Is online church just as good?

Welcome to the Uncut Podcast. I'm Pastor Luke and this is Pastor Cameron. So welcome to the Uncut Podcast where we have uncut, honest conversations about Bible theology, life,

church, ministry, anything we feel like talking about.

Anything that strokes the passion or like that, you know, stokes the fire of our conversation and our, kind of our mutual, the things that we mutually like and agree with or are involved with.

Yeah, or feel like just having an interesting conversation. Yeah. I'm looking, actually looking forward to, and I'm not sure what topic it will have, and it will probably be something that we don't expect where we're going to disagree.

Disagree. I'm sure we, if we dig hard enough and fast enough, we could find something. Oh, I'm sure.

I'm sure. Maybe not, probably not on the big things, but on the smaller things. So one of the things that we were thinking about talking about today is, you know, COVID.

Everything that happened in, or began to happen in 2020, or like this March will be like three years removed from the date that at least Conduit said,

hey, we're gonna pause in-person services for a while.

2020 both feels far away and not far away at the same time.

Yeah, I was reading a book the other day that was written, published, distributed, and got into my hands all post-COVID.

And I was like, it doesn't seem like someone would have the ability to write a book, publish a book, sell and distribute a book, and get it into Cameron Leinhardt's hands in that amount of time.

But it has been, say three years, and a lot has changed in the world, or a lot had an opportunity to change through COVID, and those changes were not absent from the church.

They were, they're prevalent in our church as well, in all churches. And one of the ways, one of the things, or I think the primary thing,

that it really changed, that COVID really changed the landscape of in churches is the,

prevalence of or what seems like the necessity now to have.

Everything and anything that you can streamed online, offered online so that the person who cannot be present in either the building or in the small group or at the Bible study or on a Sunday

morning or whatever still has an opportunity to participate. Stated in that kind of way,

it feels like, oh my gosh, what an opportunity to involve people, involve more people.

Well, I don't know if I remember growing up in our church and when we had a cassette ministry, do you remember those?

I do. You know, like they record the sermon on a cassette and then they duplicate a number of those cassettes and then they would hand them out to people. That grew into, okay, well, if you don't have a cassette ministry, you're not reaching your full potential, or don't have a CD ministry, or.

You don't have a podcast, right? That kind of became at least the standard. Every church, pretty much everywhere, at least had to have an audio podcast of their sermon, put it up sometime

during the week on somewhere where they could listen to it. And then becoming more and more was like the standard was an audio podcast and a video recording were kind of the standards.

Not every church had embraced video, but COVID like, it like hit fast forward on the media trend in the church. And so now not only do we need to be recording and redistributing our sermons and

maybe services in video and audio format.

We need to be live.

Streaming out into the world concurrently, the service as it happens. Yeah. I remember, I think my first recollection of all of that was, I don't know what it would have been, what year it would have been for you, but I was a freshman or sophomore in college,

and the church that I was attending in Rochester did what I thought was an extraordinarily cutting edge thing, where it was like you could order the sermon on CD.

And then like I see you would order it the Sunday that it was preached, like leaving church, oh, that was a really good sermon. I want that. And then so you go to the window and you would order it and then next Sunday when you came back, it'd be ready for you and so you could take it.

And I thought that was just like, that was incredible. Like, oh my gosh, that we get to do this. And then I still have upstairs in my office, I have in the lower drawer of my

filing cabinet, I have the VHS tapes of the first sermons that I preached as pastor.

Yeah. I've got, I mean, this will date the difference between when you and I were going to preaching classes. I have a thumb drive with the recordings of when I was preaching.

Yeah. So like my very first Sunday as a pastor, I have a VHS tape recording of it. I got no way to play it. I don't own a VCR. I don't know anyone that does own a VCR. But someday,

maybe we'll get it down to some sort of digital copy. And I would actually, I don't know.

That sermon can probably just live in the catacombs of a VHS because there's probably not much good that's in it. Yeah.

But yeah, it was, well, and you know, growing, even growing up, like church on TV is not necessarily a new thing.

No. It's not. It's a pretty old thing, actually.

But it existed in a really small or for a really small subset. Yeah.

Churches and personalities and people. Well, because the cost of entry was so expensive. So high.

Right. But what we're doing right here with this podcast, these microphones, the cameras that we're using, the way we're recording and distributing it was a relatively low barrier of entry.

And it's not that complicated. Well, and this is.

