Mental illness in your church is not an isolated problem. Current research highlights that one in five adults in the United States struggles with some form of mental-health issue each year. One in twenty adults experiences a serious psychiatric disorder. These suffering brothers and sisters are no doubt part of the flock you are called to shepherd.

Joel is one such congregant. He was recently arrested high on crystal meth, engaging the services of a prostitute. In fact, this is the third time this kind of behavior has happened in the last two years. What does pastoral care look like for him? What is the role of church discipline in his life? Should it make a difference that Joel has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and ran out of his medications again, potentially precipitating the manic episode in which he stayed up all night using meth and engaging in illicit sex?

There are no easy answers here. In thinking about the juxtaposition of mental-health issues and church discipline, we want to be wary of two extremes. First, we don’t want to avoid corrective pastoral care out of fear that we will “add insult to injury” for those struggling with mental affliction. Second, we don’t want to care for someone with mental illness exactly as we would care for someone without such a struggle. We want biblical truth and love to guide us.

What Is Mental Illness?

Mental (or psychiatric) disorders are significant disturbances of thought, emotion, or behavior that cause distress to the person and often significant impairment in day-to-day functioning. Many struggles fall under the umbrella of mental illness, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, major depression, and also problems such as substance abuse, autism, and dementia.1

Because there is such heterogeneity in what is understood as mental illness (not to mention the potentially myriad causes of such struggles), we must be careful of any one-size-fits-all approach. Each struggling person is different. A mental-health diagnosis is a starting point, not an endpoint, for understanding a person’s experience.

Much mental suffering is hidden, including among Christians. Many who bear a psychiatric label feel ashamed and stigmatized. They may already feel disconnected from the church body and even from Christ. In my experience, they are much more often “fainthearted” and “weak” rather than “idle” or disorderly (1 Thessalonians 5:14).

Mental illness always involves suffering. Church leaders, therefore, are wise to slow down, taking the time to draw near to the brokenhearted as the Lord himself does (Psalm 34:18). But suffering isn’t the only category to consider. All believers simultaneously live as saints, sufferers, and sinners this side of glory.2 When people struggle with mental-health problems, the battle with their sinful nature continues, and this battle may have significant consequences for self or others.

Sinful behavior can be particularly prominent in some mental-health struggles, such as manic excesses, multiple relapses associated with substance abuse, the relational harm associated with certain personality disorders, or angry and abusive outbursts associated with PTSD. In such cases, it becomes even more challenging to discern the priorities of pastoral care for this sister or brother who is both a sufferer and sinner.3

What Is Church Discipline?

Now that we have some general ideas about mental illness, what about church discipline? Jonathan Leeman highlights,

Church discipline is the process of correcting sin in the congregation and its members. Church discipline typically starts privately and informally, growing to include the whole church only when necessary. In its final, formal, and public stage, church discipline involves removing someone from membership in the church and participation in the Lord’s Table.

We see this process most clearly in Matthew 18:15–17. For the person under discipline, the goal is always restorative, not punitive. We want to see unrepentant sinners return to Jesus!

It’s helpful to think of church discipline on a spectrum. In one sense, all believers sit under the autocorrect function of God’s word (2 Timothy 3:16; Hebrews 4:12). As we read and hear Scripture, we are personally convicted — disciplined — by God’s indwelling Spirit to live in line with biblical truth.4

But God also grows us through community. When a friend approaches us and says, “Hey, I’m concerned about your harsh interactions at small group,” God, in his mercy, is using this person to help us see where we have sinned (Matthew 18:15). This broader practice of discipline is an utterly normal part of the Christian life. Informal but intentional conversations focused on what living for Jesus looks like should characterize our body life and our pastoral oversight.

More formal steps of discipline (Matthew 18:16–17) are not carried out simply for those who sin (we all do this!), but for those who sin in significant, high-handed ways and do not repent despite multiple entreaties to return to the safety and beauty of God’s law.5

Seven Guiding Principles

For helpers and church leaders, seeing sin in the lives of fellow believers should prompt the question, “What is most wise and loving at this juncture to help this particular person with these particular patterns of sin?” Answering that question, however, is often more complicated when the person involved deals with mental illness. So, how might we bring together our understanding of mental illness and church discipline?

