later, the American Church faces the same problem in a different costume.
Two people in the parking lot
Two people leave Church on a Sunday morning.
The first says, “That was a wonderful service. The music was excellent. The preacher was engaging. The children enjoyed themselves. The coffee was good. We will certainly come back.“
The second says, “ Something happened there that I cannot quite explain. I heard a word I needed to hear, though I didn’t particularly want to hear it. I prayed alongside people I would not otherwise have chosen. I remembered that my life is not entirely my own. And now I have to decide what that means for Monday morning.“
The two reactions need not contradict each other. Worship can be beautiful, welcoming, and deeply transforming at once. Underneath the words, though, sit two very different expectations.
One asks: did this experience satisfy me?
The other asks: what is God making of us?
That difference sits at the center of what follows. The essay moves in the three steps Joseph Cardijn taught the Young Christian Workers. See looks honestly at the culture shaping worship. Judge weighs that culture against Christian worship, drawing on two liturgical theologians: Aidan Kavanagh and Nathan Mitchell. Act names practices that can move a congregation from religious consumption toward communion and mission.
Judging here does not mean criticizing other churches. It means examining the assumptions that quietly shape one’s own. The accounts of Kavanagh and Mitchell below are summaries and applications of their ideas, not quotations from them.
See: When Worship Becomes an Outing
The religious destination
American church life carries a standing temptation: Worship becomes an event designed to attract people.
The ingredients are familiar. An impressive entrance. Seasonal decorations. Elaborate Christmas productions. A café. A bookstore. Carefully designed children’s programs. Professional musicians. Screens, lighting, and a compelling personality at the center.
None of these, by itself, proves unfaithfulness. A café can encourage friendship. Good architecture can welcome strangers. Skilled musicians can help a congregation sing. Beauty can interrupt a world made ugly by indifference.
The same features can also send another message: this religious experience exists to fit your tastes and preferences.
Historians have traced how that message took shape. Kate Bowler and Wen Reagan, writing in Religion and American Culture in 2014, show that prosperity megachurches partnered with the growing worship-music industry to build large, high-tech services modeled on the arena concert. Congregations both adapt to consumer culture and push back against it, and the relationship is rarely simple.
The real question, then, is not whether a church looks like a theater, a cathedral, or a shopping center. It is what kind of relationship the place invites people to have with God and with one another. Guests welcomed into a shared life, or customers encouraged to return.
American Palaces of Prosperity
The phrase is mine, and I mean it as a warning about what a church could become, not a label for every large or beautiful building.
Stated directly, prosperity theology links faith to the expectation of material blessing, health, and success. A church need not preach it openly to send a subtler message through its public life: that God’s favor looks like abundance, polish, confidence, growth, and winning. In December 2013, Kate Bowler described the lavish megachurch Christmas spectacular as a “performative prosperity gospel.” Whether or not a congregation teaches that faith unlocks heavenly blessing, she argued, the event teaches it for them.
The distinction matters. A full band does not prove a church teaches prosperity theology, and a grand building does not prove spiritual corruption. Better questions cut closer:
What does this congregation present as a successful life?
Is there room here for grief that does not resolve quickly?
Can someone poor, unemployed, disabled, doubtful, or exhausted belong without pretending to be victorious?
Does the congregation’s public image tell the truth about the people who actually gather?
The problem is not that worship is enjoyable. The danger is that worship loses its ability to speak honestly about suffering, dependence, failure, and grace.
Neither an outing nor an errand
Worship shouldn’t be an entertainment outing; the alternative isn’t an errand. Everyone has heard that version too: get to Church, fulfill the obligation, get it done.
Both the outing and the errand rest on the same hidden belief: that worship stands apart from the rest of life. Something to consume or to complete. Christian worship asks something deeper. It asks people to understand themselves as belonging: to God, to one another, and to a mission that extends beyond the service.
The question is not only whether worship was enjoyable or dutiful. It is whether worship is teaching a people to live as a community.
No parking problems online
The internet sharpens the challenge. A church that attracts people mainly by offering a great experience now competes with a medium that has no parking problems, no travel, and endless choice.
The internet did not invent mediated religion. Radio, recordings, and televangelism had already carried preaching and music beyond the local Church, and Bowler and Reagan trace how televangelism and the megachurch rose together. Digital platforms extend the trend and make choosing even easier. A worshipper can now move from preacher to preacher, style to style, congregation to congregation in seconds.
One question cannot be avoided. If a church’s offering is primarily a performance, why shouldn’t people choose the performance they like best?
None of this condemns people who worship online. Physical attendance is a poor measure of devotion. For someone who cannot travel, worship through a screen may be an act of profound fidelity.
