It’s not a matter of choosing between worship or mission; nor are we faced with a false dichotomy of church or world, cathedral or city. To the contrary, we worship for mission; we gather for sending; we center ourselves in the practices of the body of Christ for the sake of the world; we are reformed in the cathedral to undertake our image-bearing commission to reform the city. – James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, 154
Every liturgy, we’ve said, is oriented toward a telos–an implicit vision of flourishing that is loaded into its rituals. Those formed by such liturgies then become the kind of people who pursue and desire that end. So if we are unreflectively immersed in the liturgies of consumerism, we will, over time, “learn” that the end goal of human life is acquisition and consumption. “What is the chief end of man?” the consumerist catechism asks “To acquire stuff with the illusion that I can enjoy it forever.” – James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love, 86