The following general guidelines are certainly not exhaustive. In any given situation, what is wisest pastorally is prayerfully discerned by a team of thoughtful and compassionate shepherds who know their people well.

1. Personalize mental illness.

Familiarize yourself with the general contours of the psychiatric disorders that you know members of your congregation struggle with, endeavoring to think biblically and theologically about such issues.6 Then personalize that growing awareness by having conversations with those brothers and sisters, along with their family members, counselors, and physicians. Get a sense of their daily lives. Where do they struggle to live out their faith? Where do they experience joy and contentment? How can the church better care for them? You don’t have to be a mental-health professional to know a person deeply, but the more complex the struggle, the greater the importance of broadening your understanding.

2. Deal patiently and gently.

Patience and gentleness are key (1 Thessalonians 5:14; Galatians 6:1–2). Notice that there is no specific timeline associated with the process of church discipline in Matthew 18. In general, apart from the clearest cases, we might expect there to be several or even many conversations while moving along the spectrum from informal to formal church discipline. The administration of church discipline is not on a hair trigger. Godly shepherds model the description of Israel’s high priest in Hebrews 5:2: “He can deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is beset with weakness.”

“You don’t have to be a mental-health professional to know a person deeply.”

Along the way, seek the input of the mental-health professionals who are working with the affected person (assuming consent is given). Decisions about formal church discipline are always momentous, even when seemingly clear-cut. How much more so when there are additional factors to weigh in the case of someone with a psychiatric diagnosis.

3. Form wise expectations.

Prayerfully consider how the weaknesses of the person might temper your expectations for obedience. A parenting analogy may help explain what I mean. In parenting, the age and developmental stage of our children matter in terms of our specific expectations for obedience, and the way we discipline should align with those differences. “Honor your father and your mother” holds equally for both the three-year-old and the twelve-year-old, but we have more robust expectations for our twelve-year-old. Additional factors in the child — such as hunger, pain, illness, or sleeplessness — may also warrant an adjustment in expectations. For example, we may not correct our three-year-old who has had a meltdown during a fever and strep throat.

How might this look for someone with both mental-health and recurring sin issues? Years ago, I was consulted about a middle-aged single man who was undergoing formal discipline for laziness and failure to honor his parents. After having a string of part-time jobs for many years, he hadn’t worked for several years and was living with his elderly parents.

As I got to know him, I indeed noticed places where his fleshly propensities for ease and comfort led to laziness. But more was going on. He struggled with incapacitating anxiety in social settings. Further, I observed some impaired interpersonal and cognitive capabilities that no doubt made it difficult for him to hold a job. The elders and I ultimately crafted a shepherding plan that took into account this man’s true weaknesses and inabilities while at the same time exhorting him to take more proactive care of his parents. However, given the full picture, the process of formal church discipline no longer seemed appropriate.

4. Care for everyone involved.

At the same time, it is also important to consider the impact of the person’s struggle on family members and the broader body of Christ. The severity and chronicity of these harmful offenses factor into the extent and time course of church discipline. A wife raising concerns about her husband’s apathy and passivity amid his serious depression is one thing. A depressed husband who has become verbally or physically abusive to his wife is a different matter and requires more urgent pastoral intervention. Or consider the difference between a person with fluctuating psychosis who sometimes disrupts church gatherings and the same person who is also making unwanted sexual advances toward another church member.

You are simultaneously trying to recognize and address the harm done to others while also bringing hope, encouragement, and correction to the suffering sinner. Put another way, you are seeking to love multiple people at once: the person with mental illness, those impacted negatively by his struggle, and the wider body of Christ.

5. Prayerfully assess repentance.

Prayerfully assess the person’s level of repentance (2 Corinthians 7:10–11). Remember, Scripture reserves the most serious manifestations of church discipline for church members who refuse to repent of clear-cut, significant sin. Questions to consider include the following (I’ll use he as a generic pronoun):

Does the person understand what he has done?
Is he grieved by this sin before God and others?
Has he asked forgiveness from those he has sinned against?
Is he doing the hard work of rebuilding trust with others?
Is he availing himself of all reasonable help, including counseling and/or medical care?
Is he compliant with prescribed medications?
Does he welcome greater pastoral oversight and accountability?

The more concern these questions raise, the more reason we may have for continuing a process of formal church discipline.

