SHOULD I ATTEND CHURCH ONLINE INDEFINITELY? by Dan Warne for Core Christianity
For months on end, Sunday after Sunday, I looked down at a fire lane curb, painted red, and then looked up at a sea of pop-up tents and lawn chairs just before reading the call to worship. The church where I serve as a pastor met in a parking lot for eleven months during the COVID-19 pandemic. But this month, we returned to an indoor worship service. It was a joy to lead the call to worship that first Sunday morning back inside from Psalm 126, a psalm for God’s people returning to their land after famine, and we rejoiced with the words in verse 3:
“The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.”
Now, whatever your opinion on masks, lockdowns, and vaccines and whatever your journey as a church or individual has been, that’s not what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about the idea of #onlinechurch. For us, #onlinechurch began when, overnight, we as a church became virtual nomads—and I mean that quite literally. Before we had access to the parking lot of what would eventually be our indoor worship space, we lost our meeting space in the public school when the district shut down all the schools and barred groups from meeting in them.
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We found virtual church—call it #churchonline—to be our best recourse at the time. We opted for a pre-recorded and abbreviated version of our worship service with all our usual elements of worship except for the Lord’s Supper, which we ordinarily celebrate weekly. We even baptized someone in our church office over a camera with a handful of joyful witnesses present to receive a new member into our church family!
I share our story with you to underscore that I think we’ve just been through a season with limited options and no easy answers.
So, what’s the big deal then? Well, I manage our church’s social media accounts, and #churchonline was a hashtag I started using that always struck me as rather hollow, sort of a Band-Aid on a wound that needed healing. The problem is, many people nationwide have settled into online church as a permanent solution instead of a best-fix for the time. Many are calling it quits on church altogether.[1] Maybe you’ve asked yourself if it’s really worth the fuss returning to an in-person worship service.
