Will current changes in church life be positive or
negative? Will our online measures enrich, or distract, us? Are they helpful contextualisations,
to a pandemic, which may help us recover important features of ecclesiology? Or,
do they betray the essence of church? Moreover, are they permanent, or only
temporary adaptations? Will everything go back to ‘business-as-usua’l: what Paul
Virilio called ‘’polar inertia”?
Because these moves coincide with longer term trends, it
may be they will remain. Pete Ward, for instance, wrote “Liquid Church”, building
on Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology; suggesting the church would, and should, become
more fluid and flexible, to be relevant in a society where people’s lives were
also less stable, and more changeable. Forced on us, by societal change, this development
is therefore necessary and desirable. Online church, with recorded services and
small groups, is therefore yet another expression of the process.
This is also noted by Kees de Groot, in “The Liquidation
of the Church”; where he observes similar tendencies in Roman Catholicism, with
formal structures replaced by informal networks and extra-ecclesial bodies. His
term, “liquidation”, plays on the image of extermination, because the official
church may well die. But, a better term might be ‘liquefaction’, conjuring an
ongoing, not-yet-completed, process. It also communicates an aesthetic
dimension, as in Robert Herrick’s poem:
“Whenas in silks my
Julia goes,
Then, then
(methinks) how sweetly flows
That liquefaction
of her clothes.”
Uploading Church
into cyberspace may represent a Christian equivalent of Ray Kurzweil’s notion
of the “singularity”: the idea that human consciousness will be digitalised, uploaded
to the mainframe. The church, and therefore the Divine, then becomes immanent,
within the internet’s circuits. Are we witnessing an ecclesial realisation of
Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the “Noosphere”? A hypthesis adopted by
Marshall McLuhan, in “The Mechanical Bride”: only now conceived as the Electronic
Bride - of Christ?
The problem is that Ward’s embrace of Bauman is naïve and
superficial. Pragmatically concerned with immediate application to mission, Ward’s
pro-consumerist approach misses Bauman’s dialectical nuance, in identifying positive
and negative aspects. For there is a cost, in intimacy and permanency, when relationships
become transient. This psychic cost, integral to advanced capitalism, is also
described by Richard Sennett, in “The Corrosion of Character”.
Although absolute numbers visiting online services may be
high, this includes later views; and obscures that many ‘attend’ for only a
short while, before scooting off to other sites: a pick’n’mix, sight-seeing style
of vicarious church-going. Furthermore, many are excluded, because either they
don’t possess, or don’t understand, the technology needed to participate. Will
we, therefore, experience individual and collective loss: individuals slipping away,
and missing the body-life of community?
Mike Frost has criticised this online response to Covid,
as another manifestation of “Attractional Church”: putting on a ‘show’. This
audience passivity may be mitigated through interactive comments sections, and
by participatory online small groups. But are we in danger of becoming, in
Charles Taylor’s terms, a “discarnate” church? What becomes of the ‘gathered
church’, when we no longer ‘gather’?
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