This week my pastor called: “Tell me about online church.” As thrilled as I was to speak about online church, the challenges of being the church in the wake of a worldwide pandemic are tremendous. In the United States, local authorities have prohibited large, non-essential gatherings in order to stop the spread of COVID-19. This means the church must be the church as it always have, but given the crisis, also more than ever, and for many, in a way that will be uncomfortable. Many churches have turned to some form of online church to help their congregation stay together. Online church is a great idea—but for those churches who haven’t ministered online before, there’s one thing that you need to know.
Right now, many churches are scrambling to figure out how to do online church. This is to be expected. Many churches will want to do it right; and by “right,” they mean the technology part. However, I want offer a suggestion about being the church online.
When I wrote SimChurch in 2008, I was hopeful that when the year 2020 hit that technology would be a little further along than it is, and the opportunities for online church would be more robust. As a technophile, it’s a flying cars thing—we are optimistic but tech advances in fits and starts, not smooth slopes. Our tendency as pastors is to think about production, the pragmatics, the nuts and bolts. That’s important, but it’s not the one thing churches need to know about online church.
Let’s start with what church is. In writing SimChurch, I didn’t spend as much time with online churches themselves until I had taken a deep dive into the Bible, the Fathers, and the history of the church up until the present era.[1] As a result, I came up with a working definition of church:
a localized assembly of the people of God dwelling in meaningful community with the task of building the kingdom
Later, I offered a definition of an online church:
a virtually localized assembly of the people of God dwelling in meaningful community with the task of building the kingdom
Online church is church, in the same way that house churches and megachurches are also churches. What is different is in the way they assemble. We could say the same thing about other forms of church; for example, a house church would be a localized-in-houses-only assembly of the people of God. The way we try to differentiate this in English is to say that if I am in a building with you that I am present, whereas if I am meeting you via Zoom then I am telepresent with you. Looking back twelve years, I am not sure this distinction is as helpful as I’d hoped. After all, two people can attend the same megachurch, but never really know each other, as one sits in section 313, row L, seat 19 and the other in section 124, row A, seat 4, yet we still think that they are both present. And talking on the phone is not present. But talking on the phone is actually far more present than merely being in the stadium with someone else. Nor does either word speak to the degree or depth of relationship. English is sorely lacking in this department—it is why we have a hard time describing that God is also present with us, and what that means.
This then is the one thing everyone needs to know about online church: It’s not the technology. It’s the relationships.
When I wrote SimChurch, I was deeply concerned that people would miss the meaning of what church is the same way people today miss the meaning of what church is. Today, we tend to think of a building as church. Likewise, people tend to think the online platform is church but neither of these are church. Church is a localized assembly of the people of God, dwelling, with a task.[2]
I was so concerned about this that I listed all of the ways people would confuse technology with online church (i.e., the building for the body). I wrote:
It is critical that we do not confuse an online church with, say, a website of a real-world church. An online church is not a website (building or place), a podcast (ritualized institution), or a blog (fellowship or activity). An online church is a place where people professing to have faith in Jesus Christ gather regularly to be in meaningful community appointed to build up the kingdom—or more specifically, an online church is the confessing people gathering in a synthetic world.[3]
When my pastor called to speak to me about online church, this was the advice I offered: Don’t worry about the technology right now (yes, it has to work, and be decent, but most people will understand if it’s not perfect), focus on building connections between people. Focus on making sure people can respond to worship, and respond to each other.
True worship must be dialogical, not monological. People need to speak to God, and God needs to speak back. People need to hear from God. Then people need to hear from each other, and speak love to each other. That’s what makes church church, not the building (platform).
I’m not sure what my pastor expected when he called, but we talked for an hour about what God could do online. Of that hour about five minutes was on technology; the rest was on how to build connections.
One more thing: Last week CPT fellow Preston Sprinkle did a Twitter survey of what people missed the most about church for those who could not go. The primary response was “fellowship.” Don’t expect people who are used to fellowshipping one way to be super excited about fellowshipping in a whole new way. Don’t take a person from a megachurch and put them in a house church and expect them to be super excited by it the first week out. This is why we as the church want to encourage all kinds of churches: house churches, intentionally-small churches, megachurches, online churches, coffeehouse churches, and churches that God himself foresaw, but we have yet to imagine.
Douglas Estes (PhD, University of Nottingham) is Associate Professor of New Testament and Practical Theology at South University. Prior to this, he served in pastoral ministry for sixteen years. He has written or edited nine books, two of which focus on technology and the church: SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World (Zondervan, 2008) and Braving the Future: Christian Faith in a World of Limitless Tech (Herald, 2018). He is a member of the St. John Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
Notes:
[1] All references are to Douglas Estes, SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008).
[2] Anecdotal evidence suggests this is less of an issue in the Majority World, where there are less freedoms, and technology is understood more as a blessing from God to accomplish the work of the church. This also seems the attitude of the early and medieval church, but that attitude shifted in the West in the last several hundred years as technology became met with increasing skepticism.
[3] In this quote, I have update my term virtual church to online church. When I wrote SimChurch, much of the vocabulary was in flux, and I intentionally alternated between the synonyms “virtual church,” “online church,” “internet campus,” and more as I did not know which way the language would go.
