Edit: these definitions might come in handy!
The Phenomenal Problem
EMBODIMENT IN THE DIGITAL AGE
In mainstream 21st century cultural discourse, the topic of embodiment is increasingly irrelevant. Across architecture, media, and the arts, it is no longer as significant to discuss the importance of the embodied experience, which is our total physical participation in the world around us. In fact, the notion of embodiment and phenomenology is an understated, enigmatic, and seemingly avoided concept in the contemporary world. Phenomenology is essentially that which is known through the experiences of the body and its senses. In this digital age, there is a distinctive dampening of the conscious experiences of the totality of the body, as it exists in the world.
SCREENS VS. SANCTUARIES
In society, we lament about not being present in the moments we are blessed with, as we are always distracted and on our phones all the time. We externalise the blame for our habits. Insufferable technology! Apparently, it is so serious that even AI could take our jobs. We attempt to immerse in and engage with reality through virtual lenses. These days, the best we can do on the mildly entertaining front is market “immersive” experiences as huge looming screens playing continuous reels of footage to us… as we stare aghast. Hardly immersive. Our augmented grasp on reality is so bad that American writer and critic Susan Sontag argued that we perceive and pre-empt the world and our surroundings “as a set of potential photographs”.[1] The way we experience the world around us, particularly through a screen, affects our neurological and biological makeup. We are visually overstimulated and numbed to our other senses and visceral experiences that the totality of the body allows us to engage in. The body is not just isolated to sight. Yet we rarely provide the antidote to this. We murmur about our technological addictions, yet perhaps we have not quite diagnosed the root cause. We seem to be running away. But what are we afraid of? We appear not to have the courage to find solutions… yet. Maybe we have not even identified the problem sufficiently (hint: it is not the screens!).
Yet Christians, above all, should be concerned — deeply so.
In Christian discourse and on the subject of worship, we often neglect that this pressing dilemma is encroaching on our relationship with God. If embodiment in worship is irrelevant, then, by all means, continue “attending” your internet church. However, if we are honest with ourselves, it is likely that we neglect our propensity for lethargic worship already embedded in our human condition, as we have set the moral bar low enough for us to hobble over. The children of Israel did this in the wilderness by making other gods to worship… and they went for it with their entire beings too, fornicating and revelling. Perhaps, as Christians, we are ignorant of the devices of our own deeply carnal state in our present troubler, our compromised flesh. This denigration and degrading of worship is likely and more aptly defined as idolatry, the worship of another or the worship of God as we would want it.
This matters in today’s technologically advanced world.
FROM PIXELS TO PRESENCE
It is understandable that significant world events like the 2020 pandemic resulted in the need to connect online with other believers – it seemed like the only viable solution. Indeed, some benefit from tuning into a service remotely because a physical disability or similar impediment prevents them from attending a local assembly of believers.
However, our modern cultural ways of image-obsession and idle consumption conflict with the Word of God and the worship of the Most High. Worship of God is not about idle spectatorship, nor is it about redefining worship to suit ourselves. Increasingly, embodied worship of our Creator continues to be taken lightly and for granted in countries here in the West, where Christianity is well-established. This is tragic, and it speaks to our shame that corporal worship is highly precious in countries where believers and churches are scattered and heavily persecuted for gathering together in worship of the LORD. It stands to reason that perhaps we need to reflect and prioritise what is important.
The Phenomenal Solution
COMMANDMENTS IN CONTEXT
In our blueprint for worship, as inspired by the LORD Himself, the Word of God states the second commandment in Exodus as:
Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
So, what is worship? The answer to this question depends on whom or Whom you ask.
A Merriam Webster dictionary definition of the word “worship” is:[2]
1 : to honour or show reverence for as a divine being or supernatural power
2 : to regard with great or extravagant respect, honour, or devotion
This dictionary definition is not far off but only skims the surface. According to the 10 Commandments that Moses received of the LORD on Mount Sinai, the second commandment defines worship in terms of both bowing down and servitude. Human beings, created in the image of God, are living souls and embodied spirits – our spirits and souls are housed in living bodies, and they are unified up until death when separation inevitably takes place. The second commandment describes the action of bowing down and the spiritual attitude of the heart of servitude, which also has a physical outworking. This can be defined as embodied worship, even phenomenal (or experiential) worship.
PHENOMENAL WORSHIP
Worship is multisensory and kinaesthetic. It involves all the senses, their inevitable synaesthetic crossovers and the actions that accompany them. Synaesthesia is “the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body.”[3] Worship is also multidimensional, as it involves the intangible qualities of the mind, will and emotions. Furthermore, the first and great commandment, is a demonstration of the necessity to yield our entire embodied spirits in worship to the LORD:
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.
– Deuteronomy 6:4-5 (Matthew 22:37, Mark 12:29-30 and Luke 10:27)
When our minds are full of theology, but the rest of our bodies are not participating in worship, or vice versa, then we can appear double-minded, a weakened or false testimony, and in a sense, we are not offering a complete worship to God. Too often, worship is compartmentalised. We either over-intellectualise our faith, neglecting the rest of the body, or we over-emphasise physical actions while leaving theology behind. The danger in both cases is this leads to idolatry and profane practices. However, we are to be living sacrifices, a vessel of honour to Him, renewed in our minds through the cleansing of the Word, which supplies health to the rest of us, as the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans states.
I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.
Scripture calls us to an integrated worship of God that embraces every part of who we are. When we pray, we may bow our heads in reverence to God, kneel in submission to Him, lament, cry out to God with our emotions and our heart. As we sing to Him, we can stand to honour Him, we can lift our heads upwards as though to Him, lift our hands to Him, maybe even close our eyes and focus on the God that is invisible, who inhabits our praises. Attending a local church, which is an embodiment of Christ’s bride, we can receive his Word through listening attentively to His ministers, partake in communion around the Lord’s Table, reflect and recall the precious suffering of our dear Saviour for our sins on the cross, while exhorting and edifying one another.
To phenomenally conclude, as children of God, we need to revert to the old paths of the Ancient of Days, the One who set out the way to glorify Him for us to follow. Yielding ourselves to idolatrous machinations of our imagination is not the way forward. We are to be counter-cultural, redefining ocular-centric (predominantly visual) and lethargic worldly narratives about the way we relate to this world, each other and our Heavenly Father. This means engaging not only our minds in rich theology but also the rest of our bodies in reverent, joyful, and expressive worship of Him.
This is phenomenal worship.
[1] Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, (West Sussex: Wiley, 2012), p. 33.
[2] ‘Worship’, in The Merriam Webster Dictionary [online], < https://www.merriam-webster.com/ [accessed 01 February 2025].
[3] ‘Synaesthesia’, in The Oxford English Dictionary [online], <https://www.oed.com/> [accessed 03 February 2025].
Phenomenal Worship 
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