The virtual church and how to avoid it | Peter C Glover (ISBN: 1594673985)

The cyberchurch, and the possibilities it offers for global scale fellowship, is already enthusing many evangelical leaders.

The presence of church and parachurch ministries on the internet, in just a few years into the new millennium, is already enormous. It is right also that Christianity should make its presence felt.

Information about local churches, Christian books, sermons available in MP3, you name it, is already duly available in the comfort of our homes, via the Net. I for one am only too pleased that the church is taking seriously both the evangelistic and teaching-aid possibilities that the Web provides. But the vast array of church and Christian information already available is not our concern here. What I propose focusing on is the current growth and still greater potential for growth of real-time, on-line worship experiences afforded by cyberspace.

Online churches are already up and running and offering membership. Some are more geared to providing teaching aids indirectly via their sites. But, increasingly, the prospect of 'participating' in on-line worship, and becoming a member of an on-line church in different towns, even different countries, from where we live is a very real one. The question is: is it possible to 'participate' in corporate worship, and thereby take up membership, in churches which we may never physically attend out of choice or by geographical impossibility, and not by health restrictions alone?

Worship by cyber-proxy?

In visiting the various cyberchurch sites, one thing becomes clear: cyberchurches still currently face technological restrictions in developing on-line memberships, but these will increasingly be overcome. With the advent and use of relatively inexpensive video cams, the prospect for real-time interactive participation in the act of worship itself is increasingly realistic. Information about Christianity and the church, and observing or listening to worship services on the TV, radio or the Internet, no doubt helps some who are housebound. But this is a very different proposition from the active promotion of the worship of God and of church membership by cyber-proxy, especially for those well able to travel to their local church. Joining a cyberchurch on the other side of the world, as a matter of preference, presents the Christian with all sorts of problems biblically - problems that cannot be ignored if we believe in the nature of what it means to be church and a member of a church. Difficulties immediately arise over the nature of church and church worship itself; over the administration of the sacraments, and the whole nature of what it means to experience true fellowship.

Megachurch takeover?

While the present generation of cyberchurches are a somewhat clumsy first attempt at organising on-line worship, in future the financial clout of the megachurches - some of whom have already bought into the TV and satellite media - will enable them to take full advantage of global opportunities. And when they do, it is therefore likely to be the modern superspirituality, and not the ancient, which will be its hallmark. In the same way that television has proven a poor medium for the preaching of the true gospel, while prosperity preaching and other counterfeit spiritualities have found a ready home there, so it will be the virtual spirituality of the coming on-line Virtual Church, which will find a ready home in the cyberchurch 'worship'.

Assembling together?

Some of the world's megachurches are already dipping their toes into the culture of cyberchurch. Bill Hybels's massive Willow Creek Community Church in Chicago has announced new church arrangements that suggest a strongly cyberchurch direction to their future strategy and ministry. Willow Creek currently attracts over 17,000 people to its six weekend services. It is also reaching out to more by setting up satellite churches around its home-base Chicago area. Being aware of the potential criticism that people will 'just turn up, watch a screen and go home', the Willow Creek team emphasised that each satellite church will also have its own pastor, music and ministries tailored to its own location'. One is, however, given to wonder why, when each group is to have its 'own minister', there is any need to centralise at all? Why not simply church plant and allow the local minister to serve the local people?

The problem is not that there is anything innately wrong with the use of overspill or satellite facilities as churches grow. But while TV screens and radio links can help provide churches with the extra seating they may need when conducting a corporate act of worship, Willow Creek proposes something quite different. We might ask, how is Willow Creek to break bread around a 'common' table when the congregation is in separate locations? How are communion participants to fellowship together, to love one another, and pray for one another's needs? How can a 'remote' minister teach and pastor those in his spiritual care? And what about keeping church order and discipline in a church of mega proportions where most are able to attend in 'glorious' anonymity?

And in what sense does this obey the biblical imperative 'not to forsake the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some' (Hebrews 10.26). Again it begs the question: why not simply church plant new congregations? Why insist on maintaining centralisation?

Choosing how to do church

It is easy to see how young and vulnerable Christians, used only to glimpses of their megachurch heroes and buying their self-help videos, may well rush to join their on-line congregations - within the privacy of their own home. Why belong to a small group of 50 or so faithful local believers with their Bible-based worship, when we can experience the real-time communal excitement on offer to a congregation of thousands?

What are the rest of us as ministers and church members to make of the coming cyberchurch and the debate it will continue to foster? Will we be as gullible and wowed by its pragmatic successes, as we have been by that of successive waves of other 'new way' megachurch-doers? If the history of 20th-century Christian and modern evangelical thinking is anything to go by, the answer is: probably. We may take the view that each of us can choose for ourselves how to 'do church'. That is, of course, unless we are Bible-believing Christians. As such, we will understand that, as in all areas of life, the Bible has much to say about what it means to be 'church'.

This article is an excerpt from The Virtual Church and how to avoid it by Peter C. Glover (Xulon Press, 297 pages, ISBN 1 594673 98 5).