Last
weekend, I was suffering a combination bad head cold/allergic reaction to the
Valentine’s Day flowers I bought for my wife. (No, the lesson was not stop
buying flowers for Valentine’s Day. Rather than inflict my
sneezing/coughing/hacking/misery on our church, I chose to miss church. Instead,
I would watch the livestream of the 9:45 service.
Except
the livestream worked for all of about five seconds, and then stopped. The livestreaming
system wasn’t working, and I watched the “visitor numbers” fluctuate from five
to eight to eleven and then back down as online visitors began to figure out
the same thing.
While
it would have been nice for someone like me, being sick, or someone who wasn’t
able to travel to church, I realized something. Livestreaming, even when it
works, is not the next best thing to being there. You can watch a church
service, but you can’t participate. This is likely at least one of the issues I
have with so-called online churches, and churches that use videostreaming as
they embrace the “sites” concept. Something is missing, something important.
Yesterday,
Marcus Goodyear posted an article at his blog, Good Word Editing, entitled “The Uncertain Future of Traditional
Faith Communities.” And he put his finger on what’s missing – community.
But he raises more fundamental issues that the problem the problems of
livestreaming.
The
American church today is losing both its knowledge and community roles, and
what does that mean? Marcus says it’s already lost the knowledge role, and it’s
losing the community role.
I
left a comment on the post. Before the community role began to change, the
church, or a significant and influential part of it, began moving away from the
knowledge role and embracing a personal experience role. Like most major
changes, it happened incrementally. But at some point, many churches – and I am
speaking of those in what we would call the evangelical tradition – began to
move away from teaching the Bible. The focus became something else.
This
subject needs – demands – a broader and continuing discussion. People are
experiencing the problems of the church, and there are a lot of books being
written, but the discussion seems to have been largely left to the experts –
theologians, pastors, theological academics.
This
is one of those subjects too important to be left to the experts. The church
itself needs to engage.