Access alone, however, is not community. The Pew Research Center surveyed 11,377 US adults on 16–27 November 2022 and published the results on 2 June 2023. About two-thirds (65%) of regular in-person attendees reported feeling a great deal or quite a bit of connection with fellow attendees. Among regular virtual viewers, 22% reported a similarly strong connection with others watching online or on TV, and 28% with those attending in person. The figures describe reported experience. They do not prove that worship is spiritually empty, or that physical presence automatically creates community.
They do raise a question worth carrying into every planning meeting: how does a congregation help people become known, needed, and responsible to one another, rather than merely counted as viewers?
A pause for the reader
Think of your own congregation. When someone asks, “How was church?“ what do people usually describe? The sermon, the music, the length? Or the people, the prayer, and what changed in them? There is no need to answer quickly. The words people use in passing often reveal their deepest expectations.
Judge: What Is Liturgy For?
Worship does not merely illustrate theology.
Aidan Kavanagh (1929–2006) was a monk of Saint Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana who taught liturgy at Saint Meinrad, Notre Dame, and Yale. His On Liturgical Theology, first given as the Hale Memorial Lectures at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in 1981 and published by Pueblo in 1984, challenges an assumption most churches never notice: that Christians first work out their ideas and then worship to express them.
Kavanagh reverses the order. The Church’s encounter with God in worship shapes its theological understanding. Liturgy does not merely express beliefs formed elsewhere; it helps form them. He calls the assembly Worshiphip primary theology and the later work of explaining it secondary theology. He argued that theology, at its source, belongs to the whole assembly, and its first practitioners are more likely to be “chairwomen and shopkeepers“ than pontiffs and professors.
That changes how a congregation sees itself. The people gathered for worship are not an audience listening to someone else’s conclusions. Their praying, singing, listening, silence, thanksgiving, and sacramental participation belong to the Church’s living encounter with God.
Kavanagh describes the encounter as one that can bring worshippers to the brink of chaos in the presence of the living God. It changes those who take part, and because they are changed, their next act of worship is different, however slightly. For Kavanagh, that adjustment is where theology begins.
The consequence is plain. If liturgy is mainly a product, its success depends on delivering the experience people expect. If liturgy is an encounter with the living God, no one controls what will happen. People may come seeking reassurance and hear a call to repentance. They may come guarding their independence and discover their dependence. They may come expecting an uplifting hour and find themselves confronted by a neighbor’s suffering.
None of this argues against careful preparation. It argues against imagining that preparation can force God’s action into a plan.
Summit and source
The historical weight of this view becomes clearer in the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, promulgated on 4 December 1963. The bishops approved it by a vote of 2,147 to 4, and it marked half a century since the liturgical movement Beauduin launched at Malines.
The constitution describes the liturgy as the action of Christ and of his body, the Church (article 7). It names the liturgy as the summit toward which the Church’s activity moves and the font from which its power flows (article 10). It calls for the full, conscious, and active participation of all the faithful (article 14).
These are Catholic formulations, and Christian traditions understand sacrament, ministry, and worship differently. They still pose useful questions for an ecumenical conversation. Who is acting in worship? What does participation mean? How does worship relate to the Church’s life outside the building?
The constitution does not say Worship belongs to religious professionals while everyone else observes. Nor does it treat liturgy as a technique for producing a friendly community. Worship is directed toward God, and in the worship, the Church is sanctified and formed for its life and mission.
The order matters. Christians do not worship one another. They worship God, and in doing so they learn that they cannot worship faithfully while treating their neighbors as unimportant.
Meeting mystery, not managing experience
Nathan D. Mitchell (1943–2024), professor emeritus of liturgy at the University of Notre Dame, a former professor at Saint Meinrad, and a friend, offers a complementary approach. In Meeting Mystery: Liturgy, Worship, Sacraments (Orbis Books, 2006), part of the Theology in Global Perspective series, Mitchell treats ritual as integral to human identity. He invites readers to recover the harmony of the “liturgy of the church“ and the “liturgy of the world,” and to recognize worship as an opening to God’s surprising presence in creation.
The title draws the contrast. A church can organize an event, design a presentation, and schedule a service. Meeting mystery is a different act from managing an experience. Mystery here is not a puzzle for experts to solve. It is the depth of divine life that worship discloses, and no one controls.
The distinction separates spectacle from a sacramental way of seeing. A spectacle holds attention. A sacramental imagination changes what a person notices. Applied to a congregation, Mitchell’s approach raises three questions:
Does worship help people notice the person whose labor is hidden?
Does it teach them to recognize dependence as part of human life rather than as personal failure?
