I remember well the repulsive reaction growing in me while talking to the pastor of a larger church and the focus he placed on feelings.

His church had a worship area that was a blacked out large room with concert-style lighting and music. Everything from the parking lot to the auditorium to the bathroom was coordinated so well in order to produce in the attendee a feeling. That feeling being planted in the person was actually water to the seed already there. The person was attending the church because they were interested in God, either for the first time or someone returning to grow closer. The feeling being produced by the careful coordination of the Sunday experience was to get the person all the way there. That the seeker may find God, the long-time attendee may focus and grow closer.

But with so much attention being paid to the feelings of the attendees, it felt somewhat manipulative. It felt like the pastor was saying if the Sunday experience can move someone emotionally in a specific way, then we can get them to make a decision they may not otherwise make.

If we can get people drunk on their feelings, their defenses are taken down.

The audience can also tend to prioritize their feelings. I cannot tell you how often I have heard that so-and-so is no longer going to attend because the pastor’s message made them feel a certain way, or that the music does not move their feelings enough. Sometimes people have a hard time hearing the Bible because it makes them feel bad or uncomfortable.

People can allow their feelings to block what it is that God may be doing in their lives.

As someone who grapples with stoic philosophy, it seems as though the answer is to minimize emotion and feeling in general. That our services should be stripped of manufactured emotion and only allow for God to move. And the people participating in the service should remove their own preconceived notions and not allow their emotions to play part of the service.

But, as I fall more in love with Jesus, the Church, and special blessings like my family, I cannot help but see that emotions and feelings are pivotal to the worship on Sunday. If Jesus is as beautiful as I think he is, how can I not be moved in my emotions? If I am as deeply connected with the Church body as Scripture tells me I am, how can I not be emotionally drawn into the people around me? And when I see and hear my own children singing, how could my emotions not leap with joy?

It is not that the Sunday service should be absent of emotion, but it needs to be a place that teaches us what it looks like for our feelings to be redeemed.

The problem we face is that our culture places our emotions and feelings as primary forces in our lives. So often our feelings direct our lives and master our days.

Our feelings are redeemed when we place God as the primary force in our lives and allow our emotions to become a natural outflow of the God we have come to know.

A healthy church does not manufacture emotions in the people, but by faithfully proclaiming the truth of God and opening spaces for participating in the worship service the Holy Spirit is given space to move the people in their emotions.

And for the people, our goal is not to become emotionless but to have our feelings ordered, in response to a truth that is outside of ourselves and yet breaking into us and written on our hearts. We are reordered to rejoice over what is beautiful in the sight of God, and to be brokenhearted with the things that pain God.

Let your hearts burn within you. Not for your own passions, but for Christ.

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