I grew up in Appalachia, where Sunday worship was not a quiet, polite thing folks sat and watched happen.

Where I grew up, in Southwest Ohio, worship was a verb.

It was beautifully imperfect, and sometimes, even a little chaotic.

There were babies crying, hands raised, and shoes kicked off so folks could better connect with the holiness of the earth God made. If the spirit moved, [and it usually did], someone broke out a tambourine and started badly banging along with the scraggly brass band on the platform. Amens and hallelujahs were shouted back at the preacher like punctuation.

Did everybody join the ruckus?

No.

Some people worshipped in a reserved, quiet fashion because that’s just who they were as people – introverts.

But here’s the thing — they never shamed us extroverts for expressing ourselves in the way that felt right to us.

They didn’t try to police our joy or stifle our willingness to show up and worship on Sunday mornings.

And when it came time for prayer time, us loud folks brought our tambourines to a halt.

We’d drop into a deep silence, intentionally making space for the quiet ones to feel the holy hanging heavy in the humid summer air.

At the altar, the tambourine banger and the silent-pray-er knelt side by side.

How?

Because we knew that God’s house was big enough for all of us.

Sure, we had niche spaces too. Those are important in a healthy congregation.

Wednesday night Bible Study and Prayer meeting were for the quiet crowd.

Sunday night Bible Study and Salvation Meetings were rowdy, complete with drum sets and the latest contemporary worship songs.

But Sunday mornings? Sunday mornings were for everybody.

Kids sat with old ladies they weren’t related to.

I always used to sit with a woman named Judy Long, who kept wintergreen Life Savers in her purse for when the sermon got boring, and genuinely listened when I blathered on about elementary school nonsense.

Teenagers and old men whispered and giggled in the back rows together, amused by whatever mildly naughty thing they were doing mid-sermon.

It was messy, and it was perfect.

Somewhere along the line, though, and across denominations, Sunday mornings have become a lot less joyfully jumbled.

This problem has been dubbed “worship wars”.

Traditional versus contemporary.

Pipe organ versus praise band.

Sitting quietly like you’re at a lecture versus clapping and shouting.

Suddenly, bare feet are “distracting,” and silent contemplation is “boring.”

The corporate, efficiency-minded solution?

We split congregations into multiple services. We offer the “Traditional Service” at 8:30 AM and the “Contemporary Service” at 11:00 AM.

And let’s be honest—we don’t do this because the sanctuary ran out of space. We do it to cater to consumer preferences.

Ew.

When we engage in worship wars, we completely tank the idea that a congregation should be a multigenerational community.

We treat worship like a noun.

A product.

We look at the church bulletin like a diner menu, picking the dish that suits our palate while avoiding the table across the room because they don’t dress/act/worship the same way we do.

But worship isn’t a noun.

It’s a verb.

An action.

It’s something we do collectively with our bodies, our breath, our silence, and our noise.

When we turn church into a boutique shopping experience tailored to our exact comfort zone, we just mirror the polarization fracturing the rest of the world.

Everything out there is already “this or that,” “us or them.” We curate our feeds and our friend groups to ensure we never have to encounter a style that makes us twitchy.

Can’t we just let worship be the one place where we don’t do that?

What if we stopped trying to pacify the “other side” by turning church into a sanitized, predictable rerun?

Imagine a Sunday morning where no one has to diminish themselves to keep the peace.

If you need to kick off your shoes and clap off-beat, do it.

If you need to sit in absolute, unmoving stillness to survive the week, do that.

There is room for it all.

There is room for US all.

Let’s bring back the joyful jumble.

Let’s show up for each other—wintergreen Life Savers, back-row giggles, tambourines, red boots, bare feet, and all.