6. Remain open to change.

Be ready to change direction. Sometimes a decision regarding discipline needs rethinking. In many cases, this is not being wishy-washy but being wise and humble stewards of additional information and insights as they become apparent. No doubt, it is difficult to discern the difference between can’t and won’t in a struggling person. Sometimes, we will realize later that we erred on either side — being too lenient when greater accountability would have been wiser, or being too quick to advance formal discipline when greater patience and mercy would have been appropriate.

7. Love beyond discipline.

What about those (hopefully infrequent) instances where a congregant with a mental-health diagnosis requires removal from membership and the Lord’s Supper for serious and unrepentant sin — despite a prayerful, thoughtful process and multiple entreaties of love and warning? We do it with gentleness and tears, continuing to acknowledge the person’s real suffering as well as the sins that have harmed others and brought the gospel into disrepute.

If possible, communicate well with those outside the church who are involved in the person’s care (like counselors and physicians), as the discipline process may impact the person’s emotional state, and caregivers may need increased vigilance. Be prepared that taking such a step may incite anger and/or self-harm in the person. Ideally, family members and friends understand the need for this final step of church discipline and can offer ongoing support to the person.

Excommunication doesn’t mean that the person is barred from attending your church (a potential exception being harm done to others in the congregation by his continued presence). But it does mean that this person’s profession of faith is no longer seen as credible, and he is therefore viewed as an unbeliever. What does that look like? The person is welcomed and encouraged to attend the gathering but not partake of the Lord’s Supper, and leaders and members continue to urge him toward repentance and faith in Christ.

While this article cannot fully address the complexity involved in the exercise of church discipline in cases of mental illness, I hope these reflections provide biblical perspective and guidance as you, together with your fellow pastors, seek to wisely love those God has called you to shepherd.

Audio Transcript

Several decades ago, preaching was defined as an act meant “to disturb the comfortable and to comfort the disturbed” (Campus Gods on Trial, 102). You’ve heard that definition before of preaching. Disturbing the comfortable remains one of the great challenges faced by the preacher and the evangelist and all of us who seek to share the gospel in the prosperous West today. Because to be comfortable in sin, apart from Christ, is the deadliest place to be.

With that concern comes this question from a listener named Matt. “Hello, Pastor John! As an evangelist, what have you done to try and convince people who have their material needs met of their need for Christ? I have a wealthy brother who has no interest in the gospel or spiritual matters. I’ve been praying for him for years to be saved and I just don’t know how to break through all the comforts of his life that make him feel confident and assured and safe.”

This question resonates deeply with me, not only because of people I know who are outwardly quite content and yet are lost, but also because my father was an evangelist who saw thousands of people come to Christ through his ministry, and he said to me when I was a boy, “Johnny, getting people saved through the gospel seems not to be the hardest thing in my ministry. But getting them lost so that they know they need to be saved — that’s the hardest thing.” So, this question is not new to me. It’s been around for a long time. I suspect it’s not unique to our time.

Alternative Gospels

The thing that this question is getting at is that most people do not feel any need for the most important thing that Jesus accomplished and offers. And add to that the tragedy that so many Christians, and even some preachers, in our day have altered the message of the gospel so that the main thing — the most important thing Jesus accomplished by dying and rising again — is not the most important thing being offered when people share the gospel. Rather, there’s a constant effort to make the message fit the felt need, which drastically alters the message from something infinite and ultimate and glorious and precious to something temporal and far less important.

The prosperity gospel, of course, is the most egregious example of this, as prosperity preachers try to sell Jesus as a kind of magical force in your life that will make things go better in this world. But there are less egregious forms of prosperity-gospel distortion, which do the same thing at a lesser level, that is pretty much infecting the American church. We create alterations of the gospel as we try to persuade people with our own seemingly innocuous version of the prosperity gospel — by mainly referring to the fact that your psychological state or your marriage or children or finances or health will improve if you accept Jesus.

Death and Judgment

Now, my father was a very happy man. He knew the wonderful effects of God’s forgiveness and justification by faith and the hope of eternal life. He knew the wonderful effects here and now of being a Christian. He was a happy, well-rounded, balanced Christian. I think that’s probably why I’m a Christian today. I never saw in my father or my mother any reason to jettison what they were so authentically changed by. My father wrote a little paperback. Most fundamentalists don’t write books like this — and he was one, a very happy one. I have it on my shelf: A Good Time and How to Have It.

