Will the church regret this season of live-streaming?

So the coronavirus came like a thief in the night and in a matter of hours and days our entire church life has been overturned, and many of us have, in a reactive and necessary way, ended up cantering towards the brave new world of live-streaming our church services and exploring numerous means of doing so. But of course, not all have been able to do this. We are now all experts (of course not) - or getting there, and like reaching a new challenging level in a computer game or entering a foreign country where the language is quite different, we are coming to terms with this brave new world. I'm in the groove now with the preliminary levels of expertise of the technology: I can do the basics well and each week I find myself modifying or adapting some of the tek, and getting slicker with the presentation. I've taught myself to predominantly get past the lack of a physical presence of a congregation with which I can make eye contact, and yet to imagine our viewers in the homes that I have visited pastorally. And I've taught myself to look at the camera and make presentation snappy. And yes, I've even caught myself thinking "Oh, I don't look like that on camera do I?" And "I really must tidy myself up and brush my hair." And then I've chuckled when others have gone on camera and done the same thing. Then I've found myself unhealthily playing a pointless game that I long gave up years ago, and bound myself over to never, ever play again - the "bums on seats" numbers game, except that this time it's with "the number of channel subscribers game." And it felt good and momentarily injected my ego that we've xxx more subscribers this week. Wow! And then I slapped myself around the face, told myself how stupid I'd been for falling for the old game again, and recommitted myself that this streaming experience was primarily for our own church family, anything else was well "nice, but wasn't why we were primarily doing it." And so we keep going with this brave new world of doing church and we are adapting and perhaps this is a plateau for the moment. The loss of not being together physically Sunday by Sunday is an ache that we all feel, but we have no choice and we must make the best of what we are doing so far. And we are, and we will. Except that I have a sinking feeling that this is not completely all good and how will we recover from it? In the brave new world of cyber church, parts can be cut out, muted, changed and so that we only get to hear what we want to hear. And in cyber church, the complete lack of tangible fellowship holds no one to account.

And the entire world has gone Zoom, Facebook-live or Youtube mad. Now everyone and their mother is doing it! Suddenly I am receiving invitations to zoom-meet with my denominational leaders, association leaders, and church world leaders in the intimacy of my home where before I've not heard a dicky-bird from them. Now, all of a sudden my time can be taken up with all-day Zoom meetings, and my steady emotionally-healthy-spirituality routine has been smashed to bits. I'm just not going to survive the pace if this goes on. More to the point, I'm not going to find the silence, let alone the downtime to just relax.

I recognise that not all churches have either been able to or in fact, wanted to stream and that some church members and congregation attendees are essentially wanting to and needing to engage with an act of worship that is in their style and worship diet. So I guess the natural thing would be to find a nearby suitable church and connect in with their streaming. But now my social media feed is full of a steady list of virtually every possible church from here, there and everywhere advertising their stream. So the opportunity now exists to pick and choose what your diet is going to be each Sunday. Why stick with one? Even my local association is advertising a different church each Sunday to do this with. And okay, I might be a tad moaning here, or overdoing my argument, but the glorious spirit of spiritual consumerism is now fully present in our homes. You can surf the proverbial channels and literally pick and choose and no one will ever know. In fact, speaking as a Pastor of a local Baptist Church, I have no ability to track whether my church members are faithfully tuning in to our channel, or whether this glorious "extended church holiday" is actually a great opportunity to look around and view what others are doing. You see Youtube tells me how many are present, but not who. Facebook is I think different. Zoom shows people's faces. And will this enforced diet divide into a number of different responses? Firstly, will it mean that some will never actually come back to a physical church in the future because of the easier experience of staying at home in your pyjamas and tuning into your preferred cyber church of choice for that day? This I think has been fairly minor in the UK until now, though the USA has lived with the TV church for several decades. The assessment is mixed - physical church attendance has still continued in the US, but the consumer spirit has been strong. Secondly, will it mean that some are using this time as an opportunity to look around other churches, and actually they will choose a new, different church to attend physically in the future? That could be a gain or a loss of course! And thirdly, will there be some who actually will never ever return to church at all, because they haven't missed it. That would be a very worrying situation and one that is out of the control of anyone.

On the upside, service streaming is doing something that I recognise is a positive experience and takes me all the way back to our short few days of training in radio at theological college 30 years ago, where we had to write a "thought for the day" and you discover that most have written far too much waffle and the red pen needs to be applied. Here's what I think its doing: our first service stream was way too long, but it reflected what we normally did on a Sunday morning. But in the TV world, no one is going to stick around that long. So its made me look at what we've been doing in terms of content and cutting it right back to the really important bits, and removing the unnecessary. And actually, most churches have been woefully asleep in this respect. They have thought that what they have been churning out on a Sunday is what people want to see and experience and they have been utterly wrong. This is an unhelpful wake-up call to Preachers, Worship Leaders and all involved to wake up and get their act together. And I'm not talking here about style necessarily - after all some very contemporary churches have for a while been pitching their services almost as rock concerts where the focus is on the hero band, rather than a corporate worship occasion or experience. What we are understanding about the days we have been living in is that people are thirsty for real spirituality. That's why some of the Cathedrals of the UK have been experiencing extensive congregational growth.

We are all looking forward to getting back to normal, in our lives and in our churches. But will that actually be a good thing? We can't go back to how it was in any aspect of our lives. And in terms of church, there are things that we should leave behind. But nor should we merely buy completely into the future of this brave new world. Many have and are grieving what was. But I'm already grieving what we might become. The danger signs are already ahead on the road and much wisdom will be needed to discern carefully what we should take up, as well as letting go of the past.