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.