The Distanced Church: Reflections on Doing Church Online in a time of Pandemic from the Dolly Mama

Here I speak from my heart, not as an expert. Church is tremendously important to me, as a lifer. I have been a pastor over forty years in flourishing congregations, the kind that made a difference to people and their communities and which grew and prospered. My life mission is spiritual nurture for public capacity. I pastor a progressive church with a strong piety. We love each other, for the most part, as pastor and people.

We lived before the virus in a dangerous and strung out world. People are eucharistically starving; the species had begun to devolve, long before this virus came along. School shootings in which we sacrifice the young join clueless leadership and civic division to place us all in precarious positions. Our national original sin of racism required us to repeat, hoarsely, that black lives matter. Women candidates remain invisible or ignored or declared “unelectable.” Add the virus to the pot, and it and you boil over.

Simultaneous, with the multiple national breakdowns, sacred sites and main line, now offline, religious organizations have long been in survival mode. Deferred maintenance of buildings joins membership loss in putting many congregations out of business already– and now, under Queen Corona, the pace of congregational dissolution and property abandonment or sale will only accelerate.

Virtual worship jumped into the boiling pot as a band aid for many. Megachurches saw the opportunity in technology of all kinds and resourced worship early enough to make it work. They were smart enough and open enough to experiment early to technology. They also embraced the two-career family and its culture, by offering “full service” church mid-week instead of just Sunday. Main line churches stayed true to their class and educational level and poo-pooed technology. Now they are scrambling to find “somebody” who knows how to film, how to send, how to video, how to live stream.

So, what will happen? Larger congregations will do the work for smaller congregations. They will invite smaller congregations to worship virtually with them. Eventually these congregations will merge, which they should have done a decade ago. Now they will find meaningful technology-based worship online — as well as music, well-wrought and briefer meditations, pictures, design — at churches not their own. They will love praising God in their pajamas, and still have a primary social group with their aged congregation but not bother with the worship and the parking lot and the dysfunctional trustees’ meetings.

Of course, online worship will prevail if for no other reason than how green it is. You don’t need a parking lot to worship online. The utility bills are also less.

The people who thought they were too good for virtual worship will worship virtually, just like they pod cast virtually and go to the gym virtually and talk to their grandchildren virtually. They will wonder why they waited so long and sat through dismal services in a third full looking empty sanctuary listening to people who can’t sing, try to sing.

This shift will happen first as a short-term fix to a longer-term problem, that of the inability of most smaller membership churches to survive, anyway, any day. It will then become the new normal.

The Spiritual Shifts

I am writing a book called RemovethePews.com in which I use the pews as a metaphor as well as an outdated kind of furniture. My argument is that spiritual experience has rendered the pew obsolete. We need to remove the pews from our sanctuaries and from our souls and our heads.

People want interactivity; they don’t want to be talked at. People want relief from shame and blame — and pulpits and pews exude shame and blame. They also feature the big male booming voice, which sounds way too much like mean angry finger wagging Daddy to most people. Even though half of mainline, offline clergy today are women, who just look funny in pulpits and usually end up preaching “down” instead of “up.” That means they go to the floor and get closer to people as opposed to using the pulpit to look down on people. Not all women make this shift and not all men angrily boom. But a trend is a trend.

Merging congregations, worshipping more than one congregation in one well heated or well cooled place all day of a Sunday or a Wednesday night, removing the pews so different setups of chairs is possible and weekday rentals are likewise possible — all these things will help individual congregations survive long enough to pray another day in another way.

The Larger Picture

The office as we know it is likely gone. Why office when you can zoom? School as we know it is likely gone. Why drive to school when you can plug into it? Aren’t your kids always asking for screen time?

The outer world is going, and the inner world is taking hold. This shift is the best news there could possibly be — since externals had long been beating internals, 12–1. Lions 12, Christians 1 is the other way to count.

The individual is going, and the collective is prevailing. Queen Corona knows nothing about class or race, and we won’t have enough time to teach her. We may even find a silver lining in what was previously understood as the higher horseshit: we are all one. We are not individuals but members, one another. E pluribus Unum. With liberty and justice for all.

Easter and Passover are gone, at least as we know them. They are both there and not there, and powerfully so. Like ventilators, we are desperate for the fresh breath of the religious holidays but don’t have enough of them.

We might gather if we are really lucky with this bug, but the smart money is on the religious holidays joining Broadway in going dark. Theater may depend on an audience; faith does not. Faith likes an audience but doesn’t require one.

During the time of the Black Plague in the middle ages, people were required to go to church at 11:00 a.m. every day. That was before they knew phrases like “flatten the curve” or “social distancing” or, for that matter, molecular biology.

The weekend is also gone. No snark intended but losing sports and kids’ soccer and bars and restaurants is probably harder on people than virtual worship. Yale librarian Judith Ann Schiff explained how the weekend was invented. In 1926 Yale put an end to compulsory chapel attendance for students. The end of compulsory Sunday church services meant that everyone could live it up in the city. Now prayer is so necessary that you don’t even have to make it compulsory.

The renewed attention to the inner will be a boost to dinosaurian religious organizations. “Stop the train, I want to get off, “was my pre-virus mantra. I have moved home to psalms and hymns.

Religious themes matter. We know about Easter and its affirmation of life after death, and Passover and its insistence on liberation for the captives. Do we have to gather to remember these themes? Nope. They exist even if we don’t consider or celebrate them. Or if we have to observe them alone. Or if we can’t find a shank bone or an Easter egg to color. They are not their outer trappings. They are their inner truths. You’ve always wanted to learn how to meditate or how to have an authentic spiritual experience. Now, courtesy of the plague, you can. Spiritual clarity is neither going nor gone. We may not like what we see but some heavy-duty spiritual crap is firmly on our screen.

There will be terrible, painful losses in these multiple transitions. Some of us still miss going to the bank. Touch and eyeballs and hugging and passing the peace will all be terrible losses, especially for the already lonely. I may sound blithe about these losses, but I am not blithe. Instead I am a fan of the still speaking God, the one who keeps us changing and keeps changing on us. And yes, someday the screen will also make its way out the door and a fresh wind will blow in.

The Dolly Mama is an ordained Baptist/UCC pastor with 42 years leading congregations. She is intrigued by the Buddhism of the Dalai Lama and the music of Dolly Parton. She is married to a practicing Jew. Her spirituality is blended and blending. Her last published book of 37 is ‘I HEART YOU FRANCIS: LOVE LETTERS FROM A RELUCTANT ADMIRER. Queen Corona has asked her to say something, and she has agreed. The recipe is one-part detachment, one-part engagement, all unbearably light.