All things online don’t work well for churches. Church is about people. Having a church online goes against what you want to do as a church.
The whole point about reaching out to people is they come to learn and share about the gospel of Jesus Christ. This is about teaching, caring, praying, sharing, chatting, helping, supporting, and often over a cup of tea, coffee or some other drinks, and often in the midst of family members, the younger ones, the older ones, next to us or close by. Why do this online at all?
At the time of writing this, there are a range of factors why online church is being used. I refrain from saying the words “reason” why online church is “acceptable“. Acceptable has many connotations to do with liturgical, theological, historical, even social, political and cultural persuasion. Acceptable is also becoming a way of measuring if doing church online is a “fit” for the time being. Quite a number of things I want to unpick here. But I want to turn to some practical stuff.
At the basic level for the need of a church, what kind of technological thing we can do to enable this? Let’s contextualise this a bit (in other words, relating to us in the here and now). Most of us will have attempted the use of things like Whatsapp, Facebook, Zoom, Google Meet, Youtube etc. to emulate our church service.
It is true to say that technology has its own ‘brain’ and often do things completely out of ordinary. Fundamentally it cannot read our mind. The same tool that you use to hang out with your mates, when you use it to do an online service, it does not know you have changed its purpose of use.
Creating church without the building, elements, or facilities.
By and large, these tools will show faces of individual faces of those currently connected to a joint session. And yes these faces will be like thumbnails across the screen, maybe the whole screen, whether on mobile phone or big computer / TV screen.
Using an image of your church would be useful to create a focus. It (re)creates a sense of identity and purpose.
This heightened use of technology is nothing new. Chairs replaced chairs. Carpets laid over floors. Gas boiler and kitchen, in fact a whole new breed of such thing created a new set of vocabulary for their design, installation and use in churches.
Specific to liturgical, or worship, some of the churches might be debating replacing song books, installing projector along with a computer, lighting system, and all the concerns and needs of the congregation that these changes will affect them.
When we struggled to use a mic over the PA, now, that is such a minute problem. Fast forward, when we get back to meeting in person, there is more focus on getting it work, less on the problems and the hitherto tradition that is dear to us.
Why the deviation on technology or the use of the mic.
This needs a re-think about church.
But not quite, it’s probably much simpler than a “re-think”. Bottom line is we already have a community that desire to meet regularly (that’s why we are a church), and the baseline then is the required level of technology to enable this, online. A tool that consistently show all our individual faces through the worship session might be a good thing, but others might find that showing fewer, or none of those faces is less important than some other things, such as important Bible verses, photos that define who the church is/represent, or indeed the physical look and feel of the building.
Then, comes the elements, the sacraments, the offering, baptism, wedding, bread and wine.
The prominence, or primacy of visual focus, of these things are liturgical and cultural. A 2-year old needs to be trained to focus on the people up front who are getting wedded. That’s why the couple are standing there, in that way, undergoing a form of speech that is somewhat unusual. We learned about this and other kind of church practices when we join a church.
We know we will have communion a particular Sunday, or even every time we meet. Or if for some reasons we did not recall we are going to have the bread and the wine at that service, we will know the moment we step in to that part of the building where the service will be conducted. The atmosphere is a little different, we can feel it because we felt it before – it’s the time we fervently recall what Jesus did for us.
Without all that in an online church, we need to re-create it online. What has become "natural" for us in doing church in our buildings and other associated places, how do we do the same online?
In short, many churches stopped their church services. Nobody knows what to do with these technologies. There is far more need to care for church folks than spending time to run a service online.
But, starting in small steps, even with showing faces only, it is still possible to meet.
For those who are on relatively modern types of mobile phone, it is possible that Whatsapp or similar social media applications are already installed anyway. You might have even used these tools to chat with your family. Running a church service using these tools will give you very limited functions. But, where two or three gather in the name of God, he did not say in the exclusion of technology. It will be a good start. You can obviously have a sharing, sermon, or homily. Singing together will be a challenge because it will create a havoc of sounds that would not be pleasing to your ears; a better idea is for one person to sing, or taking turn. Praying, reading a psalms, telling a story, etc. No difference, it’s a kind of monologue with audience. When you get to that point, your attention is on people and what they share, the actual building is ‘immaterial’. So, church on such tools like Whatsapp is possible.
On to next.
