I enjoyed watching Calamity Jane a few nights ago. It’s a rip-roaring musical starring Doris Day and, in what seems like an inevitability in musicals of a certain age and type, Howard Keel. The story centres on the adventures of the title character who is rumbustious but charming at heart. Given her propensity for getting herself into mischief, her nickname is delightfully ambiguous.

I do enjoy musicals, but I can understand how the improbable transitions from intimate moment to group song can strike some people as absurd. It takes more than the usual suspension of belief to watch a musical of Calamity Jane‘s ilk. But it wouldn’t be a romance if it didn’t have private moments—and it wouldn’t be a musical if it didn’t have group songs.

Church can be similar to Calamity Jane in many ways. It is easy to suppose that meeting on Sunday is about developing our own private relationship with Jesus. After all, knowing God and growing in that knowledge is a marvelous joy! But if we make church meetings about that relationship, they could easily become just as absurd a collection of private moments and group songs as Calamity Jane. Why should we cut a moment of mediation short with a hymn? Maybe a brief ‘blessed thought’ and then a time of quiet and stillness would be more appropriate. It might even be more aesthetically pleasing. As long as church meetings are about the individual, then it is a fair criticism to say that many church services don’t adequately allow for the quiet we need for private prayer.

To some extent, we are to blame for that. After all, much of what we say and sing is about us, individually. The more we can make it clear that what we do in church is corporate—and about what God has done for all Christians—then the less we’ll be like Calamity Jane. And that’s a good thing!