With the return to our church buildings, we realise this is not a recovery of pre-pandemic normal. Some people should not attend, because they are clinically vulnerable, others are awaiting their vaccine, some a nervous, others because they have lost the habit. So we are all developing a ‘hybrid’ form of gathering: simultaneously physical, in the building, and virtual, livestreamed to those watching from home. Perversely, for the latter, the provision may be less positive, since we eventually learned how to do very good online services, a mix of ‘live’ and recorded material.
However, some people never did learn to access our online products; through a mixture of technical inability, work & family pressures, or techno-phobia. So we have to identify how to serve these too, who can’t or won’t watch online. Small groups can be done through conference calls, and recorded prayers by phone. But some will not return to physical services yet; perhaps never will. This we have a kind of ‘tribrid’ church: physical, virtual and aboriginal.
In addition, online church has overcome limitations of geography. People have ‘attended’ services, from different cities, even different countries. In some cases, they have been able to participate in, and even lead, meetings; and eventually ask for Church Membership. How will our traditional Baptist emphasis on the Priesthood of Believers, Church Governance through the Church Meeting, and the Gathered Church, cope with such transformations?
Is there not a loss of ‘community’? The notion of ‘community’ relates both to our internal relationships as God’s People, and to our external mission to the world. Both have become identified with a defined geographical area, where we are located. Part of the problem here arises from our reversion to a geographical concept of church, modelled on the Parish System, which formally Baptist rejected, in favour of attending church, based on theological-doctrinal beliefs, often by-passing many other churches en route to their preferred congregation. Our churches are therefore not dependent on contiguity.
Nevertheless, the Incarnation does entail a certain emphasis on physically, on being embodied. How can we be the Body of Christ, when we are not together? Perhaps a certain recovery of the notion of the ‘spiritual’ can help us? For Christ’s Body, the Church or the Communion bread, is not his actual earthly body. Yet he is localised in both of these formats. The Catholics, have a model of God’s presence as localised, in the Communion elements, for example. Do we need an ecclesiastical transubstantiation, or at the least consubstantiation, whereby the Church is present in absence? A sacrament is a physical sign of a spiritual reality. Maybe, in our online church, we experience a spiritual sign of a physical reality?
Can we be spiritually present while being physically absent? Paul seems to have thought so (Col. 2.5); telling the Colossians, he was with them ‘in spirit’. One dictionary defines ‘with you in spirit’, as meaning that ‘I think about you a lot’. But if the language of spirit means anything, then this demythologised reductionist definition is inadequate. Spirit discourse can refer to either the Human or the Divine level. Paul seems to mean the former. But Ezekiel is transported, physically or in vision (Ezek. 8 & 11), to Jerusalem, to witness the idolatry of the priests in the temple. Sacramentally, Calvin conceives of the Holy Spirit as ensuring the Real Presence of Christ in the Communion, in response to the partakers’ faith. Is there a Spirit-enabled ‘real presence’ of believers, with each other, through the online medium? Is this a new medium for the gathered church?
In contemporary culture, among younger adults, especially gamers, there may be a close bond between them, than with physically nearer neighbours. These are their ‘friends’, although living perhaps in another city, or different country. Communities form online, for all kinds of disadvantaged and marginalised lifestyle groups, who would previously have been isolated. Might this not be a model for our churches post-pandemic? This period has been a catch-up for many churches, as we have been forced to experiment with technology; a measure which many mega-churches had already begun, but which has now brought us along through a process of ‘acceleration’.
There does need to be a check on this development. One of the problems arising from the gathered church is that of ignoring the population around the building where they meet. Besides the intrusion of parking cars in restricted areas, the needs of marginalised, often poor, communities, are frequently overlooked, as mega-churches draw in adherents from a wide area, but remain ignorant of the actual neighbourhood their church meets among. The same could surely become true of online churches, which completely ignore the (physical, and material) needs of others.
Nevertheless, the internet, social media in particular, can serve to publicise social needs, if church leaders choose to promote it. Furthermore, these means can also be used missionally, to reach out to new people, through utilising arts and creativity, or designers, artists, film-makers, and musicians. But, alongside this, again in ‘hybrid’ mode, we need to deliberately include those excluded through poverty from the new techno-utopia.
This dissipation of church, its fragmentation, in to micro-franchises, could be debilitating; but it may also be releasing, enabling experimentation in 'fresh techno-expressions' of church’. The very dispersal of believers may actually represent a twenty-first actualisation of the first century experience. Peter refers to the church as ‘scattered’ (1 Pe. 1.1). His vocabulary borrows the language of the Jewish diaspora (Jn. 7.35), and applies it to the predicament of Christians, scattered throughout the Roman Empire. Might our own situation, scattered, dispersed, among the circuits of international techno-capitalism, be an equivalent, in this neo-imperial age?
Church life typically has resided in the oscillation between gathered and scattered. That is, our services focus our scattered worship and witness during the week, and then, through the gathering fuel us to return to that scattered service of God and world: a rhythm of focus and fuel. Thus the church exists always, dialectically, in this dispersed mode. Recognition of this has led to attempts at ‘Whole Life Discipleship’ and ‘Workplace Ministry’, to resource believers for their witness in the main part of their life.
Could something similar be done, for discipleship, where the alternation is between virtual and physical? A friend of mine, for example, is considering whether to join a Christian community. But it is a ‘dispersed community’; they do not actually live together. How ‘real’ then can the community life really be? Before the advent of today’s technology, this would have been difficult; the time lag in communication would have hindered any common life. But now, perhaps it is possible.
It is this element of interpersonal connection which is crucial. When Paul and Peter are writing, they are communicating with the small Christian communities in the Mediterranean Basin. Today, the danger is the atomisation of believers, as isolated individuals, linked cerebrally in their terminals, but not experiencing a visceral connection with other people. This could be a terminal condition for church and community. We are essentially bodied beings, a condition we share with other creatures.
One solution to our current atomic relational fission, is the creation of Cell Groups, physical or virtual, where relationships may flourish. But the overall problem of disconnection from our created bodyness is stil not overcome. Marshal McLuhan and Charles Taylor identified our civilizational problem as being ‘discarnate’ or ‘excarnate’. As Catholics, they perhaps laid hold of the necessary ‘sacramentality, of (bodied) daily life’, as Karl Rahner called it; which Protestants often miss. We see this in the rush for hugs, when care homes re-opened for relatives’ visits. We ignore our need for human touch, at our psychological peril.
Although there are ways forward, therefore, with the online church, which we need to explore, there are also primordial human needs which we must not lose in our headlong rush into the computerised uploaded singularity.
(Thanks to Simon Woodman, Pastor of Bloomsbury Baptist Church, for comments which prompted this paper)
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