WORSHIP:
MEANINGLESS; CHURCH: INEFFECTIVENESS; ACTIVITY: RELIGIOUS

There is probably not another field of human activity where there is so much waste as in the field of religion.…

In the average church we hear the same prayers repeated each Sunday year in and year out with, one would suspect, not the remotest expectation that they will be answered. It is enough, it seems, that they have been uttered. The familiar phrase, the religious tone, the emotionally loaded words have their superficial and temporary effect, but the worshiper is no neuter to God, no better morally and no surer of heaven than he was before. Yet every Sunday morning for twenty years he goes through the same routine and, allowing two hours for him to leave his house, sit through a church service and return to his house again, he has wasted 170 twelve-hour days with this exercise in futility.… I need only add that all this tragic waste is unnecessary. The believing Christian will relish every moment in church and will profit by it. The instructed, obedient Christian will yield to God as the clay to the potter, and the result will be not waste but glory everlasting.

Psalm 122:1; Isaiah 1:11–20; Isaiah 64:8; Jeremiah 18:6

Born After Midnight, 100, 101, 103.