The Church of our Lord Jesus is not a gathering of individual habits and rituals. In fact, the best way to never be a part of the culture of a church is to be stubbornly bound by your individual habits in church.
While everyone should have their own habits and rituals outside of worship, corporate worship ought to have a sense of unified ritualism in the best Protestant sense. Once we begin to add our external peculiarities to worship, we end up endangering the very unity Christ desires.
Corporate worship must be a call for consistent liturgical acts. For this reason, every externalized ritual must meet the standard of corporateness, and it should not appeal to individual tastes in corporate worship. The Lord’s Day worship reshapes our individual tastes and brings us into the tastes of ancient biblical texts. We talk so much about preferences in worship that we forget that God has distinct preferences that overturn our preferences.
When the people of God raise their hands for the Gloria Patri (or whatever portion of worship is common in the service), everyone raises their hands—young and old. When we kneel to confess our sins, everyone kneels to confess our sins (unless they are not able physically). When we sing a hymn or a psalm, we don’t stand there imagining we were singing something else; we sing what the body sings, whether that is on your greatest hits or not.
We cannot complain about liturgical incoherence in the evangelical world–where praise bands and people are doing two separate things or where the spontaneity of service subtracts from liturgical continuity–while offering our own version of incoherence regarding our own liturgy.
We are not individualists. We don’t atomize our participation. When we eat and drink, we are participating in Christ, joining our voices to Christ and to one another.
So, let us prepare ourselves to join one another in our separate bodies leaving our preferences behind and joining the preferences of God as expressed in our local churches. The best worship is the imitative part. Worship is not the place to bring your eccentricities; it is the place to imitate one another in adoration and acts of renewal.
