observes that the main criterion by which contemporary life is ordered (especially in the global West) is “self-realization,” or pursuit of a life of one’s own. In such a culture, Jeziorski notes, the dynamics of life, including those of human relations, “are reduced to the logic of usability and profitability.”4 In this milieu, pressing questions emerge for Adventist


worship. Has God, too, been drawn into the marketplace and reduced to a product designed to meet individual needs? Have some Adventist practices slipped toward what Sally Morgenthaler calls the “non-worship epidemic,” where worship becomes a commodified performance, functioning more as an infomercial for a particular brand of Christianity?5 Tese are essential questions as we attempt to imagine our


denomination’s liturgical future. Yet even here, liturgy offers a counter-path. Scholars remind us


that liturgy, much like good art, serves no utilitarian purpose. It is not a mechanism for religious gain. Worship cannot be confused with performing a meritorious task. Te glorification belongs to the gloria Dei alone. In this sense, liturgy is indeed “sublimely useless.” Tis distinction between purpose and meaning is crucial. In


a world governed by profitability and usability, liturgy—like watching a sunset—has no practical finality, yet it is brimming with significance. It offers a rare, habitable space where the human spirit is freed from the demands of utility and where the act of worship becomes an end in itself. Moreover, at the heart of this “sublime uselessness” is the


mystery of selflessness that liturgy embodies. Scripture reveals in Christ a love entirely outside the logic of exchange—an uneconomic love that gives without demanding return, that refuses the seductions of usefulness (Phil. 2:5-11). Good liturgy embodies this Christ-pattern. It does not aim at outcomes or efficiencies but, instead, draws worshipers into a way of being shaped by gratuitous self-giving. Participating in liturgical rites that resist commodification


invites worshipers into a form of life freed from calculation and gain. Here, liturgy becomes, paradoxically, both a “waste of time” and a pedagogy of selflessness, shaping the body and heart for the Christian mystery. 2. Te future of Adventist liturgy will be rooted in beauty. If liturgy frees us from the demands of usefulness, it also opens


us to the experience of beauty. Beauty, too, resists the logic of utility. It speaks in a different register: one of wonder, presence, and revelation.


Troughout Christian history, beauty has occupied a central


place in the life of worship. When I read St. Augustine’s Sermon 241, I can almost hear him urging: Ask the beauty of the earth, ask the beauty of the sea … of the air expanding and spreading itself … of the sky ...; question all of these realities. Tey all answer: Behold, we are beautiful.6 Perhaps the most resonant reflection on beauty comes to us


from Tomas Aquinas’s Summa Teologiae. Tere, beauty is regarded as the aesthetic manifestation of the transcendentals, awakening desire for what is true and good and drawing the human person toward a deeper knowing of God.7 Seen in that light, beauty becomes a window through which the invisible things of God shimmer into view, making what is otherwise beyond us a little more accessible, however faintly.


For many, the very word “liturgy” still carries suspicion. It evokes images of archaic formalism—a set of rituals sourced out of a past culture—rather than divine revelation, as though these could ever be neatly separated.


Beauty, then, touches faith in ways that are experiential, moral,


and revelatory. Te soſt glow of a candle during prayer, or the morning light passing through stained glass, or the hush that settles during a well-sung hymn—these moments open the heart to what no argument or explanation can fully capture. Beauty conveys divine reality in ways that words and ideas alone cannot. In our cultural moment, marked by an increasingly diminished


sense of the aesthetic, beauty’s capacity to shape the soul may be one of the profound giſts Adventism needs to recover. Beauty draws us back to attentiveness. It gathers the scattered self. Liturgically, this is an invitation to intentionally incorporate


“materials of beauty” into worship. Yet, this is not about making worship more “artsy.” Te liturgical event is, itself, a celebration of beauty and a beautiful celebration. As the psalmist prays, “One


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