Froth-less Christianity

Over the years my coffee drinking habits have changed. I used to favour the cappuccino, with about an inch of froth and foam before you got to the real coffee. Now I prefer my coffee black and strong. In a completely trivial and inappropriate way, I’m now going to use this as a picture for how the way I relate to God has changed as well. What I’m about to share is my own personal experience, it is not meant to cast negative reflections on anybody else’s. I’m also largely referring to things from my own church tradition and I suspect this may be more common in the more charismatic type of church, but I also suspect that other traditions probably have their own forms of froth.

What it all comes down to is a desire for greater reality in my walk with God, in my experience of God. The real coffee, if you will, of spirituality. And I’m increasingly getting put off by the froth – the unreality of certain aspects of church. Sometimes it seems that people are trying to hype things up and to whip things up in worship. Whereas once I might have really got into that and it would have helped me to meet God, nowadays I’m finding it more of a distraction. Its froth that used to taste good to me, but is now just hollow and artificial. I’m finding the volume and repetition of the person at the front telling me to push into God doesn’t actually help me to push into God. Instead its more of a distraction and I find myself standing there thinking “Will you just shut up, get out of the way, and let me focus on God!”

OK, there are some truths I need to balance this with. Firstly – it doesn’t really matter what guys up the front are doing, there’s no excuse for not worshipping because God is always worthy to receive our worship and he’s always there. Also, I’m not saying that I’m any better than others – for them it might be a real and helpful way of encountering God – I’m not prepared to pass judgment on that. Like the coffee in the cappuccino, I’m sure God is in it somewhere.

I guess the interesting question here is can you hype God up? After all he is infinitely more in all possible ways than the hype would suggest. But sometimes I feel that by an “artificial” exaggeration of what we see happening, we maybe miss the bigger picture of who He is and what He’s really doing.

Here’s what I know for certain – that God is there, that He is immensely more good and loving and powerful and involved and compassionate (and I could keep going here) than I possibly could imagine.

I also know that he’s with me all the time, although most of the time I’m just not aware of that and I want to know him with me much more. Not just in lovely, cosy times of worship – actually the times I’ve felt closest to God haven’t always been that cosy, like Aslan – he’s good, but he’s not necessarily safe and being close to him can be literally awe-inspring. But even just mean the wow-moments, I mean a greater awareness of him in the day-to-day, a greater sense of his hand in my life and in the world around, a greater ability to see the divine at work in creation in the little thing he does every moment. Most of all I need a greater awareness of him to lift me out of my self-centred existence and the breakdown the hardness that has grown in my heart. To get there I need a reality in my walk with him, which moves past the froth and to the heart of the matter.