When God Meets His People
When God Meets His People
by Jonathan A. Powers
The CBS television interviewer, Dan Rather, once asked Mother Teresa of Calcutta: “When you pray, what do you say to God?” Teresa replied, “I don’t say anything, I listen.” Rather pressed further: “Well okay, when God speaks to you, then, what does he say?” Teresa answered, “He doesn’t say anything. He listens. And if you don’t understand that, I can’t explain it to you.”
Mother Teresa’s response here is quite cryptic, but if we sit with it for a moment, we can see that it says something profound about prayer. Prayer is, at its core, an act of attention. It is not just about speaking but about listening, about being fully present before God. It is a turning toward God and an awareness that God, in love, attends to us.
Worship shares this character as prayer. When we gather to offer God our praise, prayers, and devotion, we turn our attention toward God. But worship does not begin with our decision to turn toward him. Rather, it begins with the God who has already turned toward us.
That truth matters in a world where attention is continually divided. Screens, responsibilities, anxieties, and the ordinary demands of life leave many of us restless even when we enter a place of worship. However, to worship is to turn our hearts and minds toward God once again. As we sing, pray, listen to Scripture, and come to the Lord’s Table, we make ourselves attentive to the One who sees us more fully than we see ourselves.
This attention is more than an exercise in concentration, however. In worship, we remember that we do not have to strive to earn God’s notice. We come before a God who knows and loves us, who hears both our spoken prayers and the needs we cannot yet put into words. Such an encounter can reshape our sense of who we are. Our achievements and failures do not have the final word about us. We belong to the God who receives us in grace.
The Manifest Presence of God
Scripture assures us that God is always present. “Where can I go from your spirit?” the psalmist asks. “Or where can I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139:7). Yet Scripture also describes particular occasions when God makes his presence known to his people. His glory fills the tabernacle in Exodus 40; Isaiah encounters him in the temple; and at Pentecost, the gathered disciples experience the coming of the Holy Spirit.
These accounts are good and important, especially as they help us distinguish between affirming that God is present everywhere on the one hand and becoming aware of his presence in a particular moment on the other. When Christians speak of God’s manifest presence, they are speaking of this gracious disclosure of his nearness. Worship offers a setting in which we turn toward God with the expectation that he may make himself known to us.
The 2023 Asbury Outpouring in 2023 brought this distinction and a longing to encounter such manifest presence into view. What began in a chapel service continued for sixteen days as people gathered in Hughes Auditorium to pray and worship. Many traveled long distances and waited for hours to join them. They came because they longed for an encounter with the living God.
Of course, the Outpouring was a particular event, and no congregation can arrange for the same experience to happen again. God’s manifest presence cannot be manufactured through music, atmosphere, or the removal of every distraction. Nor is God confined to an auditorium or an extraordinary gathering. Yet the desire that drew people to Hughes was familiar to the church across its history: the desire to meet with God. The Outpouring invited many of us to ask whether we approach ordinary worship with that same expectation.
Worship as Homecoming
The desire to encounter God is bound up with another deep human longing, i.e., the longing to be known and loved. Many people come to worship carrying loneliness, disappointment, or a diminished sense of belonging. Some have been hurt by the very communities in which they hoped to find welcome. In this context, the promise of God’s presence is more than an abstract assurance but speaks to the longing for a place where we can come as we are and be received in love.
Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son gives us a vivid image of that kind of welcome. The son returns home uncertain of how he will be received, but his father sees him while he is still far away and runs to meet him. The son’s homecoming begins with the father’s gracious and loving character and his desire to be present with his son.
Worship can be understood in a similar way. We come before God with all that we carry and discover that he has already come toward us in grace and mercy. We hear again the story of his faithfulness. We confess our sins and receive the promise of forgiveness. We join our voices with others and remember that we have been gathered into a people. At the Lord’s Table, we receive the grace of Christ, who gives himself for us.
To call worship a homecoming, then, is to say it is meant to be more than a service that offers comfort or a sense of belonging. Instead, it is an encounter with the God who welcomes us into communion with himself and with one another. In his presence, we are reminded who we are and whose we are.
Making Room to Meet with God
Those who plan and lead worship have a responsibility to help their congregations attend to worship as a meeting between God and his people. We gather with the expectation that God may make his presence known to us, drawing us into deeper communion with him and with one another. This expectation changes the questions we ask when planning a service: Do our postures, practices, and patterns help the congregation recognize and respond to God’s presence? Do our songs and prayers give people language for praise, confession, lament, and thanksgiving? Does the reading and preaching of Scripture invite them to hear and answer God’s Word? Are we making room for silence as well as speech, for receiving as well as offering? These questions concern more than the shape of a single service; they concern the kind of worshippers we are helping people become.
Over time, such worship forms people who come prepared to offer themselves to God and receive his grace. We can cultivate expectancy by reminding people that God is present and active among them. We can shape services so that prayers, songs, readings, preaching, and silence draw attention to Christ. And we can model attentiveness ourselves, listening for the Spirit rather than treating each element of worship as something to complete before moving to the next.
This work also calls for trust in the practices Christians have received through the centuries and how God meets us in and through them. The church has gathered around Scripture, prayer, praise, confession, and the Eucharist through seasons of renewal and seasons that felt quite ordinary. In these familiar acts, we learn to listen for God’s Word, bring our whole lives before him, and receive the grace Christ offers his people. Their value does not depend on whether each gathering feels extraordinary. God has met his people through these practices across generations, often in ways that become clear only as their lives are shaped by them over time. We cannot use them to summon or control God’s presence, but can only return to them with faith, trusting that the God who has promised to be with his people will meet us there.
Mother Teresa’s answer to Dan Rather returns us to the heart of the matter. In prayer, she listened and knew herself to be heard. In worship, the church does the same, though never in silence alone. We sing, speak, listen, confess, and come to the Eucharist because we believe the living God meets his people and wants to be with them. Whether his nearness comes with extraordinary intensity or through the steady grace of familiar words and actions, worship invites us to turn regularly and continually toward the One who has turned toward us in Christ.
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