Last week, while researching the post about the gap between behavior and ideals, I ran across a whole slew of stuff online about costly worship. Evangelicals sell this kind of sacrificial giving as a necessity for Jesusing perfectly. But it’s anything but. It’s just another adaptation to their ongoing decline, and it’s a painfully obvious attempt at psychological manipulation at that. Today, let’s explore this concept—and behold the results of this very natural process.
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 3/10/2026. They’re both available now!)
SITUATION REPORT: Costly worship surges ahead in the list of evangelical demands
Part of the art of search engine use is knowing how to ask the questions. Last week, however, I used a query that threw all of mine for a loop: “why evangelicals make high demands”. It was only one of several searches I conducted, yet it yielded the weirdest, most mixed-bag results I’ve ever seen. It’s like server farms around the world just scrambled to find something, anything, that might match properly.
But in its frantic search for something relevant to the query, one search engine flung up an entire set of evangelical sites talking about costly worship.
This term isn’t exactly new. It’s been floating around in the Christ-o-sphere for ages now, though I didn’t hear it called exactly that for a while. But in recent years, the idea has surged in evangelicalism. And so I wondered just how common this term is.
In fact, it is incredibly common. And it’s getting more and more common! In the past five years, evangelical leaders have been laser-focusing on the necessity of costly worship for their flocks.
And this is a very new situation for them. The term barely existed online in evangelical spaces in the 1990s, and it didn’t proliferate much in the 2000s. Even from 2010 to the end of 2014, there aren’t many returns for the phrase. But evangelicals weren’t caught up in their never-ending spiral of decline yet. From 2015 to 2020, search results begin to grow rapidly. And now, just from 2021-2026, there’s no real counting the uses. It’s exploded.
Today, I’ll show you what this all-important concept is, how evangelicals use it, and what a completely cheap and obvious manipulation tactic it really is.
Christianese 201: Costly worship
The idea of costly worship isn’t intro-level Christianese. Rather, it shows up as a jargon church members learn after joining up. Forget about all that “his yoke is easy and his burden is light” stuff. That’s just for hooking and reeling in the marks. Once you’re ensnared, you’ll find that actually the yoke is very difficult and the burden just gets heavier and heavier as you go along.
Suddenly, you have to worry about the quality of the resources you’re providing for free to the church you’ve presumably chosen to attend of your own free will. Church leaders only want your best offerings of time, effort, and money
Costly worship means giving only your best, your utmost, your A-game resources. More than that, it means giving your church those resources till it hurts.
One evangelical, Rob Brockman, describes anything less as “regifting,” explicitly comparing costly worship to buying super-nice Christmas presents versus repurposing whatever we have left over from previous holidays that we didn’t really want.
Last month, another evangelical, Joshua Swanson, asserted that “[i]f we look at Scripture, God always responds to costly worship.” Naturally, the very first example of “costly worship” that he gives is “giving financially when it stretches you.”
(Yahweh may be the all-powerful god of Christianity’s universe, but for some reason he always needs their money. And absolute gobs of it, all the time!)
Last September, Josh Powell, another evangelical, laid out other forms of costly worship: more time in prayer, more tithing and volunteering at church (phrased as “more devotion to our church as an act of service”), more Bible reading, and more kindness to others.
Evangelical leaders are beginning to stress the compete necessity of costly worship to their flocks. And their flocks are facing enough pressure nowadays to buy into the idea wholeheartedly—without questioning it too much.
We steelman costly worship…
Evangelical leaders draw from the same list of inspirations for costly worship.
First: King David’s purchase of a plot of land to use as a shrine to Yahweh. In the story in 2 Samuel 24:18-25, Araunah offers to donate the land to David. But David refuses to accept it for free. He will pay for it. He tells Araunah in verse 24, “I insist on paying a price, for I will not offer to the LORD my God burnt offerings that cost me nothing.” We see this story crop up often in exhortations about costly worship in recent years.
