Virtual Church

So as I was reading in the books assigned for this class that I am doing this blog for and I got to thinking about this idea of virtual church. First we need to have some background for why I was going down this road. The other day I participated in a lunch in where the presenter was presenting on Vibrant Faith at Home, where the main premise is that it is a website that gives families activities to do together. They wanted to give families a way to build and grow their faith in the home setting because it is something that needs to be happening. I would completely endorse this idea that there needs to be faith activities and rituals in the home. The question I am always wondering is if these families are doing all of these things at home where does the drive to go to worship come in? Now I know that many say that it doesn’t replace worship. yet I wonder if they say this because it would upset the status quo to say we have no need of church buildings any more. So that is where the thoughts started.

So the following are some ideas that I came up with for how we would no longer need a building to have church and yet still worship.

One way is to create worship in the virtual realm. This could mean that we would create a reality that would be just like what it is on a Sunday morning. People would sign into it from their couches at home. We already have technologies like Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s X-BOX Connect, so they could still sit and stand and participate in church the way they always have on Sundays. So what would they be missing? They would not have the physical connection to the people in their church community (which I think is very important,) and they may have a hard time conversing with people who are sitting next to them, yet it is an idea that has me intrigued.

Another way: How many of you have been on Google Hangout, Skype or have worked in the corporate world where you are all on video screens? What if church became a setting that was interacted through video connect. There would be nine of you together who would sing songs, praise God, maybe go through a liturgy. You could pass the peace through the computer and after the worship part of the session you could discuss with one another what you just heard in the sermon.

With both scenarios, you may wonder then how do we do word and sacrament? This would be a kink that would have to be ironed out. I have thought that the sacraments could be consecrated and distributed ahead of time (in some way) and once a month a pastor could sign in with the group to go through these aspects with them.

This “virtual reality” is  just interesting question to think about what the church would be like if we no longer had buildings. How might we commune differently? How would the role of the pastor change? What would the economic and stewardship responsibilities look like? I don’t think it is truly possible and I think that worship is something very necessary in the life of our faith, but I do question what it might look like in the future and how that might be different than anything we can currently imagine.