Note: This post is the next in a series, “Technologizing of Worship Before, During, and After COVID: Epistemology, Eschatology, and Presence,“ part of a larger project suggesting a pastoral response to COVID and lockdowns in the church. Read more and subscribe here.
Worship and Community: “Unity and Presence” over “Mere Simultaneity”
My diagnosis of the problem in the pre-pandemic Western church is that mediating technology has allowed us to emphasize the discursive means of grace (scripture and prayer) while neglecting the performative (sacraments/ordinances, and fellowship/discipleship)—and that in practice the discursive means of grace cannot be fully effective in our lives apart from the others.
One aspect of this has been the substitution of simultaneity for unity. Even unmediated by technology, if the entirety of my pre-COVID worship experience has been simply passive and receptive (hearing and observing the preaching and the musicians[1]) while I am standing or sitting beside someone else in the assembly with whom I am barely acquainted—then there is little benefit to the incidental simultaneity of our passive reception of the information presented to us by the pastor or the worship leader. If this is all that church has been, then it is not surprising that people would feel little loss by introducing the mediating technology, i.e., receiving preaching and music while at home—with or without a pandemic.
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