Many Christians are formed to think of their own private prayer life as primary and to consider Sunday worship as effective to the extent that it ignites or deepens their personal piety. In this way of thinking, the question “what did worship do for me?” is completely natural, even if it is a bit self-centered and individualistic.

Yet it may be more profound and more spiritually healthy to think in precisely the opposite way: that corporate worship—in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts—is our primary and most essential form of prayer, one that gathers up and completes necessary forms of personal piety.

This is especially true in times when our individual mental or emotional reserves are depleted. At minimum, this more corporate vision of piety provides a new way to think about and experience the unmistakably corporate language that the Bible gives us for the church as the people of God, the body of Christ, and the temple of the Spirit.

from Wonderful Words of Life: Hymns in American Protestant History and Theology, edited by Richard Mouw & Mark Noll