I have been haunted by a thought of late: churches that feature attractive dancers doing sexualized dance moves would have been very appealing to me as a young man. It would have drawn my eye for sure. Put such women in front of me on a “stage” in a church service and you would have had my full attention. Many men would no doubt agree.

But this is where the problem begins, isn’t it? Featuring scantily clad women in tight clothes doing sensual dances would have meant a church was offering me—and other men—exactly what the world offered. As a child of the 90s, I grew up when MTV was cutting-edge and powerful. Its influence was not for the better in spiritual terms. MTV and its ilk were fleshly. It was tempting. It gave young men and women exactly the kind of sexualized context our depraved teenage self wanted (now immediately accessible on largely-unmonitored smartphones).

What a grace to me that my local church featured no such material. As I wrote about last week, my local church in a small town had no exciting dancing, no fleshly appeal, no sensual connection. The ministry of the church thus did not appeal to my flesh as an immature young man. Though a young believer, I sometimes found myself more interested in sports and the social scene than the church’s offerings. This was precisely because the church was not worldly. The church seemed boring in comparison. The church was boring in comparison, at least in natural terms.

How tragic it would have been for me if my church was exciting in a secular way. I do not exaggerate when I say that I very likely would not have trusted Christ as my Savior in such an environment. If the church was worldly, in other words, I would have liked the worldly parts and not the spiritual parts. If my congregation had opened services with choreographed dance numbers featuring attractive women, I would have liked those dance numbers. If our “worship” featured covers of famous pop songs, I would have liked those covers. If the preaching was anchored in entertainment and the pastor made endless reference to movies and cool TV shows and celebrities, I would have liked that preaching. But I would not have liked it as a Christian. I would have liked it in a fleshly way. I would have liked it as an unbeliever.

What a terrifying thought to me, years later. Yet we are in an age when our “leading” evangelical churches increasingly offer just this kind of “worship service” to people. They blend the world with the Bible. In order to “reach” people, they use worldly means. They do so because they believe they can connect with people through culture and then introduce them to Jesus. It is not impossible that this would be so. I am sure people do get saved in worldlified churches. But I am also sure that people do not get saved in such places, and that many people who think they get saved and then get baptized do not truly know Christ as Lord and Savior. In other words, worldlified churches at best confuse some people and at worst mislead them entirely.

I am grateful to God that I was not raised in a cool, exciting, attractional church. I am thankful that I was raised in an assembly by a godly father and mother that was not worldly. Ours was an unsensational, unexciting, fully normal Baptist congregation. It preached the Word and the gospel. It gave me no worldly reason to follow Jesus in faith. I am only realizing now—in deeper measure—just what a gift this was, and what a protection to my soul it provided.

None of this reflection means that I think that churches should be grumpy. Or boring. Or mean-spirited. Or focused on how awful everyone else is. How miserable such groups sound! Churches should be full of the joy that is in Christ crucified and risen, joy prepared for us by the Father before the world began, joy realized in the Spirit’s ongoing transformation (1 Peter 1:8-9). We are free to be men and women of God in our gathered worship, and we need not be ashamed of our body, our person, our calling from God. We are instead filled with joy in God that is not worldly joy. (Worldly joy is not joy, truthfully.) This joy gladdens the soul. It summons us to worship God corporately on Sunday and to worship God individually in the quiet anonymity of our week. It spills into all of our lives, showing that we are a new creation.

But woe to us if we offer people worldliness in our services. Woe to us if we, as one example, give young men like I once was a reason to love coming to church that is not God-grounded. Woe to us if we, in fact, offer content that is tempting to young men and women, that encourages young men to view women as sexual objects, and that encourages young women to hunger for such attention from young men. Woe to us if we present a church that is exciting as the world is exciting, that is creative as the world is creative, that is fleshly as the world is fleshly. Woe to us, for even as we may see some people genuinely converted in such settings, we may also make false converts, and give them baptismal assurance of their salvation when they are in truth far from the kingdom of God, dazzled by our flesh-pleasing “worship.” (Perhaps, in the end, we are worshipping still, but at some level worshipping self, not God.)

If you are a church planter or pastor, please do not commission dancers for your service. Please do not use the top 40 songs in corporate worship. Do not give people any reason to like your church but the things of God. If you are a young Christian and this is new material to you (as it may very well be given the state of evangelicalism), please do not join a church that is worldly. For the good of your own soul, and for the good of your witness to unbelievers, join a church that pulses with joy in the living God, that features sound doctrine from sound exegesis. If you are training men for ministry in a seminary or academic institution or internship, please do not commend worldly methodology to those men. Take them deep in first-century methodology, in Spirit-driven methods shaped by the Word, not the world.

If you are a Christian, fight the flesh every day you live. Wake up with prayers of great need on your lips. Pray them to God, and ask him to grant you power over sinful desires, fleshly urges, worldly instincts, ungodly appetites. Pray that he will give you greater joy in his Word and gospel, and less zeal for this earthly order which even now is passing away. Pray that as you enjoy common grace and build a vocation and bless a family and serve your church, you would magnify the strong Christ in your weakness.

And pray that God would give us a fresh cleansing of the temple in our time, and scourge the spirit of worldliness from our churches, leaving not one table of the money-changers standing in our midst.