You Really Should (Mostly) Get Rid of Online Church

What's Live about Livestreaming Services?

We’ll continue thinking about institutions next week, but taking a one-week hiatus—The Management.

For those of you who aren’t online, and/or aren’t plugged into the maelstrom of Very Online Opinions, there was a major-minor kerfuffle around an opinion piece by Tish Harrison Warren, which you can see unpaywalled here, on whether or not it’s time for churches to pull the plug on their virtual services. There were no shortage of backlash, both online in off-the-cuff responses and in full length treatments. I won’t link to those, because by and large, they exhibit poor reading of the actual piece, accusations of ableism or flagrant “this is just bad theology” accusations.

It’s not as if she was the first person making this suggestion: Ephraim Radner asked it in March 2020, and Brad East, my colleague and friend, asked it here. But whereas the former pieces could ask the question of virtual worship at the front end of a novel virus, the new piece had the liability of being two years later, with nearly a million dead of COVID in its wake. And so, in 2022, the question now brings with it a whole new sense of the ways in which digital streaming of church not only becomes convenient, but protective. For months, many of our churches were fully virtual, and now that an opportunity has emerged to walk back this immersion, it’s a hard habit to unwind.

The day after Warren posted her article, I was the guest of Vista Community Church in Temple, Texas, where I was helping them think through some of the dynamics of tech and the Christian life. And people had lots of good questions. It’s not as if prior to 2020, churches were this pristine world, free of digital tech, and the last two years have only deepened what I broadly think is a pathological dependence on not only the mechanics but the schooling of digital technology. But as COVID wears on, and begins to slowly recede, the question of what to do with this emergency arrangement becomes more acute.

The research that digital life is rotting our brains, corroding our ability to think, to relate to difference, and to live virtuous lives is legion: I won’t get into any of that here. I take it for granted that two years of whatever benefits we’ve incurred through incorporating digital life more fully into our lives to mitigate COVID don’t make us any less neurologically altered by the way these techs are designed. One of the main issues which surfaced this week had to do with disability, and whether the past arrangement of visitation was now sufficient. For a very long time, this was the option for including people unable to attend in person: a minister would bring Communion, sit in a living room, offer in-person counsel—an extension of the in-person gathering, but by no means a duplication of what happens on Sunday. But with streaming, the homebound could now view the main event. More on this in a moment.

With respect to the backlash itself, there were a number of dynamics which surfaced: Warren belongs to a more conservative Anglican denomination; her standing as a NY Times columnist has been the subject of no small online scrutiny because of her being a more conservative Christian. But the one dynamic which was mind-boggling in the bevy of criticisms was the way in which digital media, an utter novelty for many congregations two years ago, now seems to be a canonized necessity. In the rush to criticize her, many of her critics seem to forget that only two years ago, many of them were Zoom-less as well, with their own homebound limited to house calls or televangelists.

With this canonical status of digital services, a bizarre development in our way of speaking about digital church has emerged: statements of equivalence between online and physical presence abound. But when we describe our virtual engagement almost any other time, it strikes me as weird that somehow church is exempt from the normal pattern of language we employ. When I watch a baseball game on TV, I don’t describe it as “attending”; when I Zoomed into a wedding, I didn’t say that I was “there”. But in the discourse surrounding Zoom church, somehow these things become not just analogous, but equal. There’s an impulse of justice here, to be sure, that it seems unfair to name the digital experience of someone who can’t physically attend different than that of those present seated elbow to elbow. But it’s also important to note that the equivalence of our discourse around digital versus physically present church is weird to the ways in which we talk about anything else.

I began thinking about this as an extension of my book project coming out in April, in which I take it for granted, with Warren, that there is an intrinsic logic of physical bodily presence to worship. In the book, I didn’t name that logic as “sacramental” (though it is), but here’s the gist: if Christians celebrate the crucified, resurrected, and ascended Christ, and believe that bodily person to be present in their worship and among them by the work of the Spirit, then the community follows from this logic, meaning that the very unpopular opinion follows: the full body of Jesus, worshipped as present by Christians, corresponds to a gathered body of believers.

That we can think of scattered people, even if joined through a technological medium, depends on the logic of that arrangement not being primary: we can only scatter because we have first been gathered, with the gathering as the normative arrangement, not the scattering. The church is not an aggregation of individuals who gather together, but a body created because Christ is present among them, who are then sent out into their diverse settings. The Spirit, in other words, doesn’t work like some invisible glue, making our invisible connection to one another the norm, but the Spirit amplifies the physicality of God’s work: you’ll get tired of the New Testament describing the ways in which the Spirit’s work is to knit together people who get sick of seeing each other on a regular basis. It doesn’t omit the translocal connection that people have with one another, but these connections always assume the centrality and primacy of gathering, not scattering.

But none of this theologizing seems to touch the most current objection: those physically unable to attend, but who desire communion with others. Let’s set aside the problem that has cropped up everywhere now—the Internet churchgoer. In 95% of instances, say no: churches are not content producers, but living organisms, bodies of diversely and wonderfully made bodies, and staying with virtual streams because people might pop in occasionally is a great way to undermine that. For the ones who can’t be bothered to come to church, it’s okay to make it costly: Jesus wasn’t somehow above telling people who wanted to plow the fields first that wasn’t a legit excuse.

But, setting aside the grazers, let’s focus on the ones who Livestream could benefit. The ones physically unable to go to church prior to the pandemic, by and large, either did without it or participated in one of the early adopters of virtual church. So, for those who were able to watch worship during those two years, should the gift of faces be taken from them? Should churches absolutely ditch the Zoom option? I’m inclined to say a very modified version of “No”, with one caveat: make it password protected, given intentionally to those who need it. If I know of someone who needs it, it allows a church to be able to engage with them personally, not as a passer-by on a channel, not as a consumer of bits of religious experience, but as a known person who the church can then continue to engage not as a viewer on Sunday, but as a person to be included.

It does none of us favors to say that a digital viewing and a physical presence are the same: it puts too much expectation on the digital, and gives the physically gathered every reason to forgo gathering. But the option of retaining an open-ended digital option, as an equivalent and open-ended option, has the unintended consequence of creating a segregated space for the immuno-compromised: stay here, for the rest of us are unable to bear your presence safely otherwise. But if a limited, intentional use of digital inclusion can be the opening to establishing face-to-face relationships, of drawing people, who would otherwise be lost in the ones and zeroes, into the gathered and diffuse body, carry on and Godspeed.