And yet he also knew that most people thought they were having a good time and the gospel would just get in the way. That was the problem. That’s what he had to overcome. Therefore, what I remember most clearly in his preaching is the flame in his eyes of mingled kindness and severity when he quoted Hebrews 9:27: “It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.” Oh, I can just hear him say it. I can see the look on his face.

“At the bottom of all other problems is the problem that we are under the wrath of God.”

Sometimes we joke and say, “Well, two things are unavoidable in life: death and taxes.” Well, that’s not true. Taxes are avoidable. You can just go to jail. But there are two things that are unavoidable without Christ: death and judgment, death and hell. The main thing Jesus came into the world to accomplish was to make it possible for human beings, under the just sentence of death and hell, to escape that eternal condemnation and live forever, glorifying God by their happiness in him. That’s what he came to do — centrally at the bottom of all other things.

Solving Our Biggest Problem

What God sent Jesus into the world to do was to solve every human problem eventually. The problem that has to be solved at the bottom of all other problems is the problem that we are under the wrath of God. That’s humanity’s biggest problem. No matter how rich we are or happy we are — or healthy or famous or strong or beautiful — we are all sinners. We have belittled the glory of God by making so little of it, and we deserve eternal condemnation. Romans 5:9 says, “Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.” And 1 Thessalonians 1:10 says, “[God] raised [Jesus] from the dead, . . . who delivers us from the wrath to come.” And Romans 2:5 says, “Because of your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.”

This is the problem at the bottom, under all other problems, and this is the main problem for people who feel they have no problems and don’t need the gospel: the rich, the comfortable, the content; the poor, the comfortable, the content.

So, my father pleaded with healthy, wealthy, self-satisfied people to wake up and realize that every heartbeat could be your last, and you’re not ready to face an all-holy God. There’s only one way to be ready, and that is to be united to Jesus Christ by faith in him as our Savior and Lord and treasure. According to Romans 8:3, God condemned sin in Jesus Christ’s flesh. That is, he gave his Son to bear the condemnation of his own wrath for all who will trust him.

Or in Galatians 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us — for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.’” My father would plead with people, “If you don’t accept the curse that Jesus came under God’s wrath against you to give, you will have to bear your own curse in hell.” That’s the one crucial message that our comfortable, oblivious friends and neighbors need to hear. There are many other good things to say; that dare not be neglected.

Warning with Wisdom and Love

We need to be deeply aware that this is a message of love about an act of love that is so great it cannot be exaggerated. Just before mentioning God’s wrath in Romans 5:9, Paul said, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). There is no greater love than that God would put his only Son through hell on the cross to save his enemies from going to hell. That’s the heart of the gospel.

So, Matt, let’s pray that God would give us tears and compassion, not just for the pains and sorrows of this life. Oh my goodness. You read the news of what’s happening around the world, and there is just so much suffering now. Yes, by all means let us weep for that, but also, may God give us tears for the pain-free people, the comfortable people, the healthy, wealthy people who are blind to what awaits them without Christ.

God will show you, Matt, when and how to give this message as you seek to lay down your life for others. He will. He’ll show you. I have seen such warnings — I mean severe, earnest, tearful warnings, from my father and in my own ministry — I have seen warnings from my father and from me bear the fruit of salvation. May God cause our love to abound with great wisdom so that we know how best to deliver this essential message.

Audio Transcript

One final time we dip back into the online controversy, into the “brew-haha,” as it was called. Pastor John, on September 30 you tweeted about coffee. You posted Hebrews 12:28, which says, “Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe.” And in light of that reverent vision for our worship, you posed this open question: “Can we reassess whether Sunday coffee-sipping in the sanctuary fits?”

The tweet was loved. The tweet was hated. The tweet was spread all over the Internet to the point that after a couple weeks it had over 1,000 retweets, 1,500 comments, 3,000 likes, 2.7 million views, and feature articles online from Fox News and the Daily Mail — none of which you saw.

