Beyond Virtual vs. Analog

Recently, award winning author, Episcopal priest, and New York Times columnist Tish Harrison Warren wrote in her weekly column that it’s time for churches to drop virtual worship in order to best love God and neighbor. Warren writes, “Why not meet in person…but also continue to offer the option of a live-streamed service? Because offering church online implicitly makes embodiment elective. It presents in-person gatherings as something we can opt in to or out of with little consequence. It assumes that embodiment is more of a consumer preference, like whether or not you buy hardwood floors, than a necessity, like whether or not you have shelter.” She then shares a story towards the end of her column about a group of young adults at her church that, several years before the pandemic, surprised her by sharing that one of the biggest challenges they faced regarding church was sitting next to people with different backgrounds and demographic profiles than their own. For Warren, this is precisely why churches must no longer offer a virtual option: being together physically is both particularly counter-cultural for young adults, and something they especially need as digital natives. 

There are several important problems with Warren’s recommendation and theological reasoning. I would argue, however, that the most important problem in her argument is that she frames it as a choice between digital and analog ways of connecting, between being a church virtual or a church embodied. By setting the choice in this way, Warren limits the possibilities of what it means to be church at precisely the moment when the church desperately needs new and fresh visions of what it can be.  

In Missional Church, Guder et al write that the crisis facing the local church in our era is that it must reorient itself around its fundamental mission and calling to follow Jesus and witness to him, but that this inevitably leads to conflict with how they are structured now since “the organizational structures that guarantee maintenance and survival are often missiologically questionable.“ By painting the dilemma facing the church as one between virtual and in-person gathering, Warren offers Christians a choice between what we’ve been doing for the last 2 years and what we’ve been doing for the last 50., which does little to challenge these kinds of organizational structures. What we need instead is to look forwards, not backwards. 

Were pews and fellowship halls really where the substance of church actually happened? I hear people reminiscing about seeing a fellow member shedding a tear in service, and I cannot help but wonder: was that the extent of the connection between these two disciples? We don’t need to be back in pews, all staring in the same direction, occasionally glancing at those around us. We need to be around dinner tables together, we need to be playing with each other’s kids, and we need to be exploring and trying out new, smaller ways of worshiping together. 

And by the way, the great thing about imagining church in smaller forms is that we don’t have to have our discussions about whether to meet virtually or in person out in the public sphere. Instead we have this discussion as friends, as family, with the flexibility to try one thing this week, and then another next week without various factions jockeying for power and influence because we’re too small to have factions.