Does it help them see ordinary things, water, bread, wine, bodies, and voices, as worthy of attention instead of things to use and discard?
If the Church Worship and the life of the world belong together, Worship cannot be sealed off from how people inhabit creation and treat their neighbors.
Beauty is not the enemy.
The strongest objection deserves a full hearing. Does all this mean churches should be plain, music mediocre, and worship uncomfortable? Many who build excellence in worship do so precisely out of hospitality: they want the stranger, the skeptic, and the teenager to find the door open and the room alive.
They are right that refusing consumerism does not require accepting ugliness. Refusing performance does not require carelessness. Refusing to entertain does not require boredom. Mitchell’s attention to ritual and the depths of creation gives no reason to reject beauty, and Kavanagh’s account of liturgy as formative encounter gives no reason to neglect the embodied, communal act of worship.
The question is what role beauty plays in a community:
Does the music help the congregation find its voice, or make its voice unnecessary?
Does the building make room for people who are easily overlooked?
Does the preaching open Scripture to the assembly, or make the assembly dependent on a personality?
Does excellence serve the people’s prayer, or turn the people into admirers?
The same outward form can serve very different ends. A band can accompany a congregation or overwhelm it. A choir can deepen participation without requiring everyone to sing every moment. A magnificent building can become a shared inheritance or a monument to institutional importance. Discernment requires more than picking one style over another.
What kind of people
Kavanagh asks the Church to take the assembly’s encounter with God seriously as a source of theology. Mitchell asks it to take ritual, mystery, and the bond between worship and the life of the world seriously. Together they move the question past “What kind of religious experience do people want?“ toward a harder one: what kind of people does worship help us become before God?
That question does not dismiss pleasure, emotion, or hospitality. It places them inside a larger purpose. A church may be warm and beautiful, yet if it never challenges possessiveness, indifference, or the assumption that everything exists for our satisfaction, it has to ask what formation is really taking place.
Act: From Religious Consumption to Shared Life
The last step is practical. Not how to fix American Christianity, but what one congregation can begin to practice. The suggestions below build on Kavanagh and Mitchell; they are not instructions from either.
1. Examine worship without turning it into customer research.
For several weeks, invite a small, varied group to observe the congregation’s worship and gathering life. Include people who do not usually make decisions: a newcomer, a longtime member, a person with a disability, a young adult, someone who participates online. Ask them to notice:
Who is welcomed personally, and who remains anonymous?
When does the assembly act together?
What do the music, preaching, and physical space make possible?
What does the congregation assume about income, mobility, family structure, and confidence?
Where is there room for silence, lament, uncertainty, and the world’s needs?
The first question is not “Did you like it?“ It is “What did our practice communicate?“
2. Connect hospitality with responsibility.
Keep the coffee if it helps people meet, and ask whether anyone notices the person drinking alone. Keep the gathering space, and ask whether it welcomes those who cannot contribute financially. Keep the attractive entrance, and ask whether what happens inside matches the promise made at the door.
Hospitality should not stop at the threshold. It should grow into a relationship in which each person can be known and, over time, contribute according to their gifts. The goal is not to press every newcomer into volunteering. The goal is a belonging deeper than showing up.
3. Strengthen the voice of the assembly.
Choose music people can genuinely learn and sing.
Allow silence without treating it as an embarrassing gap.
Prepare readers and other ministers carefully.
Make responses, movement, and physical arrangements accessible.
Recognize that attentive listening and prayerful stillness are also forms of participation.
The aim is not constant activity. It is a congregation that knows itself as a participant in worship, not an audience.
4. Build a bridge between Sunday prayer and weekday responsibility.
Choose one recurring element of worship and ask what practice corresponds to it:
We pray for people who are sick. The congregation organizes visits, transport, meals, and follow-up.
We pray for workers. The congregation examines how it pays and treats its own employees and contractors.
We confess failures of love. The congregation creates ways to acknowledge harm and pursue repair.
We welcome strangers. The congregation examines who can enter, participate, and feel safe.
We are sent forth. The congregation names a shared responsibility beyond maintaining the institution.
These practices do not substitute for worship. They test whether a congregation’s life is beginning to resemble what it prays.
5. Use digital worship to connect, not only to broadcast.
The answer to digital culture is not to abandon the people who depend on it. It is to connect online participation with actual relationships:
A named contact for remote participants.
Telephone or personal follow-up when requested.
Accessible ways to submit prayer intentions.
Small groups that include people unable to travel.
Pastoral visits and sacramental care appropriate to the tradition.
Ways for remote members to contribute their gifts.
Pew’s finding of weaker connection among virtual worshippers names a challenge to meet, not a reason to ignore those worshippers. The measure is not how many people watched. It is who became less isolated.