This is probably 10 times as complicated as what it actually has to be for churches all over the world right now to get their services at least out.

You need a smartphone and an internet connection, which presumably every smartphone has, and then you just need a platform.

Everyone has Facebook and that's a primary way that most people are connecting that message out there. And so it has taken maybe let's say in the span of the last, I think generously,

like 40 to 50 years, what has been something that has been reserved primarily for the biggest churches with the most resources and the most charismatic personalities to get their messages

out there, get their services out there and it's taken it down all the way to the smallest of little country churches who maybe typically wouldn't have a wide geographical impact with.

Their message and it's given them the opportunity to give people literally across the world access to what they're saying.

Yeah. Well, like I remember I was pastoring as associate pastor in a church plant in Chicago prior and during 2020. And we, I've always been like a gadgety guy.

I've always been the like tech, I love sound. So you know, I was making sure we had video recordings and audio recordings of like our service and like our sermons. I did do...

The we did live streaming for a bit and we were just running it off of like my little I think it was my iPhone five and like just strapping it to this pole with a GoPro mount and hitting like go live and that's what we were doing. And I think we ultimately we stopped doing it because you know so few people were tuning in live.

And it was, but even with that simplicity, it was such a technical headache that we were just like, like, is this really worth it? Like, we get the sermon out within so many hours of the, you know,

like, you know, so we kind of, we opted not to, but then, you know, maybe a year passes after we stopped live streaming and that became the only way in which we could do ministry in Chicago was

was me and senior pastor sitting side by side, kind of like this, staring into iPhones and doing a whole service, like a little acoustic guitar.

One, it was amazing how much we were able to do given the constraints of not being able to meet together.

But then it was also incredibly sad.

I hated that season. Like, it was lonely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I thought that, like, in terms of that season for me.

And I want to say that we, I don't think we live streamed only for very long. Not for, certainly not as long as many places did.

Yeah.

I think we started live streaming or started going, we, we suspended in-person services, I think in the middle of March of 2020.

And then I want to say it was Father's Day.

Okay. So June, beginning of June, so three ish months that we put a big tent in the front yard and then we literally worshiped underneath that tent for the next.

Four months. Yeah. So we were, we, we, but then we still live streamed out there too. Yeah.

Right. But I remember, I actually want to look like, and maybe this is a question that we come back to later, but is, you know, when you said like, when you first started live streaming pre-COVID, it, you got to the point where it was like, viewership was so low.

Yeah. determined like this isn't worth it. I think we were getting maybe one person.

Right. Um, the, and that for me is an interesting, like philosophical marker is like at what point, at what point does it become worth it?

Yeah. At what point does it become worth it? Um, and so, you know,

maybe there's a more appropriate time to come back to that question cause we're Now we're digging into really kind of where the like, at least the heart of the conversation

is for me is, you know, we're, I think we're, we're, we're typically talking about live streaming and all of church being online, everything that we can, Bible studies, you

know, whatever we get announcements and we get that question at any time we do any event,

Will it be a live stream? Will it be recorded? Will I be able to access it without being here?

Yeah, without being here. We're typically having the conversation within the parenthesis of this is such a great thing. One of the guys that you and I know that you and I, I I don't know like how.

How hook line and sinker you take all the things that Craig Rochelle says or does, you know.

And I mean, for those who are listening or watching who might not know who Greg Craig Rochelle is, he's a, you know, probably one of the most influential Christian pastors in the United States, maybe the world.

Yeah, I don't think he, I think he leads one of the most influential churches. Churches, yeah. I don't think he's like the best known preacher. I think that falls to a couple other people.

But as far as what his church does. Well, and probably his overall leadership influence.

Not necessarily his preaching influence, but his leadership influence is probably second to none. Yeah, that's where he is significant.

So he is someone that you pay attention to in the church world because often where they go, the world goes, or at least the church world goes.

And just for context, his church is the church created the Bible app. The U version Bible app that you probably have on your phone is what his church made and made publicly free for everyone.

And you and I, I listen to his podcast every month. I listen to all his interviews. I read pretty much all of his books. And while it's impossible to really know him truly as a person,

All signs point to genuine, caring, faithful man of God, pastor of the largest church in America.

Yeah. So, but he is a big proponent of like what one of his catchphrases is, if you want to reach people that no one is reaching, you have to do things that no one is doing.

Yes.

