In person vs. online
Ah, it’s the debate of the whatever we are in now. It’s a big debate in the church. What’s the right approach? Going all in on hybrid and online ways of doing things or scrapping them to focus attention fully on in person gatherings? I’ve heard so many of the arguments and have made them myself. And like most arguments in churches, the arguments fall on deaf ears because most of us have already made up our minds and we can easily dismiss anything we disagree with. Fun times!
The more I’ve thought about this lately, the more I have come to the conclusion that the debate is pointless – not unlike so many debates that go on in churches.
That’s because the debate is on the wrong focus.
Being in person is not some kind of silver bullet solution for churches. If it was, it would have been working great before the pandemic. It wasn’t and it hasn’t for decades. It’s not the being in person that matters the most.
Hybrid and online options are not the silver bullet solutions for churches either. If they were, we’d see amazing long term sustained growth. We aren’t. It’s not the technology that matters the most.
You want to know what matters the most – trust. If you don’t have trust, it doesn’t matter if you are in person or online. If you can’t trust the people you are with, then no amount of in person or online connection will matter.
But if you have trust with someone, then here’s what I also know – whether you are in person or online won’t matter either. It’s just a medium. What matters is the trust.
Trust can be built in person, for sure. But it can most definitely be built in an online digital medium as well. For example, I have a colleague that I have known for a few years now. We have taught a few classes together and done some one-day style teaching opportunities. We have spend hours in planning and talking and keeping up with each other. We work really great together. And…I’ve never met my colleague in person. Ever. And it’s possible that I may never either. And that’s ok. I don’t feel disconnected from them. I have great trust of them and they of me. That’s why we can do what we do. I have far more trust of my colleague who I only know online than I do of some of the people I live next door to in my neighborhood, and I see them in person all the time.
If there is a lack of trust, there is nothing to build a relationship on. It doesn’t matter how much time you spend with that person. It doesn’t matter what activities you do. It doesn’t matter how much you invest in the relationship. Without trust, you have nothing. And I think that’s part of the challenge that churches face. The people don’t trust one another – not all of them of course. But you end up with congregations within congregations. Call them cliques, call them groups, call them whatever you want. Most of the time, it’s just informal, which makes it even harder to deal with. They have trust within their group, but not in the larger body. They may even have a different culture than the larger body. They may have a different way of communicating. They may have different expectations and assumptions. But if that’s the case, and they don’t try to go beyond their grouping, then they won’t have trust in the larger body. Why would they? They aren’t making any effort to build trust.
In person, online, hybrid – save your arguments. Show me how trust is being built and maintained. If that isn’t happening, then the medium doesn’t matter. And that’s not just a leadership challenge to overcome as if the leadership has all the responsibility to build trust. That’s the responsibility of everyone who is part of a church. It’s part of the responsibility of being a member of the church and the body of Christ. If you expect someone else to do the work of building trust, then you really don’t understand what trust is. Trust is mutual. It means you see one another as equals. It means that you contribute to the relationship and put effort into it. It means you are intentional. It means you care about the other person. It means you are vulnerable with them too. It means you listen. It means you speak up directly to them – not through back channels.
It’s really hard to trust someone who makes no effort to reciprocate, who communicates anonymously through back channels, who doesn’t respond, who maintains unspoken expectations and assumptions, and who leaves you scratching your head as to why they are a part of the church when they don’t do anything to support it, or worse yet, openly refuse to do anything to support the church.
The church has been in decline for decades – this is not news. Numbers don’t lie. There are lots of reasons for this, but I think the essential reason why the church has been in decline is because of a lack of trust. There has been a lack of trust among people in the church, a lack of trust in what the church is about and what it stands for, a lack of trust in how money is used and who gets to make the decisions, a lack of trust in transformation, a lack of trust in the message of life, death, and resurrection. Without trust, you end up with a dying church.
Every church that I have seen that is thriving has at its core this essential element – the people trust one another and trust God. That doesn’t mean they are uniform in their beliefs or politics. It doesn’t mean they all have the same culture, background, language, or race. It doesn’t mean they are all the same economically. It means they are able to get over and past divisions because they trust one another. They know that their relationship with one another and God is far more important than anything else. They are intentional about building and maintaining trust – regardless of whether that happens in person, online, or through a hybrid means. They all invest in building trust with one another, not relying on someone else to do it for them. They trust.
You want to turn a church around? You want to see a church grow and thrive? You want to see new ministry happen? You want to see care done for the members? Then it starts with a foundation of trust.
