How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Online Worshippers

When the pandemic began, the church I was serving in Austin was not equipped for livestreaming worship services. Indeed, that first Sunday during which we cancelled in-person worship (March 15, 2020), our senior pastor — who was supposed to preach — also called in sick! I quickly put a sermon together, went into the sanctuary on Saturday morning, set up a video camera halfway down the aisle, and hit “record.” I walked through each piece of liturgy as if the pews were full, trying to make eye contact with the “congregation” and the camera. The recording was amateur, the sound was poor, and our sick Senior Pastor needed to video edit significantly to make the recording work—yet it enabled us to worship together nonetheless. (The recording is still up on YouTube!)

During the first few months, we got better at offering video worship services. We developed shared standards for recording pieces of worship, and these video clips were stitched together into the worship service to post on YouTube. Eventually, in November, we installed some livestream equipment, going between using the sanctuary together or a church member’s studio individually, depending on the city’s COVID guidelines.

In mid-2021, I moved from Austin to South Bend, Indiana, to pastor Sunnyside Presbyterian Church. As we emerged on the other side of quarantine, social distancing, masking and all the other COVID precautions, both the church I served in Austin and the one I’m serving in South Bend maintained the livestreamed worship services. Broadcasting worship, which was once only the purview of televangelists and large, multi-site churches, was suddenly standard operating procedure for nearly every congregation with more than 50 members—and even for some with fewer!

Worship Through The Screens

One of the points of discussion — even of contention at times — has been those who primarily worship “through the screen.” Even how we refer to these folks has consequences. Are they “virtual worshippers”? Folks “worshipping from home”? Or are they “worshipping from afar” or “through the screen” or “online worshippers”? Each way of referring to these worshippers conjures up an image of how or why they might be worshipping from somewhere other than the Sanctuary. “Online worshippers” has been my term of choice, since it seems the most value-neutral of these, centering the practice of worship while describing the means of worship (online).

Pre-pandemic, I didn’t believe that online worship was a good option. Five years into this “great livestreaming experiment,” I have learned to celebrate our online worshippers. Yes, online worship allows for some people to sit on their couch with their coffee in their pajamas and sleep in. But it also allows folks who spend weeks or months of winter in Florida instead of South Bend to continue worshiping alongside this community. It allows those who are regularly called away to travel for work to maintain a home church. It allows those who are ill or homebound to access worship in ways they weren’t able to before. Indeed, while the church I served in Austin needed to scramble to provide livestreamed worship in their sanctuary, Sunnyside began livestreaming in late-2018 as a ministry to homebound members. Worship that is accessible through a computer, a tablet, or a phone — it is still worship, even if it feels like it lacks something in-person worship has.

And online worship does indeed lack something. When we stream or record worship, the service occurs in the exact same way regardless of how those who participate online worship. By its very nature, online worship cannot be liturgical in the strictest sense of the word. The word liturgy comes from the Greek words laos, meaning people, and ergos, meaning work. Because the actions and participation of online worshippers cannot shape the worship service in the same ways as those present in the sanctuary, there’s a liturgical disconnect with online worship that isn’t easy to bridge.

There was an article in the New York Times by Rev. Tish Harrison Warren in January 2022 suggesting that churches should drop their online services. In this article, Warren placed a lot of value on embodiment as a Christian value, wondering how we can have the physical interaction we crave — indeed, that our bodies require — from the one-way broadcast of livestreamed Sunday services. This question of how we can be incarnate yet not proximate with our worshipping community has been one I’ve found myself circling back to again and again, unsure of how we can lean into loving and truly welcoming our primarily online worshippers.

As I look to what the church might learn in the next five to 10 years, I imagine we will endeavor to build avenues of interaction between those who are physically present in the sanctuary for worship and those who worship at a distance. Many of the programs we reflexively turn to in the church (dinners for eight, small group Bible studies, meeting over coffee) tacitly assume physical proximity, and may not translate as well through online meeting platforms (such as Zoom). How might we engage those who aren’t able to enter the church building regularly, whether for reasons of distance, health, or otherwise? What kinds of programs might invite more two-way interaction among the entire congregation—both those worshipping in person and those worshipping online?

Rev. Joel Moody is the senior pastor of Sunnyside Presbyterian Church in South Bend, Indiana. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and served a congregation in Austin, Texas, prior to moving to South Bend with his spouse and two children. He’s passionate about partnering with people to learn about God and working to build bridges across differences.