Too many of our churches offer no connection to God

In my home town of York in the 1960s, archaeologists discovered a stone pillar. It has originally towered nearly 10 metres vertically, to the roof of what must have been a very imposing building, the headquarters of the Roman city in the 2nd Century AD. Now, a sad shadow of its former glory, it was lying on its side; its stone sections sprawling horizontally through the mud.

We live at a time when, for the first time in decades, perhaps in centuries, people are starting to yearn for something transcendent. The spell of secularism, with its creed that there is nothing higher than us, is for some at least being broken. If there is anything to the “Quiet Revival”, it is because people want to encounter truths, values, and ultimately a God who is higher than us. They want to revert to the vertical.

And yet the tragedy is that far too many of our evangelical churches are like York’s Roman pillar. What should be a vertical connection between us and the One high above us is lying horizontally on its side. We offer no connection to God. We accuse liberals of removing God from the gospel – often with considerable justification – and yet in our worship we have peculiarly fallen into the same trap.

So much so, that many evangelicals avoid using the word “worship” to describe what we do when we meet together. This was certainly what I was taught as a young Christian, and myself taught others as a somewhat older one: we don’t meet to worship, we just meet to encourage and edify one another. There’s nothing spiritually special about our Sunday gatherings. It’s more like a club meeting than anything else: a group for those with a particular kind of interest – like classic cars or stamp collecting, though for us it’s the Bible – to get together and encourage each other.

I’m exaggerating, but only slightly. I’ve been part of more than one church where the chairs were deliberately shifted so that people looked at each other rather than at those reading or preaching God’s Word, to show that we’re not worshipping God, we’re edifying each other. In many of our churches the atmosphere is so informal that we would make more effort if we were meeting a minor celebrity or local MP. And, weirdly, the amount of prayer (us speaking to God) and Scripture reading (God speaking to us) is remarkably low in many churches who claim that God and His Word are what is most important to them. I know this is true, because I have been guilty of all of these things myself.

This is partly because Evangelicals have often reacted strongly against errors they have seen in others. Older Evangelicals tended to define themselves over against the empty formalism of some Anglo-Catholics; more recent ones against the chaotic and manipulative emotionalism of some Charismatics. And so we have tried to be as unlike both as possible, pursuing informality and avoiding talk of experiencing God as if both these things were noble ends in themselves.

But, as J.I. Packer once said: “The reaction of man worketh not the righteousness of God.” In this case, we have fled from a bear and fallen into a pit. For it is central to the Bible’s story and the gospel that God does, in fact, meet with us. Sinai was “the Day of the Assembly” (Deut. 9v10) when God came down to meet with His people gathered at the foot of the mountain. The Tabernacle/ Temple was that seismic day made semi-permanent for Israel: the place where they were to assemble to encounter God dwelling in their midst. The Psalms are full of this (e.g. Pss. 63v2; 84v1,2; 68v17; 48v1,2). The temple pointed of course to our Lord Jesus, whose body is the true temple (John 2v21). He has ascended into heaven, but this is not to remove Himself from us but so that by the Spirit He may be closer to us (John 16v7). How? Well, the church is the body of Christ, the true temple. The word “church” means “assembly”: the same word used for the assembly at Sinai. We gather as God’s people on the Lord’s Day so that as the body of Christ God may meet with us by the Spirit.

This is why Jesus promises that He will be present when two or three gather in His name (Matt.18v19). It is why the Spirit descends on the believers when they are gathered in one place on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2v1), an event echoed numerous times in later gatherings of the saints in Acts. It is why Jesus appeared after His resurrection almost always to gatherings of His disciples; every time when we’re told when, it is on the first day of the week. It is why Paul says that the unbeliever entering a faithful church (which means “assembly”, remember) will fall on his face, worship God, and “declare that God is really among you” (1 Cor.14v25). It is why Peter called the church, made of the living stones of Christ’s people, a dwelling-place for God by His Spirit. The assembly of the saints is the meeting-place of God with His people.

Indeed, we can take a bigger view than that. The goal of our salvation, so beautifully described in the book of Revelation, is that we will be assembled (“churched”!) around the throne of God and the Lamb, us dwelling with Him and He present with us, hearing and declaring His praises, for eternity. Our gatherings now as Christ’s church are foretastes of that. Just as we will not be in an eternal lecture in the new creation, merely edifying one another while God remains at a distance, so now we must not reduce our gathering now to mere education and encouragement. To be the church of Christ is to be the bride of Christ, for whom encounter with our Lord and husband is the thing for which we live.

Of course the church is still the church when she is not gathered, for the Spirit is a permanent gift of Christ to His church. But she is named after and defined by what happens when she is gathered. For then, assembled as the bride of Christ, her Bridegroom comes to meet with her. The gathered worship of the church is the vertical encounter between redeemed human beings and the God of all creation.

It is perhaps the loss of this appreciation of the vertical reality of worship which has made some pass by evangelicalism for the perceived greater “spiritual” reality of Rome or Eastern Orthodoxy. That is an illusion of course; for both those churches sadly offer ways to encounter God which God Himself has not. We cannot meet God though our own inventions, whether icons, saints, idols, indulgences or man-made ceremonies. But perhaps we can understand why some are tempted by false ways to meet God, if our churches are offering no way to meet God at all.

But God has in His grace provided (and commanded) the perfect means to meet Him in worship. His word read and preached; prayers offered in sincerity in the name of Christ; psalms and songs of praise sung; baptism and the Lord’s Supper according to Christ’s command. God uses these things to make Christ truly present with us by the Spirit. The Reformation was at least as much a reformation of worship, reinstating these things in the place of the inventions which had usurped them, as it was a reformation of doctrine. I suspect many of the Reformers would be astounded and befuddled at the lack of careful attention to, and love of, worship in our churches. They would see what should be a towering vertical encounter with God, lying horizontal in the mud.

Several years after it was found, York’s Roman pillar was pulled out of the mud, and the horizontal pieces stood up vertically once again. It’s still there today, restored to something like its former glory. Perhaps, in the worship of our churches, we should seek to do the same.