There I was, sitting in the church’s auditorium for our denomination’s regional conference. The meeting had been going on for hours by this time. It began when the regional director called the meeting to order. The newly elected regional director was then introduced, and he shared his vision for the future. The denominational president and other leaders cast vision and shared reports, and the treasurer for the region talked about income, expenses, and investments.

At some point during all this, I happened to notice the back of the chair in front of me. It was, like many found in church auditoriums, steel-framed, with a padded seat and back. Below the seat, a narrow steel dowel ran from one back leg to the other, and attached to it was a round cup holder.

There was hardly anything new about this. The church I served previously had similar chairs, with similar cup holders. The difference, though, was that the cup holders in our previous church (like many others I have seen) was made to hold small glass or plastic cups, the kind Protestants frequently use in Holy Communion. But the cup holders in these chairs were not made for communion cups – at least not Holy Communion cups. It was made for coffee cups.

Not surprisingly, there was a coffee bar in the lobby, and people were welcome to bring their cups into the meeting. On Sundays also, when people enter the auditorium to worship, the cup holders are convenient for those who bring their coffee into the service. No one wants to raise their hands in worship when they are holding a coffee cup. Someone may think that they are promoting Starbucks.

Something about this struck me as incongruous and significant. Incongruous because the church is not a coffeehouse but a place of worship, where people gather to exalt and adore God, not to hang out and sip Iced Cinnamon Dolce Lattes. Significant because it seems to symbolize a change in the way the church (the evangelical church, at least) thinks of its gatherings.

When I first came to faith and began attending church, “fellowship time” was planned. It generally took the form of church picnics, fall festivals, or summer swim parties. Occasionally, people would go out after the evening service to share a light meal. In those days, taking a cup of coffee into a worship service would have struck the vast majority of evangelicals (or any other Christians) as bad form, and maybe even sacrilege. Would someone carry a cup of coffee into a meeting with the King Charles or Pope Leo XIV? And if they would not do that, how is it that they think nothing of carrying a coffee cup into an encounter with God?

Or have we stopped thinking of worship as an encounter with God and started thinking of it as a concert followed by a lecture or a pep talk? Perhaps worship etiquette has changed because we have come to think differently about what is happening during the time we are gathered. And for this reason, the coffee cup holders on the back of those church chairs seems significant to me.

When I first became a Christian, I had no real understanding of worship, what it was or why we offered it. This, I think, was an oversight on the part of our church and its leaders. But I did understand that worship was not designed for me. Perhaps others thought differently, but it never occurred to me to judge the success of a worship service or base its value on whether my favorite songs were sung or the preacher maxed out my emotion meter. As our society has become ever more consumeristic, worship has been tailored to the worshiper rather than to the Worshiped. The music industry has had the Billboard Hot 100 since 1958, and woe to the radio station that didn’t include a high enough percentage of the Hot 100 in their playlist. It may have taken 50 years, but the worship industry now tracks their biggest hits with the CCLI Top 100, and woe to the church that does not include enough of the Top 100 in its worship services.

So, is taking a cup of coffee into a worship service a spiritual faux pas? I don’t think so. A person can carry a cup of coffee into a worship service without denigrating God’s character or his worth. Still, I fear that we have turned the worship service upside down. We have taken the place of God by making ourselves the recipients of worship. We often act as if the music, the sermon, and the prayers are presented for us rather than him.

I, who have planned worship services for decades, have not been guiltless in this. I have sometimes forgotten that God’s satisfaction with our worship is what matters most. I have sometimes judged the success of a worship service by whether people seemed engaged and emotionally moved. If no one said, “Great service!” or “Good sermon!” as people streamed out, I was apt to feel our time together was a flop.

Coffee cups in the sanctuary are not a problem. Religious consumers in the sanctuary are, whether they drink coffee or not. I don’t know how to solve the problem – if I did, I would have done it already – but I am sure it will require big changes. The spectator version of the faith that dominates the Western church, nurtured by a gospel that makes Christians passive receptors rather than active disciples, must come to an end.