It’s a Tuesday night in the suburbs of Chicago. Just like the weeks before, I’m standing on the campus of Judson University waiting for the doors to open outside a small chapel. A handful of students have gathered, and I’m one of the few high schoolers in the crowd, standing out like a shrunken thumb.
There is a buzz in the air as the seconds pass and the crowd grows. We inhale collectively as the 9 o’clock hour draws closer.
At 8:59, a woman in her mid twenties approaches the glass doors from the inside, unlocks the latch and holds the door open. “Welcome to Upper Room,” she says. I quickly walk into a small room in complete darkness.
I grope through the darkness for a seat and prepare myself. Over the next two hours, 40 young adults and I will have our hearts raised into ecstatic worship of God. The only thing we will see is lyrics to popular Christians songs projected onto black screen. The only sound we will hear is the amplified sound of a worship band with dials turned to 11.
Looking back on this experience, I realize that what I thought was true worship was actually a spiritual sensory deprivation chamber. If you had asked me then to describe true worship, I wouldn’t have had a category for it apart from dark rooms, loud music, and youthful zeal.
Laura Story’s “Stand In Awe” (Crossway, 2026) is a book I wish I could hand to my 17-year-old self as he stepped out of that dark room. It is a book that brings 25 years of experience leading worship to bear upon questions of what really matters when we worship God.
The practical application in Story’s book cannot be overstated in an age that treats church so individualistically. When we enter the doors of the church, Story tells us, “The corporate worship service must be a time for God’s people to hear from the Lord through the preaching of his word, to express their hearts to him, and to bring both their gratitude and their grief…Through what we say, sing, hear, and do, we solidify our understanding of who God is” (pg. 111).
But she argues that worship must not be confined within the doors of a church. “The Westminster Shorter Catechism calls glorifying God the ‘chief end of man.’… Simply put, we were made to worship God. And when we fully embrace this truth, not only will our Sunday morning worship change — everything will change” (pg. 5).
So Story turns her eyes to the Christian life. Calling out the threats that distraction, fame, and autonomy pose to the daily rhythms of life, she calls Christians instead to turn their hearts to God and pursue discipline, faithfulness, and submission, respectively.
Story also points out the “ditches” that we fall into when worshiping God. She warns against the casual nature of our worship, calling us instead to fear the Lord. “Fearing the Lord is essential to reverence. It is a humble acknowledgment of our pitiful and incapable state, combined with a deep sense of awe that God would choose us and dwell in us” (pg. 46).
She confronts the self-centered worship of so many shallow services, telling the reader, “…until we reverence God as we ought, our lives will be misaligned. Our view of self will be too great. Our attachments to the world will be too strong. And our perception of purpose in life will be skewed. But all this will change when we revere God as Scripture both commands and commends. He must increase, and we must decrease (John 3:30)” (pg. 125).
Amid these pointed critiques and injunctions, Story never shies away from self-deprecating humor about her own struggles in the spotlight. Joking that she is “kind of a big deal,” she changes the titles of famous hymns to “I Could Sing of Myself Forever” or “To Me Be the Glory.”
Story’s warmth and vulnerability make this work an approachable resource for those stepping into the Reformed view of worship and for the youth who, like me, were too busy chasing spiritual sensory deprivation tanks to somehow see the beatific vision.
Still, I would caution the reader to be on guard against oversimplification. Story raises the question, “Is Reverence supposed to be one aspect of your relationship with God or the core virtue that informs everything about your spiritual life” (pg. 22)?
Her answer appears to be the latter: “Reverence is the starting point of our relationship with him. Reverence is the ending point of relationship with him. Reverence is also the means of living the Christian life with humility and dependence” (pg. 29).
While the call to reverence certainly diagnoses and treats a modern problem, I am skeptical of the benefit of boiling down virtue in worship to a single word. Her definition of reverence rings true, but leaves me wanting more.
She argues that “Reverence is a humble faith in and submission to the reality of God’s holiness, splendor, and goodness” (pg. 19). This definition, though explained with great detail in the later chapters, fails to fully convince me that, while certainly indispensable, reverence need be the single central virtue in the Christian life.
Story’s omission of love in her definition of reverence — when the Bible is rich with fruits of the spirit and chief of all, love — must be addressed. Authors from Augustine to Edwards have placed our loves at the center of our worship. Augustine goes so far as to say, the Christian’s loves are ordered rightly when we worship God.
Though I find Story’s argument in need of nuance, the book is still thoughtfully written and full of Scripture references. I would encourage any within my congregation to read it, recognizing that while there may be more to worship than reverence, it is no doubt an essential aspect of our faith.
Isaac Ferrell serves as pastor of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.