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First off, I am NOT a pastor and your post is so pastoral in nature that I simply must acknowlege my limitations as a commentator. There is no doubt my thoughts will not be conclusive, however they might – MIGHT – impact the course getting there.
But I will refrain from claiming I know the right answers here.
In the meantime: let me acknowledge a three paragraph quote from the post by reciting it now:
***
That’s because the debate is on the wrong focus.
Being in person is not some kind of silver bullet solution for churches. If it was, it would have been working great before the pandemic. It wasn’t and it hasn’t for decades. It’s not the being in person that matters the most.
Hybrid and online options are not the silver bullet solutions for churches either. If they were, we’d see amazing long term sustained growth. We aren’t. It’s not the technology that matters the most.
***
The “debate” as is I think brings up relevant ideas, but the notion it needs refocused still strikes me as right.
Let me play my card now. At the end of this, I will LEAN (not outright demand, but lean) toward in person assembly. I will lean that way with nuance. In today’s world, you CAN make a baby through invitro fertilization, but it is not the preferred method, nor is it the way God designed it. A mother married to the father in a committed, ongoing, loving and trusting relationship is, in my view, the proper way to go.
A godly couple in such a relationship can be helped by science to have a baby in such ways, and that is fine by me, but a woman shopping for a sperm donor on her phone late at night so she can raise a child as a career-minded, single woman stretches God’s rule past the breaking point in my book. (I have reservations about this statement too, but I will reserve ironing them out upon request.)
Some relationships are fine with the limitations others not. When I go to the bank and actually walk inside and do my transactions with a teller behind a bulletproof glass, I don’t walk out feeling shortchanged unless there is an accounting error. On the other hand, when I go to the local jail to visit my beloved wife and she sits on the other side of a similar glass and we talk over the little telephone, it hurts.
Which kind of relation is church?
Well, not exactly either. Thus a REFOCUS of the debate is in order, but a focus which probably deals with the same baggage. Only now it’s brought into a new focus.
Let me say something now about what we WANT.
I think often times in many circumstances we have broken WANTERS. Our desires are shaped largely in a marketplace of ideas better termed a MARKET PLACE. Our consumerist whims come to church as if we were at Burger King where you “have it YOUR way.” But God never left such a desire up to us. There will be neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Not that the differences cease to matter, but that our avoidance of one another over such things or the advantages we take against one another over such things will not do in God’s church.
Church is not about our desires, but God’s doing. He is saving the world, saving our enemies – FROM US among other calamities. He is saving us too, but we must yield to him… all the way. Our WANTER is not a good measure for this. We must focus on bigger wants and needs than our consumerist whims. But America is really good at reducing God to our consumerist whims (political whims are largely consumerist in nature too).
With such a refocus, let me just say this by way of specific example in MY life TODAY:
I’m seeing/hearing some advertisement on TV, not one I have yet paid close attention to, but which the tagline is now reverberating in my mind. Whatever they are selling, the discussion is about sharing your vacation space with strangers. Why would you share your vacation space with someone you wouldn’t share your vacation with? (I think that is the tag.)
I mention to my wife while this question is hanging in the air, Do you remember when we took that Latvian kid on vacation with us? He was a stranger.
He was. There’s a long twisted story behind that, but suffice it to say, this young man found himself stranded in America for the whole summer and my wife and I, took him in and treated him like one of our kids! When it came time for our vacation, we took him with us. We took another kid too who we knew, but who was not one of us. And we didn’t have money to spare!!!
Financially, it was a hardship, but when we opened our home to this kid, he started fitting in and we grew very affectionate for him. IT would have been horrible to leave him back here in Lubbock while we went on vacation at that point. It would have treated him as second class. On the contrary, it was far more natural to treat him like one of our kids who we love, and so we took him.
This Latvian kid then enhanced our experience tremendously too. We celebrated some of our own culture in ways we normally don’t because he was finding new experiences we could share! It was a blast! A serendipity. He became all the more important to us. And it took a long time before we really counted the cost of including him simply because we were counting this burden as a joy!
That is my reaction to that stupid commercial on TV. The world at large is missing the joy of the Lord. Let us not miss it. Let us SHARE it. Appropriately. And intimately as best we can.
Thanks for sharing all of this. And it gets to the heart of it – giving a damn about other people. I’m do sick of Christians who go around claiming Jesus and then living in rejection of everything he calls on followers to be and do. The church needs to convert the so called converted because there is a serious lack of Christlikeness going on. This is partly why i wrote what i write snd preach what i preach because it needs to be said and people need to be uncomfortable with consumer comfortable christianity.