Unlike a lot of spiritualized words that fall victim to illegitimate totality transfer—dragging the whole bundle of possible meanings into every use—worship in my nook of the Christian world has suffered an opposite misfortune. When we say “worship,” we almost always mean a thin slice: singing to God in a specific CCM style, maybe hands raised, maybe eyes closed, maybe a whispered prayer—an individual and collective moment of meditation. Beautiful, but strikingly narrow.
Our use of worship is too small. The biblical history of God-fearing people across cultures points to something broader than “Sunday songs.” So instead of trying to redeem the word worship in our modern context, I propose we use devotion as the umbrella for all one-way, God-ward communication where He is on the receiving end of a positive act from us. “Devotion” names the act of directing our focus toward God for His sake.
From there, I’ve been framing the field by the part of the body primarily involved—what I call Somatic Devotion. God gifted us bodies. These bodies are empowered to express what’s inside us. Too often, they sit idle when the chapel bell rings. I’m not interested in letting that incessant juggernaut of Gnosticism oust the body from its spiritual pedestal.
How might the hands be devoted to God? The feet, the knees, the nose, the bones? Each locus can carry different emotional categories we often miss when everything funnels through one musical channel: thanksgiving, wonder, contrition, humility, deep sadness, frustration, yearning, passion. In our usual church rhythm we tend to rotate a few—adoration, pleading, gratitude—and almost exclusively through song. It’s monotonous and monolithic; entire parts of our humanity go unused and unaddressed.
Consider culture: throughout Scripture, people leveraged the ordinary materials of their world—their tools, foods, calendars, and habits—and turned them toward God. Devotion wasn’t an escape from everyday life; it was repurposed everyday life. They started with what already carried meaning for them and redirected it God-ward. If we import borrowed forms without translation, we’ve got the order wrong. We end up carrying forward inherited tradition leaving behind the significance that made it valuable.
Outside of church services, in the rest of your normal life,
- Do you line up in seated rows to listen to someone talk for an hour?
- Do you gather with others, lift hands, and sing corporate songs?
- Do you meditate and pray while ambient pads float underneath?
If not, maybe these patterns aren’t as inherently meaningful to us as we insist they must be. Maybe there are other forms that would land more naturally. It’s admirable to build spiritual rhythms that require effort and discipline, but there’s also a “work smarter, not harder” path: it’s often easier to refashion what already exists than to invent from scratch.
So what holds the weight of normalcy in our twenty-first-century American life? Cars, coffee, commutes—things unique to our moment in history. What if those could be redirected as devotion? The point isn’t to replace the gathered songs I love. It’s to widen our address to God so more of who we are—mind, mouth, hands, feet, senses—actually gets involved.
This is the beginning of a longer exploration: first, naming why “worship” feels too small in our setting; then mapping devotion onto embodied life; then looking at how people in Scripture and history did this within their cultures; and finally asking how we might do the same in ours.
If people in the Bible could take what was normal to them and turn it toward God, why couldn’t we? What would it look like to redirect the ordinary—our actual modern lives—into meaningful expressions toward the person of God?