6. Run a ninety-day experiment.
Choose one change, not twelve. For example:
For ninety days, connect intercessions for isolated people with an organized ministry of contact and visitation.
For ninety days, test whether the music and sound levels let the congregation hear its own voice.
For ninety days, give every remote participant who requests contact a consistent relationship with someone in the congregation.
Then return to the method. See: what actually happened? Judge: what did it reveal about the congregation’s understanding of worship and community? Act: what should continue, change, or stop?
One small practice, sustained and honestly evaluated, does more good than a large announcement that changes nothing.
The booklet and the palace
“American Palaces of Prosperity“ is a strong phrase because it asks whether churches have become better at displaying abundance than at living solidarity. It belongs first in a congregation’s own examination of conscience, not in its criticism of another denomination or another musical style. The question is not whether a church has a café, a choir, a band, a beautiful sanctuary, or a livestream. It is whether these things serve an assembly that worships God and grows in its capacity for faithful life together.
Kavanagh shows that a congregation’s worship is not merely a delivery system for religious ideas. Mitchell shows why ritual and mystery cannot be confined to an hour sealed off from the rest of life. Together they dissolve the false choice between worship as an enjoyable event and worship as a burdensome task. Worship is neither consumed nor checked off. It is entered together.
Beauduin understood that in Liège. His answer to people who sat as spectators at their own prayer was not a more impressive Mass. He handed them the words and gave them back their part. Later, while teaching in Rome, he passed that conviction to a young American monk named Virgil Michel, who carried it home to Collegeville, Minnesota, and founded the journal Orate Fratres in 1926, later renamed Worship. Nathan Mitchell would write its closing column for more than twenty years. Aidan Kavanagh would teach the same conviction at Saint Meinrad.
The booklet cost almost nothing. The palace costs a great deal. Only one of them asks the people to pray.
So the question to carry out the door is not only “Was the service good?” It is “What are we now ready to give, receive, repair, and become?“
Questions for discussion
Where does our congregation offer genuine hospitality, and where might it unintentionally encourage a customer relationship?
What is the difference between being emotionally moved and being changed? When do the two belong together?
What would a person living with poverty, grief, disability, or failure learn about belonging from worship?
How does worship connect, or fail to connect, with the responsibilities of ordinary life?
What single practice could we undertake for ninety days to strengthen the bond between prayer, communion, and service?
Further reading
Aidan Kavanagh, On Liturgical Theology (Pueblo, 1984). This essay’s account of worship as the source of theological understanding draws on this foundational text.
Nathan D. Mitchell, Meeting Mystery: Liturgy, Worship, Sacraments (Orbis Books, 2006). Especially useful on ritual, divine mystery, and the bond between the Church, worship, and the world.
Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), especially articles 7, 10, and 14, on Christ’s action, worship, liturgy as summit and font, and the participation of the faithful.
Sources
Bowler, Kate. “The American Megachurch and the Christmas Prosperity Gospel.” The Christian Century, Then & Now blog, December 2013.
Bowler, Kate, and Wen Reagan. “Bigger, Better, Louder: The Prosperity Gospel’s Impact on Contemporary Christian Worship.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 24, no. 2 (2014): 186–230.
Cummins, Fergal. “The Liturgical Theology of Aidan Kavanagh.” Student essay, Saint Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth, submitted 30 November 2014.
Kavanagh, Aidan. On Liturgical Theology: The Hale Memorial Lectures of Seabury-Western Theological Seminary, 1981. New York: Pueblo Publishing Company, 1984.
Mitchell, Nathan D. Meeting Mystery: Liturgy, Worship, Sacraments. Theology in Global Perspective. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006.
Pecklers, Keith F. “Liturgical Movement, I: Catholic.” New Catholic Encyclopedia, via Encyclopedia.com.
Pew Research Center. “Online Religious Services Appeal to Many Americans, but Going in Person Remains More Popular.” 2 June 2023. See also chapter 1, “Americans’ Experiences with Virtual Religious Services.”
Second Vatican Council. Sacrosanctum Concilium, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy. 4 December 1963.
On Lambert Beauduin and the Malines congress: “Lambert Beauduin,” Wikipedia; Zerfaß, Alexander, “Heilsgeschehen,” lecture at the Balduin-Sulzer-Symposium, Wilhering, 17 March 2023 (for the date of 23 September 1909); “A Miscellany of Missals,” Cambridge Core archive, for the circulation of La Vie liturgique; Barnas, on Beauduin’s years with the Aumôniers du Travail, in “The Unity of Christians: The Vision of Paul Couturier.”