God showed up ???

The other day one of my clergy colleagues on Facebook was waxing lyrical over a conference of leaders that he had attended - and then at the end he wrote 'And God showed up!' To my way of thinking this is a dreadful statement to make. It suggests that God was otherwise somehow absent until the participants did something or were sufficiently attentive to make Him take some notice of them. It denies the very understanding of Christianity - not to mention the other world religions that worship a single deity - that God is everywhere present at all times and is all powerful. Omniscient and Omnipotent. It got me thinking of some of the other challenges of worship services and gatherings in Church circles.

Somehow we have got away from the idea that God is sovereign and in charge of His world and does not need us to somehow conjure him up. We find this reflected in churches where the ceremony has got to be exactly right or the music has to be of a particular kind or somehow he can only respond if we yell at him or sing very loudly or that He is not present if nothing spectacular happens - and even when the spectacular does happen as one can view on a number of tele-evangelists' programmes one is left with the sneaking feeling that it is all rather contrived and that God has little to do with it.

I realise that some of the differences in worship styles stem from cultural differences and therefore I do not expect necessarily that Nigerians will want to worship with a loud organ and traditional hymns - though some do - and not all British people would want to be totally solemn. And many will have experienced what I saw on more than one occasion in Ireland of a clergyman appearing from the vestry during the first droning hymn to plough his way through an entire service of morning prayer without apparently communicating with the people or God, only to disappear back into the vestry during the last hymn - one almost wished, never to be seen again!

Perhaps the real point of my thinking - or rambling thoughts, is that the gathered congregation really need to be coming together with a sense that they will be worshipping the Living God who is indeed Omniscient and Omnipotent. Without that sense of His presence, from the very commencement of the proceedings, then a worship service however culturally appropriate will be much more a 'celebration of the divine absence' rather than the divine presence.