Corporate Worship strengthens your Soul for serving the Lord

Most of the churches in Houghton, Hancock, and the rest of the Copper Country have spent the last thirty years training you to be a spiritual consumer instead of a worshipper.

You walk in, grab a coffee, sit in a cushioned chair, watch a praise band play four emotionally manipulative songs, listen to a pastor in jeans and untucked shirt give a 22-minute TED Talk with three funny stories and one proof-text, sing one more song, and you’re out in 62 minutes flat. Everyone smiles and says, “Great service today!”

Great for who? For you, because it felt nice? Or great for God, because He actually received the reverence and glory He demands in Scripture?

If you’ve ever walked out thinking, “That felt more like a show than worship,” you’re not shallow. You’re sensing the truth.

God never once in Scripture says, “Come to worship however you feel comfortable.” He says:

• Guard your steps as you go to the house of God and draw near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools; for they do not know they are doing evil.  (Ecclesiastes 5:1)
• Then the Lord said, “Because this people draw near with their words And honor Me with their lip service, But they remove their hearts far from Me, And their reverence for Me consists of tradition learned by rote, Therefore behold, I will once again deal marvelously with this people, wondrously marvelous; And the wisdom of their wise men will perish, And the discernment of their discerning men will be concealed.” (Isaiah 29:13-14)
• You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors Me with their lips, But their heart is far away from Me. ‘But in vain do they worship Me, Teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’” (Matthew 15:8-9)
• “Through Him then, let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that give thanks to His name.  And do not neglect doing good and sharing, for with such sacrifices God is pleased.” (Hebrews 13:15)—because real worship always costs you your preferences, your pride, and your desire to be entertained.

When Isaiah saw the Lord high and lifted up, the seraphim cried “Holy, holy, holy,” the doorposts shook, smoke filled the temple, and Isaiah’s only response was to fall on his face and cry, “Woe is me, I am undone!” (Isaiah 6). When the ark came back to Jerusalem, David didn’t hire a three-piece band. He appointed hundreds of Levites in rotating shifts, dressed in fine linen, to make music and offer sacrifices according to the written command of God (1 Chronicles 15–16). In Revelation 4–5 and 19 the saints in heaven do not sit casually with lattes. They fall on their faces, cast down their crowns, and sing ancient hymns to the Lamb who was slain forever.

That is the pattern. That is what God’s kind of worship. And it looks nothing like what is on offer at almost every church within 200 miles of here.

Rome and Eastern Orthodoxy are not the answer either. All of their incense, icons, and chanting cannot rectify a false gospel: praying to saints, Mary as co-redemptrix, purgatory, a priesthood that stands between you and Christ, and sacraments that make grace dependent on you instead of on His finished work. The smells and bells are beautiful wrapping paper around a different religion that doesn’t teach you that you are justified before God, at peace with God who saved you.

So is the only choice the shallow, concert-style, low-attention-span church we see everywhere in the Keweenaw and across the country?

No. There is the faithful way. It still exists.

It is faithful, biblical, high-church Protestantism that kept the reverence, the beauty, the corporate nature of worship, and threw out only the unbiblical additions of later centuries.

It looks like this every single Sunday at Christ the King:

• The service begins with a call to worship that goes back to the reformation: God’s Word begins our worship of God, the only thing that should start our services to God.
• We confess our sins together, out loud, in the first person plural: “Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against You in thought, word, and deed… we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under Your table.” You need to hear fifty or a hundred other voices around you admit they are wretched. It kills pride and isolation in one minute.
• The pastor declares forgiveness in Christ’s name, and the whole room answers together, “Thanks be to God!” You need to hear other pardoned sinners rejoice with you.
• We stand while the Word of God is carried in, because this Book rules us, not the pastor’s personality.
• We say the Creeds together every week so you are forced to speak the faith out loud, even on the mornings you don’t feel it, and so you can hear the body carrying you when your own faith feels thin.
• We kneel when we pray (Well, we will when we get the church building up and running, for now it’s next to impossible at the school.)
• We say “Amen” like we mean it, dozens of times, because every “Amen” is you signing your name under what was just prayed or sung.
• We sing Psalms and hymns that are 300–2,000 years old, because the church is bigger than the last decade’s playlist.

None of this feels natural at first. You have been discipled for years to want church that feels like entertainment. Your heart has been trained to love fog machines and seven-eleven songs more than confession and creed. That muscle has atrophied. But hearts can be retrained. Tastes can be reformed. You can learn to love kneeling more than sitting comfortably, confessing more than celebrating, hearing the body say “Amen” more than hearing the worship leader say “One more time!”

This is what we are doing every Sunday at Christ the King. We are re-learning how to worship the way heaven does. We are reminding one another that the goal is not to feel good when we leave, but to hear “Well done, good and faithful servant” when we finally stand before the throne.

If you are exhausted with Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy but still crave reverence…
If you are burned out on the non-denominational, lazy-pastor, concert-driven churches that dominate the Copper Country…
If your soul is starving for worship that costs you something, that makes you depend on the voices around you, that forms you into the image of Christ instead of the image of the culture…

Come this Sunday. 11:00. Stay for the whole service. Let it feel strange. Let it confront you. Then come back next week, because sanctification always takes longer than one visit.

We are not trying to compete with the churches down the road; we aren’t interested in trying to keep people who don’t want Jesus nor the Gospel coming back to church. We are trying to join the worship that is already happening around the throne of God and the Lamb.

Your voice is needed here. Your “Amen” matters. Your kneeling body is part of the offering. You’re off-key gravely voice honors the King.

You are welcome. You are called and made for Worship. Stop giving into laziness, and trust in the Lord your God.

Grace & peace,
Brandon Charbonneau

About the Author

Brandon Charbonneau

Brandon Charbonneau is the founder and director of Serve The King Ministries, a nonprofit dedicated to equipping college students in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with a robust, Reformed Christian faith through discipleship, teaching, and support for faithful local churches. A Michigan Tech alumnus (B.S. Chemical Engineering, 2019) Brandon is currently pursuing his Master of Divinity through New Geneva Academy while pastoring, writing, and building STK Ministries in the Copper Country. He is driven by the conviction that the church needs deep doctrine, reverent worship, and real community if it is going to stand firm in an increasingly post-Christian world. When he’s not studying, preaching, or discipling students, you’ll find him woodworking, reading old books,

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