Can we worship outside of church?

Question 11014.

People usually ask about worship outside church for one of two reasons. Either they have felt God on a hillside more powerfully than they ever have in a service and want to know whether that counts, or they have stopped attending and would like to know whether the walk on Sunday morning will do instead.

The two questions deserve different answers, and the honest reply to the whole matter is yes and no, which is unsatisfying until you see why.

Worship outside church is genuine worship

Scripture leaves no room for doubt that worship outside church buildings and services is real. Paul urges believers to present their bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is their spiritual worship (Romans 12:1). That is a whole life, not an hour.

The vocabulary confirms it. One of the main New Testament words for worship is latreuo, which carries the sense of service rendered to God, and it is applied to the ordinary conduct of Christian life as readily as to anything ceremonial. Whatever you do, eat or drink, do all to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31).

Jesus settled the question of location directly. The hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father, for the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth (John 4:21-24). Place is no longer the point, which is precisely why worship outside church premises is not a lesser category.

Where the instinct comes from

There is a reason people feel God on a mountainside. The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork (Psalm 19:1). Creation is a genuine witness, and the response it stirs is not sentimentality.

David wrote a good deal of the Psalter outdoors and on the run, in caves and wilderness places, and much of it was composed alone with nobody to hear it but God. Jesus withdrew to desolate places to pray. Worship outside church settings has an entirely respectable pedigree, and the believer who prays best while walking is in good company.

What I would gently test is whether the feeling on the hillside is worship of God or enjoyment of creation with a religious tint. The difference is whether the Creator is actually being addressed, thanked and obeyed, or whether the experience terminates on itself. Romans 1 warns about exchanging the Creator for the creature, and it is possible to be moved by a sunset without ever speaking to the One who made it.

What the gathering gives that solitude cannot

Here is the other half. Worship outside church cannot supply what the assembly supplies, because a good deal of New Testament worship is irreducibly plural. Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some (Hebrews 10:24-25).

You cannot stir up one another alone. You cannot bear one another’s burdens, confess to one another, submit to one another, or exercise a gift for the common good in an empty field. The Lord’s Supper is a shared meal, baptism is a public act, and preaching is something done to a congregation rather than downloaded by an individual.

The picture Scripture uses is a body. A hand can be perfectly healthy and entirely useless once detached, and the loss is not only to the body but to the hand. That is why I take the question seriously rather than treating it as a matter of preference, and why I have written separately on whether Christians should attend church.

The honest version of the question

Very often the real question behind worship outside church is not theological. Someone has been hurt in a congregation, or bored for years, or quietly excluded, and the hillside is not a rival theory of worship but a refuge.

If that is you, I am sorry, and I would not begin by lecturing you about attendance. Church wounds are real, and some of them were inflicted by people who should have known far better. Take time. But do not conclude from a bad congregation that the gathering itself is dispensable, any more than a bad marriage proves marriage is a mistake.

For others it is simply drift, which is more common and less dramatic. A missed Sunday becomes a habit, the habit becomes a position, and the position acquires a theology to justify it. Worship outside church is a perfectly good idea that occasionally gets recruited to defend something that was never a decision at all.

What personal worship should look like

Take the encouragement seriously and build something. Worship outside church that consists of a vague sense of God while driving is not much of a discipline. Read Scripture, sing if you can bear the sound of your own voice, pray aloud, give thanks by name for particular things, and confess specifically.

Let it feed the gathering rather than replace it. Believers who worship through the week arrive on Sunday with something to bring, and congregations made up of such people sing differently. The two are meant to reinforce each other, which is why private worship deserves its own attention.

And let it reach into ordinary things. The New Testament keeps attaching worship language to work, hospitality, generosity and endurance under pressure. A believer who is honest at the office and patient at home is worshipping in a way the neighbours can actually see.

What worship actually is

Part of the confusion here comes from our vocabulary. In most British churches ‘worship’ has quietly come to mean the singing, so that a service has a worship section followed by the sermon, as though the preaching of God’s Word were something other than worship.

Scripture is far broader. The main Greek term proskuneo carries the idea of bowing before someone greater, and it describes an attitude before it describes an activity. On that definition, listening to Scripture read, giving money, confessing sin, serving in the kitchen and obeying God on Tuesday are all worship, and none of them requires a guitar.

This matters for the question in hand. If worship is essentially singing, then worship outside church is easy to arrange with a decent playlist. If worship is the whole self bowed before God, then the question becomes whether your life is oriented towards Him, and that is a considerably harder test to pass on a hillside or in a pew.

It also removes some anxiety. People who cannot sing at all, or who feel nothing whatever while singing, sometimes conclude they must be poor worshippers. They may well be the best in the building, and I have known several who plainly were.

Online services and the modern version

The question now usually arrives with a screen attached. Does watching a service at home count? It counts for something, and for the housebound and the ill it is a genuine mercy that previous generations did not have.

But watching is not gathering. You cannot be greeted by a screen, and nobody notices if you stop appearing. Almost everything the New Testament describes the assembly doing requires the presence of an actual body in an actual room, which is why I would not make a permanent arrangement of what began as an emergency measure.

There is a further danger worth naming. A screen lets you choose the most gifted preacher in the country rather than the ordinary man God has given your town, and over time that turns worship into consumption. The New Testament knows nothing of a Christian selecting a congregation the way one selects a broadcast, and the believers who profit most are usually those who committed themselves to imperfect people in a particular place.

So use it when you must, and be honest with yourself about the difference between cannot and would rather not.

So, now what?

If you have been feeling guilty about meeting God more easily on a walk than in a pew, stop. Worship outside church is real worship and God receives it gladly, so build the habit deliberately rather than accidentally.

If you have quietly replaced the gathering with it, ask what is actually going on. Is it hurt, is it boredom, or is it simply that Sunday morning has become the only slow morning of the week? Each of those has a different remedy, and only one of them is solved by a better argument.

And ask the question the other way round for a moment. Not what do you get from the gathering, but who is missing what you would have brought, and how long has your seat been empty without anyone being able to tell you why it matters?

But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.

John 4:23, ESV