A local church has been advertising on their sign in front of the building that they now will Facebook Live their worship services on Sunday morning. A friend of mine, a youth minister in another town, has also been doing much the same thing with his Sunday school classes.
I'm not quite sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, for a younger set who might well not be able to come to a class due to work or distance reasons, this might well be effective in helping to teach them faith facts. And so on this, I applaud the outreach. Heck, I podcast my Sunday morning sermons and I know a handful of people listen to this each week for various reasons (they help in the church nursery or they are people I have known in the past who like my preaching are two reasons I have heard).
Yet when it comes to local worship, advertising locally in a small town, I wonder about this whole idea of videostreaming. Essentially it says, yes you are here in town, perhaps even close enough to walk, but you just don't want to get out of your pajamas in order to have a spiritual experience. But, it is objected, what about the old people who can't get out? Again, I get it (though my experience is that a. most older people have no idea how to get videostreaming and b. if anybody will make it services even when it's uncomfortable, it's the old people), though I wonder if this is simply an example of trying to fill a niche that doesn't need filling.
But my biggest concern is this: I wonder if internet worship makes us spiritually incomplete. For the power of church is not just in going and absorbing some good preaching or hearing the songs of faith. There's something about the necessity of community, of sitting next to somebody who may be very different than you but who likewise proclaims that Jesus is Lord. There's something about leaving the comfort of home to go a place that may at times be intimidating or downright scary and encountering the presence of God in a special place. There's something about realizing that we are more than individuals who come to God, but that we are a people united in community. All this is very difficult to do in front of a computer screen.
Of course, maybe this is the faith of a new day. So often we hear how people like God, but they don't really like Christians or the church. And so if people live on their phones and their screens are are increasingly starved for real human contact, isn't this the kind of God that they want to like? Should we be surprised that 'worship' without the need for human interaction is becoming so common?