That tweet led to this little series on the podcast. In part one, in APJ 2011, you got to the crux, saying, “The heart of the matter is not the coffee mug in hand. It’s the absence of a kind of experience with God that would make a Christian soul long for regular encounters with God and his people that are so profoundly satisfying in the depth of their being, with his majesty and his sweetness, in the seriousness of their joy and the weightiness of his glory, that a coffee mug would simply feel strangely out of place.”

And then last time you dropped into the nitty-gritty, with five appeals to preachers on how to move a casual church toward a more reverent and more deeply satisfying encounter with God on Sundays. That was in APJ 2012. But fostering such healthy reverence on Sunday mornings requires more than just sermons. We’ve talked coffee. We’ve talked preaching. But now, what about dress codes and music and announcements, and all the other factors at play here on Sunday mornings?

One of my points so far, Tony, in this — which is turning out to be a three-part series on a sense of reverence and transcendence in worship — has been that we will never out-entertain the world. Therefore, it’s not only foolish to try, but we shouldn’t try because we have something better — far, far better — than entertainment to offer our people, something our souls were made for, something profoundly stabilizing, strengthening, refining, satisfying in the depths of our being, which we experience in moments of reverence and awe in the presence of God. That has been one of my main points.

So, I began last time to point (what I hope is) a way forward for pastors especially, but also for churches or people in general in churches, to move a church gradually from the atmosphere of a casual, chipper, coffee-sipping, entertainment-oriented gathering to a more seriously joyful, reverent, deeply satisfying encounter with God. I started by referring to the preaching of the pastor, and today I simply want to give a few suggestions about the rest of the service.

Meeting God on Two Mounts

I know this is not the only way that we meet God — that is, to meet him in a joyfully serious moment of reverence and awe. I know that’s not the only way we encounter each other and God. We used to say at Bethlehem, where I was pastor for 33 years, that Sunday morning is the Mount of Transfiguration, and Sunday evening — we had Sunday-evening services — was the Mount of Olives.

On the Mount of Transfiguration, the disciples met the majesty of Christ, and they fell on their faces speechless (or they began to say foolish things). On the Mount of Olives, Luke tells us that Jesus got away with his disciples customarily. I picture them on the Mount of Olives, sitting on the grass with each other, talking about life and ministry, getting help from Jesus, telling him the problems they’ve had in trying to heal the sick. These are two very different ways of meeting Christ.

And my argument was — namely, to my church, when we talked about these things — that one hour out of our entire week to devote to a serious meeting with God in a more transcendent and reverent way was not excessive. The whole world, all week long, is urging us to equate pleasure with what’s casual, happiness with entertainment. But on Sunday morning, our people can taste in corporate reverence and awe something far deeper, far better, far more satisfying.

So, on the Mount of Transfiguration, I wore a suit. I stood behind the pulpit, a big wooden pulpit, representing God’s word, and the whole service was designed with a relentless, vertical God-focus. In the evening, I did not wear a suit. I dressed differently. I came down out of the pulpit. I used an overhead projector. There was interaction with the congregation. And so on. You get the difference between the Mount of Olives and the Mount of Transfiguration.

In all my pleading for a sense of reverence and awe and wonder and transcendence, for the sake of God’s glory and for our own hungry souls — we’re starved for transcendence, I think — in all that pleading, don’t hear me denying the preciousness of meeting Jesus together in informal, interactive, casual ways. God is for us in both of these encounters. Our hearts need both, but we don’t live in a day where there’s an excess of reverence and transcendence.

Here are just a few suggestions for the rest of the service, the Sunday-morning service, where I think it more naturally adapts itself to this kind of experience with God.

1. Consider how leaders dress.

The pastor can lead the way in how the leaders, the people up front, or the congregation dresses. We never prescribed a dress code for our people — and there was a lot of variety — but we did for those who lead.

Clothing speaks. What you wear says something about your understanding of the situation: a wedding, a funeral, interviewing for a job, meeting the president of the United States, playing tennis, sleeping, addressing the United Nations, attending a fundraising gala. What you wear speaks. It does. You cannot avoid it. It sends a message about your understanding of the event.

And the message of clothing in the last forty years in the church has largely become, “God does not require any particular dress or nice clothes” and “God accepts us as we are.” Both of those messages are true. It’s not a sin to send those messages. But they’re not the only message worth sending.

