It can imply that God is not present in the places we go to. If God is everywhere, including within us, then I think that the role of our spirituality is to support the process of discovering that presence.

Stephen, I think that we need to make a theological distinction between the presence of God in the world (as a matter of natural theology, if you like) and the presence of the Spirit of Jesus in the covenant community. So perhaps we would then say that it is part of the work of the Spirit of Jesus to help people discover the ‘natural’ presence of God in the world. The ‘giving and receiving’ dynamic is at work both inside and outside the covenant community and I wouldn’t want to downplay it. But to have the Spirit of Jesus surely makes us answerable as disciples: we are called, driven by the Spirit, to do the work of Jesus in the world.

The big question that we are wrestling with in a postmodern, post-Christian context is: what is that work? what have we been called to do? The answer, I suspect, has a lot to do with (in your words) the process of discovering the presence of God in the world. But I think we need to be aware of the fact that as followers of Jesus we already have the Spirit of God and that this entails a certain responsibility.