Second: A woman pours a super-expensive vial of perfumed oil on Jesus’ head and/or feet. This story, which appears in variations across all four Gospels in the New Testament, has a woman pouring outrageously-expensive perfumed oil on Jesus. The version in John has Mary, sister of Martha (not Jesus’ mother), pouring the oil. When the Apostles criticize her for wasting something they could have sold for much-needed money, Jesus tells them to leave her alone.
Third: A poor Jewish widow donates a tiny amount of money in Jesus’ presence, and he praises her. As it’s told in Mark 12, Jesus is just sitting and watching Jews making donations to the temple. A widow gives “two mites,” which he praises as a far larger proportion of her income than what the wealthier Jews are donating.
Fourth: Abraham takes his son Isaac to the mountain to “worship,” but he really intends to sacrifice what is most important to him. In Genesis 22:5, Abraham describes this trip as “worship” with his only child Isaac, but what he’s really planning to do is perform a human sacrifice as Yahweh has directed. What, evangelicals ask, could possibly be more costly than that?!?
Well, on that note:
A Jesus-juking fifth: Jesus’ sacrifice of himself to himself to pay for the sins he (as Yahweh) allowed into his own creation. Obviously, that laps all four other examples.
To evangelical leaders, these Bible stories more than justify the increasingly-exorbitant demands they’re making of their followers. They constantly hint that Yahweh won’t like them at all if they’re not giving this level of “sacrificial worship.” As one Calvary Chapel leader notes:
Christianity that is divorced from passionate commitment and sacrifice is no Christianity at all. This is counterfeit Christianity; a fake Christianity that only deceives yourself.
And of course, evangelicals only believe in one fate for fakey-fake fake Christians.
… Then we poke holes in the clobber verses
In 2 Samuel 24, King David wasn’t just wanting a nice spot for generic Jewish sacrifices. He and his army were in serious trouble with Yahweh right then. See, his god had put the sinful idea in his head to count all the soldiers in his army. Yahweh deliberately set David up to commit a sin, possibly that of self-reliance—but we’re not sure even today exactly what it was. After seeing the devastation of Yahweh’s punishment, David realized he needed to make a big gesture to atone for whatever he’d done. Yahweh had briefly held back his hand at the property of Araunah, so David decided he needed that particular land for the big gesture.
So the 2nd Samuel 24 story is about a very particular time of great crisis—and atoning for sin in a very particular Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) way. None of this was voluntary, and none of it was about worship as modern evangelicals understand the term.
The various NT stories of women pouring expensive oil on Jesus usually end with the Apostles criticizing them while Jesus praises them. Usually, though, he praises them for spending money on him while he’s still there in the flesh. That’s the key concept here: Jesus was physically there to enjoy the lavish gifts! In Mark 14, for example, this is what he tells his disciples:
Leave her alone; why are you bothering her? She has done a beautiful deed to Me. The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them whenever you want. But you will not always have Me. She has done what she could to anoint My body in advance of My burial. And truly I tell you, wherever the gospel is preached in all the world, what she has done will also be told in memory of her.
He seems to be ordering them to help the poor after his death, not waste resources on costly worship.
The story of the widow’s mites doesn’t lead to the modern notion of costly worship either. None of the people making these donations were “worshiping” in the modern sense. Rather, they were donating to the temple system that Jesus explicitly condemned. Worse, those donations weren’t entirely voluntary—especially in Jerusalem. In Mark 12, literally right before the widow’s donation, Jesus had this to say about that system:
Watch out for the scribes. They like to walk around in long robes, to receive greetings in the marketplaces, and to have the chief seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They defraud widows of their houses, and for a show make lengthy prayers. These men will receive greater condemnation.
And in Mark 13, right after the widow’s donation, he specifically tells his followers that the Second Temple, which received her donation, will be destroyed.
Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac doesn’t support costly worship either. Just as a starting dealbreaker, it’s not voluntary at all! Yahweh commands Abraham to murder his only child, his son, as a show of obedience. This event occurs specifically because Yahweh demanded it specifically of one specific person for one specific reason.
And last I checked, no Christian today is actually Jesus, and nobody in the New Testament really expects them to be a perfect god anyway. Evangelicals do like imagining themselves as Jesus’ mini-mes, though.
The entirely natural reasons for wanting more costly worship from the flocks
As I said earlier, the idea of costly worship isn’t totally new. It had some currency in the mid-2000s and in some form or another is quite old. But it’s really soared into popularity just in the past five years.
Nobody should be surprised by this popularity, either.
Since the pandemic, evangelicalism has been slowly collapsing from the inside. Their recruitment attempts continue to bomb, while their retention rates continue to falter. They’re mega-hyping the so-called “quiet revival” they insist is happening with Gen Z, but Gen Z continues to be largely unaffected by evangelical entreaties. (And just wait till Alpha hits adulthood. It’s gonna be kino.)
While this membership implosion occurs, the flocks are giving less money per capita than ever. Church “whales,” to borrow the gaming term, largely support their groups with donations and labor while most others give less and less of their money or time at all. Church leaders, even megachurch leaders, are finding themselves having to do more and more stuff with ever-shrinking pools of money and volunteers.
Evangelical leaders have always used high-control tactics to get what they want from their followers. I noticed the huge numbers of sermons about tithing even as a teenybopper Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) convert in the mid-1980s—and it bugged me because I’d never heard explicit exhortations about tithing as a Catholic and it all felt distinctly un-Jesusy somehow.
But when I moved from there to Pentecostalism, oh, I got an earful about all the resources my churches needed from me. From then to now, the situation has become even more high-pressure as the pews continue to empty. And every bit of that pressure comes with Bible verses that appear to support these leaders’ demands.
So what we’re seeing with these cries of costly worship is panic and desperation, not some deep desire to be as Jesusy as possible.
Costly worship may also induce sunk-cost fallacy thinking in the flocks
There’s another reason why evangelical leaders may find costly worship a useful teaching for their flocks:
The more people invest in something, the more tightly they affiliate and identify with it. I noticed this about evangelism a long, long time ago. Now, the wisdom appears to be centering on costly worship.
More than that, when someone’s invested a lot of resources in something, they’ll be far less likely to want to drop it. People who’ve invested a lot of money in a game’s DLC, like The Sims 3, won’t want to move on to the 4th installment in the franchise (ask me how I know). Someone who’s burned every relationship they have and who’s made an idiot of themselves repeatedly through evangelism will likely feel very, very tightly enmeshed with the group that taught them to do that stuff (again, ask me how I know).
I’m describing here the sunk cost fallacy. Those who’ve invested money in any group or idea or product are more likely to continue investing in it even after it’s stopped returning any usefulness or profit to them.
In evangelicalism, that investment takes the forms of money, labor, and fervor. Whatever leaders can harvest from their followers, it’ll tie the followers to them more tightly and for longer.
That’s why, when Christians realized they were in solid decline in the mid-2010s, evangelicals gloated for a while because their decline was slightly slower and softer than that of mainline Protestants and Catholics. They thought it was because of their supposedly better, higher-quality, more fervent Jesusing. But it was far more likely the very earthly result of the sunk cost fallacy.
Evangelicals’ panic and desperation leads to the mask falling clean off their faces. There’s nothing divine going on in their groups. It’s all just plain old emotional manipulation dressed up in Jesus frosting: sociology and psychology used against unwary normies who mistake it for divine commands.
Joke’s on them, though. It’s painfully obvious to see the farce’s mechanisms from the outside, and I strongly suspect that more and more of those flocks will awaken to the very earthly nature of their costly worship as the decline continues.
NEXT UP: Evangelical zingers accidentally reveal a long list of perfectly valid reasons for rejecting their recruitment attempts. See you soon! <3
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