The up-front leaders of the service will have to decide, What do we want to say about God in the various gatherings of the church? Is there one gathering anywhere in the life of our people, in the life of this church, just one, where it would be worth saying with our clothes and in every other way something about the respect and reverence and awe that we have for God? Clothing is not a big thing. It’s not the main thing. It’s just one part of what church leaders can do to move a church toward a serious joy of reverence and awe.

2. Strive to stay Godward.

Give serious attention to the Godward flow of the service. Strive to linger in the presence of God, to focus on God, uninterrupted for a significant time. For example, avoid unnecessary spoken sutures — meaning, the way different acts of worship are connected, how you move from one to the other.

If you’re just finishing the song “I Love You, Lord,” and the next planned act of worship is a pastoral prayer, the one who comes to pray does not need to say, “Let’s pray.” We are praying. That’s what we’re doing when we say, “I love you, Lord.” We, as a congregation, are loving God. We’re praying to God. We’re telling God.

So, the aim of the one leading the people in the pastoral prayer is to catch that powerful moment when the Holy Spirit is at work. We’re carrying our people Godward, and he picks up on it, so he helps the people just to stay right in the prayer and carries them into communion with God in the pastoral prayer.

Another example would be to work hard to do the necessary horizontal acts, like announcements or a word about the offering, in a Godward way. I spent hours preparing my announcements and preparing other things in the service that you have to do as a pastor. If something is happening in the life of the church that week, you have to tell the people it’s happening. And you can do it in a worshipful, Godward way that doesn’t jolt anybody out of the sweetness of the communion with God that they were just enjoying in the hymn.

You don’t need to joke about things. You don’t need to ramble with trite words that you say over and over because you didn’t prepare anything, with a bunch of “you knows” and “ums” and “ers,” and everybody is now deflated from where they just were in their moment of worship.

Suppose there’s going to be a fire drill — we did this recently at our church. You’re doing a fire drill for the kids in the nursery during the service because you’ve got to train them for what you’re going to do if there’s a fire. The people in the church are going to see their kids walking up the stairs, and they’re going to be panicked, like, “What’s going on here?” if they don’t know there’s going to be a fire drill.

Now, this is a worship service. How do you do that? What do you say? Well, you get on your knees at home, and you ask God, “Show me how to take this word about the fire drill and make you the center of it.” You conclude, “I’ll say this: ‘Jesus loves our kids. You know that. He loves kids. Jesus threatened terrible things for those who would make our children stumble. So, we take good care of our kids for Jesus’s sake, and you’re going to see them filing out here on a fire drill.’”

And you have a big smile on your face, but you’re not going to joke here. You’re not going to turn this into a joke. You’re going to say, “Let’s give thanks. Let’s give thanks when we see those kids. What a gift from God they are to us! What a weighty responsibility. God is sufficient. Oh, how he loves and how we love our children.”

That’s the way you do it, or something like that. There is always a sweet, good, deep, powerful, wonderful alternative to slapstick. Lots of pastors and other worship leaders have no idea what I’m talking about when I say, “You just don’t need to turn everything into lighthearted, jokey.” Okay. Enough on that.

3. Let the congregation sing.

Let the sound of the congregation singing be the main sound of the music in worship. Don’t let the instruments or the lead worshipers dominate the sound. That’s what entertainment does.

Let every song be singable. It needs to have a melody that people can grasp and enjoy, and make sure that the song is keyed so that the men can sing all the notes. It’s crucial that the men of the church sing. And they will sing — they’ll sing like an army — if the musicians choose the songs and calibrate the songs and the range of the notes so that the men can sing.

If half our songs are singable only by women, we are saying to the men, “This is not for you, and you might as well grab your coffee.” So, let the songs be singable, and let the congregation singing be the main sound of worship, not the worship team and not the instruments.

4. Saturate the service with Scripture.

Finally, saturate the song lyrics, the prayers, the readings, and the confessions with Scripture and rich, deep, sound doctrine. This will communicate that nothing here is random or careless. It’s all designed to help the people sustain a relentless focus on God, and that’s the focus that will make coffee-sipping seem increasingly out of place.

So I end, Tony, where I began in the first episode in this series, a couple of episodes ago. Coffee-sipping in the worship service is not the heart of the matter. The heart of the matter is Hebrews 12:28: “Let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe.” Is there in the church a longing for this?