‘Online church’ vs. ‘church online’
When you do something weird like lead an online faith community, you end up connecting with other people doing similar weird things. So in the past few years, I have crossed paths with digital pastors, Christian content creators, progressive podcasters, bespoke bloggers, and the like. It’s almost always a delight to swap stories and ideas with other weirdos.
But in the age of pandemic, it’s sometimes hard to figure out who is actually doing work similar to the reimagining / post-evangelical / beyond post-evangelical experiment that is Harbor. We are a fully online faith community (with a tiny bit of in-person magic sprinkled in with our new annual retreats). Our weekly gatherings are online. Our monthly trivia nights are online. Our book club is online. Our everyday community-wide communication is… you guessed it. Online.
Consider, by way of contrast, a typical local church congregation. It normally meets in a building for weekly worship, for Bible study, for spaghetti dinners, for committee meetings, etc. etc. Pretty much everything the church does includes a physical gathering. But when the pandemic struck, the church was forced to adapt and did so, in part, by streaming its worship services on YouTube or Facebook.
So once a week, a 1-hour video popped up on a social media site. A cell phone or an old janky video camera in the aisle of the sanctuary recorded an organist and a pastor (socially distanced from each other and possibly wearing masks) performing a worship service to an empty room.
Or consider the conservative-evangelical-megachurch-in-the-suburbs version of this. A super expensive camera system, operated by a paid camera team, swivels around to catch all the action as a polished worship band blasts Hillsong hits through lasers and fog, while a massive room of congregants sings along with raised hands. After the music, a pastor in skinny jeans and a skinny tie hops up to regale you with a sermon about the 3 Rs of spiritual disciplines.
Is this the same as a completely online church, who has always existed on the internet and who has imagined or reimagined all its shared spirituality and community-building in a digital context? Who creates highly participatory online spaces rooted in dialogue and mutual listening?
Of course it’s not. But occasionally I will be connected to either a mainline Protestant pastor who bemoans the challenges of streaming their worship services online, or to an evangelical pastor who has been tasked with overseeing the online ministry of their megachurch (which revolves completely around the streaming of their in-person worship service).
Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad I get connected to these people, and my conversations with them are very fruitful. But we are clearly doing different things.
And so I propose we come up with some language to differentiate between these two different categories. It doesn’t have to be this language, but here is my initial idea:
Online church, or an online faith community, refers to something like Harbor: a digital, non-localized community of people who do the vast majority (if not all) of their activities on the internet.
Church online, or better yet online/streamed worship services, refers to the YouTube or Facebook (or whatever) weekly video from an in-person church.
Again, maybe we need less-similar options than the ones above. The point is to find different ways to talk about these two things. If nothing else, this can help the haters write clearer attack pieces. The critiques of online churches are actually sometimes quite different from the ones leveled at church-service-streaming. We wouldn’t want any New York Times thought pieces to be misunderstood.
