This teaching is common among ministers of Christian churches. I'm considering what I'm being told by others.
Sure. But I'm an evolutionary existentialist, and ultimately a Realist, who has studied Analytic Philosophy (really much more than that though), so I'm not taken in by the intrusions of ill-defined qualifiers that have so often been inducted into Christian Theology over the centuries, instituted as they are by one denomination or another and supposedly made to stand as "official" dogma or as sanctioned explanations about the meaning of the Bible.
"Relationship" is one of those troublesome words, and it involves a concept that we don't actually find specifically in the Bible. It tends to lose its denotative force in conceptual connection to God because the referent isn't clear and distinct in everyday life on a theological level, only on a human to human level, comporting with some aspects of various theories in Communication and/or Psychology. Having a "relationship with God" sounds good, though, ideologically; it's ideal to think that God would "relate" to us in the same way on a face to face basis, much as we do with our fellow family members or neighbors, each waking day. We all want that sort of comfort and affirmation.
Still, if God loves the people of the World, then my question becomes: what is the bare minimum that we need to see at work in the world to "feel" and "believe" that God loves us? The answer isn't, I think, a universally recognized one. It is subjective rather than objective, and this is what makes it so difficult for someone like me to say to someone else who is suffering, "God Loves You!," and then see him/her come away also feeling and believing the same thing.
This is an important point indeed! Biblically it appears to me God defines it as obeying Him, and doesn't really care to talk with us individually the vast majority of the time. Given what Paul says about God creating good works for us to do, it seems to me even that God intends not to speak to any of us, preferring we spend our time talking with each other rather than Him.
God is Hidden, and yes, I think you're right that on some practical level, He prefers that we human beings, especially if we are Christian, take the time to talk to each other (as well as to "serve" others) in order to advance His Kingdom.
Of course, the trick in this church centered set up is that Christians will have to learn how to love others in order for that "talking" to not only take place, but to have a beneficent outcome. Unfortunately, for some Christians, politics instead replaces the opportunities for discourses of "care."
But then I don't understand this doctrine of "the Holy Spirit dwelling within us", to be so silent and seemingly absent! There is a Gospel passage where Jesus says both He and the Father will abide within us, as I recall...
Yes. And I've only ever interpreted that to mean that we'd each feel some amorphous motivation, however infrequently, to trudge ahead and follow Him---to follow Jesus, more specifically--- anyway despite the hurdles and the pain we all have to endure in this life ...