Why doesn't God come to church anymore?

One of the things that bothers me at times is how many people respond to church. It's boring, I don't want to go, and why can't it be more entertaining - and that is just the Christians! They are not comfortable with the worship, they switch off at the sermon, they feel awkward and uncomfortable. They love God, but you almost feel that they dread church. For some people it is the bad experiences. For others nothing has happened, and perhaps that is the problem the sheer weight of waiting for something to happen that drags down their expectation that this morning they are really going to encounter the living God.

You almost wonder when you hear some people talk if God has given up on church on a Sunday morning and has decided instead to do something more worthwhile than sit around with an increasingly disillusioned congregation - if God has decided it is time to move on. As if we sit around looking at the empty chairs, or even the full chairs, wondering why doesn't God come to church anymore?

That sounds really negative and it is, but I meet too many people for whom that is a reality, and who therefore feel disenchanted and disengaged from anything that we may term organised religion - or even the pretty disorganised religion that is church for many people.

I wonder why this so strongly affects the culture I live in. Perhaps church is too much like the lecture theatre. Our services, particularly in Britain are just too passive. We are passengers being driven along on a bus, we have a conductor who tells us what is going to happen next. We have a band who lead us in worship. We have a preacher who gives us the tour. At the end, we get off the bus and we carry on with living our lives - not even wondering whether there could be anything more.

We do not encounter, we do not discover, we are told. We do not touch and feel, we are shown and taught by others who have (hopefully) touched and felt and who know. We sit there through the lecture perhaps whispering dissent, not sure if we agree, but too polite to object, and not wanting too stick out too much from the crowd. Wondering that if we really said what we really thought, if we would not be politely asked to leave or at least given the cold shoulder until we did.

The real problem with church is not the people who object and argue and struggle, but those who have died in their seats. The film is rolling but they have switched off, they are going through the motions, but deep down they are just going through the motions. Listen sing listen sing listen listen sing talk go home.

We need space to discover and to encounter God. Church may have become more interactive in a technological sense, but it has become less "child" friendly. Matthew 18 'He called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said: "I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. '

Children learn by discovering, by doing, by living. It is only later that they learn by books. Perhaps in our intellectual age we celebrate too much the intellect, without realising that that can never satisfy. We compete with atheism on the intellect, but atheism is losing in China and elsewhere not because of its intellectual problems, but because it does not fill the void. Of course faith in God makes sense, and that is important, but we need church for children.

Tony Campolo quotes from G.K. Chesterton: "I think God is the only child left in the universe, and all the rest of us have grown old and cynical because of sin."

We need to discover the child-like passion in an all too adult world. We need to become children again. Not in a way that opens us to wandering from the truth, or to be abused by more adult leaders, but in a way that discovers God, believes in His power, and connects both with God and with one another and changes the world.

I'm scared that our interactivity and the professionalism of church creates distance rather than connection. I grew up in a little church, it sometimes went wrong, but we were family and strong enough to cope and to care, and to wipe off the dirt get up off the floor and move on. We saw God at work, and lives being changed. When the young people got free reign to lead services, there was always a drama (in the literal sense of the word), but we preached, we led worship and we did very much like the adults did. We did not rebel, because we did not need to, it was our church. I don't know what age I started going to church meetings but when I was in my early teens I could go to church meetings argue, debate and influence how the church went and be part of it.

I've moved away and attend a different church and now in my thirties there are no members, no members' meetings and therefore less of a sense of being part of it, less of a sense of belonging.

But it does not have to be this way....