Virtual churches.

Back in 2020, before there were COVID vaccines and the pandemic was still raging, we Californians were voluntarily isolating ourselves, and a lot of churches switched to online services. Mine did. Our pastor would record his sermon from his office or from home. The musicians would record their worship music separately. It’d all get edited together, then uploaded to YouTube so people could watch it Sunday morning.

Or Sunday night. Or Monday morning. Or whenever they got round to watching it. That’s the nice thing about videos of a church service: You can watch them whenever you want. However you want: If there’s a particular song you’re so very tired of, you can skip it! If the worship team has the bad habit of repeating the chorus 30 times at the end, you can skip past the last 29 repeats. If the pastor spends the first 15 minutes of any sermon talking about football, especially if he roots for the wrong team, skip that too. If he speaks too slow, crank it up to double speed! If she speaks too fast, you can even slow her down a little (and it’ll have that fun side effect of making her sound a little bit drunk). And if you wanna watch all the sermons in a series at once, you can binge-watch ’em.

Obviously there are downsides to “virtual church.” You can’t be there to participate. If the pastor says, “Turn to your neighbor and pray for them,” you can’t. If they’re having holy communion, you can pause the video and dig around your pantry for saltines and grape-flavored Kool-Aid so you can take ’em in sync with the recording, but it’s still not the communal ritual it’s meant to be. There are no real live Christians to interact with; just a service. And the real live Christians are the point.

This is why a lot of churches back then refused to move their services online, and insisted on having in-person church services, dangerous virus or no dangerous virus. Like the snake-handlers, they insisted God would honor their faith, and protect ’em despite their irresponsible behavior. Bluntly, a lot of ’em weren’t actually doing it because the church is people, and they didn’t want take the people out of their services. They were doing it ’cause they wanted to give the middle finger to the government for making ’em do anything they didn’t wanna. This jerk-like attitude managed to alienate a whole lot of people, who wouldn’t come back to their churches after the quarantines lifted. But y’know, sometimes no one in their churches did catch the virus: It hadn’t spread to them yet, or those who were most likely to spread it wore masks and gloves and sanitized themselves. Still wasn’t wise.

Well, once the quarantines lifted, and people came back to the in-person services… a lot of people stayed home. Because watching church on the internet is so convenient.

Church on my time.

Elsewhere I’ve written about when one of my previous churches switched from Sunday morning services to Saturday evening, and how very much I enjoyed sleeping in on Sunday mornings like a pagan. Well… for a few months. Then I just grew tired of lazy Sundays and decided to go to a second church in my denomination, in the next town, on Sunday mornings. (“Hey, here’s where all our former regulars went!”)

Once the churches went “virtual,” I went right back to that behavior. I’d watch the church services Saturday night, then have a lazy Sunday. I have no doubt a lot of people, Christians included, enjoyed that… and decided this was how they’d worship from now on.

Plus they could manipulate the video in all the ways I listed above. Plus you can watch it and eat breakfast at the same time. In your pajamas! You can pause it for bathroom breaks… or even take your phone into the bathroom with you and watch it while you do your dirty business. Gross, but… you can. You can even watch it butt naked in the tub; who’s gonna see you?

Exactly like streaming services, you can “have church” whenever you want, however you want.

Except, like I said earlier, the church is people. You’re not having church; you’re watching other people have church. You aren’t there, participating. You aren’t interacting. If your family is watching it together, okay there’s some interaction; that’s not nothing. But plenty of families aren’t watching it together. Mom watches it when she has time; Dad watches it once the game’s over; the girl watches it only after her parents remind her; the boy doesn’t watch it at all, but read the YouTube description so he can pretend he has.

When the people in the video sing, do you actually sing along to the video? When they pray, do you pray along with them?—or pray anything? When they preach, do you take notes like you usually would during the service? Or do you just passively watch everything? More often people don’t interact—because they just don’t interact when they’re watching videos. If by default you don’t interact with a movie or TV show, you’re not gonna switch from that default when you’re watching video church.

I’m absolutely not saying churches need to stop recording their services. If you or the kids are sick and can’t attend, or you’re out of town for any reason and can’t make it, you can watch the video and stay up with what your church is doing. If you’re a shut-in and can’t attend any church, it’s certainly better than nothing. If someone’s curious about your church, they can obviously watch the videos. They have their uses. Substituting “virtual church” for church is not one of them.

’Cause I’ll say it again: The church is people. We’re meant to interact with fellow Christians in worship, and church is about the interactivity. True, a lot of performance-heavy church services don’t let us interact to the level we oughta, and I’ll write about that another time. Video church eliminates the interactivity, eliminates the people, which means it also eliminates the church.

So go to church!