more emotion at a football game than at church

The reason so many churches are not much more than social lodges is their weak abstractions generate very little, if any, emotion. Many churches do not compete well with the world's attractions. Without emotion, our abstractions are stillborn. Some churches display little emotion and others are not much more than ritualized emotion. Abstractions should normally lead to emotions, this is the normal course of events. Those who reverse the order are thrown into an arbitrary and unpredictable thinking process that makes them vulnerable to manipulations of whim and circumstance. Then there are those who are wary of emotion as a loss of control, probably because they have not done, simply put, any homework. When talk of the spirit rises, which is after all what any church should be all about, then they retreat because things are getting ghosty. This is ironically the exact case of the matter. Churches without the presence of the Holy Spirit are a contradiction in terms. If abstracting has not taken place, then one should be wary. However, without emotion there is no power to translate the abstract into the concrete. While we are in the concrete it is more difficult to control the manifested world, one would think, because abstractions are more powerful from the unseen.