From an article on worship at the Christian Cenutry‘s website:

Instead of fretting about style, however, perhaps we should be more concerned about scale. Worship by definition should guide us to a larger place, should direct our gaze away from ourselves and toward the most vast, holy and mysterious of all horizons. But for all the over-the-top extravagance of many worship experiences, for all the invocations to an “awesome God,” much worship today seems curiously trivial, inward and downsized. To paraphrase Norma [Desmond], “The vision of worship is still magnificent; it’s the services that got small.”

We can see this downsizing in the sometimes trifling use of language. We Americans are involved in two bloody wars, have a rapacious petroleum habit and are near Depression levels of unemployment, but prayers of confession often bemoan banal, relatively low-cost, middle-class transgressions such as “busyness” or “letting our minds wander from You.” Reportedly, Martin Luther’s confessor became so frustrated when Luther was confessing “puppy sins” that he shouted at Luther, “Go kill your father or something. Then we’ll have a sin to talk about!”

Read the rest here.