So, and so like his church, Life Church, based out of Tulsa, Oklahoma is, you know, they have, I don't want to say they've pioneered, but they're certainly on like the front leading edge of doing things like virtual reality church. You know, so like if you have an Oculus,

you know. Right, the church in the metaverse.

Church and the Metaverse. And about how he feels like it's important for Life.Church to have a...

Influence there or a presence there or whatever. I'll go on record to say, I'm only 40 years old.

But I'm a little bit of an old soul in terms when it comes to technology and gadgets and stuff like that. I have the gadgety things that I like, but they're not generally technological.

And so there's a little bit of stuff like VR church and stuff like that I just don't understand and I don't get. And maybe that's on me. I'm asking it to do things without really understanding what it actually is. But anyway, so this is something that I have,

I think, a little bit of a fundamental disagreement with Craig about because he, I think would say, you know, like church is in as many ways in as many places in as many environments as many.

Like Modalities as possible like the more the better.

And while on the surface I like of course wouldn't disagree with that like yeah We want to reach the people that are in that are literally in the metaverse in the metaverse hiding away hiding away there. I.

Think it leaves some things out I think it leaves some considerations out that the whole question that begs the question of like is the iteration of everything online in church, every service, every Bible study,

small groups, all those things, is it a good thing?

Cart Blanche. Cart Blanche. Or is it sometimes good and sometimes bad or is it neutral?

And I have some thoughts on that, but I'm a little curious as to what you would say about that being a little bit different personality for me in terms of the gadget-y,

techno-world type of thing.

Right. Because I've got an Oculus. I don't spend much time in the metaverse, But I've always been kind of like, let's see what we can do.

And I, and even just my church background, I come from a very missionally minded church background, you know, like that's just like reach the people, right?

I think like for me, I was kind of having this conversation pre-COVID through, like the church has been wrestling with this question,

And I think for a good decade or more, um, ever since the advent of, uh, screen preachers.

The, the advent of having multi-sites, right.

Multi-site. And, uh, by, by that, I don't mean just like, you know, we talked about big churches that have multiple places where they meet.

Um, and specifically there's a whole bunch of different ways that that can be done.

Uh, but specifically the way in which there's multiple places where one church meets and only one of those places has a physical in-flesh preacher. The rest of the places have

a maybe a pastor on staff who does like announcements, but then everybody looks up to a big projector screen and they're either watching- They tune in.

They tune in to the main campus and they're watching either live streamed or slightly delayed or an hour off or whatever, the sermon that the main primary, usually well-known pastor was delivering.

And that has become a fairly common model. I don't know if it's sticking around, but it's been around for a while. And.

What is it i feel like has kind of that discussion around that modality of church kind of gone to the background because of just the prevalence of streaming but the question is like is that. Different does it does it matter whether or not you are at like the main campus or your fear of satellite campus where you're watching the screen preacher and i.

Like, I have like a couple reflections on that. And I think that points to where I kind of go with streaming.

And that's the first is that if you go to any of those churches, all of those churches don't have a live in-person preacher, but they almost always have live in-person bands.

And if you were to like talk to someone and you were like, they were like, oh, like it It doesn't make a difference that like, you know, that the preaching streamed.

And I go, okay, would it bug you if you went to the church and you had the watch on the screen, the band play and most people pre COVID would say, Oh, yeah, I don't want, I don't want that.

Like that's, I want to actually be there with the worship, the emotion, feel the emotion.

I want to, you know, like I want to, I want to, you know, I'm like, well, we can turn it up.

They're like, they're like, no, no, no, no. Like I want to be in the room with the worst, like there's like, that would be a pretty in common response for most people.

And so what I would normally say if someone responded that way, so what you're telling me is, is that presence does matter.

And that doesn't mean that screen preaching is wrong, but it does, for me at least, point or indicate that there is something significant to being present.

Yeah, I think it also says something about the way that we view the different aspects of a worship service.

That the worship is something that we want to participate in with people. The preaching is something that we want to receive as a piece of content.

We've commodified preaching. If anyone like you, maybe you, but mostly myself, I at one point was consuming podcasts of sermons like crazy.

And outside of the context of churches I've never attended to, pastors I've never met, people who never know me, and I'm listening to their podcasts. There's some sermons I don't miss from preachers. it doesn't matter.

I never miss any Stanley sermon. I listen to every single one of his sermons. I just love any Stanley. That cracks me up.

So like, yeah, but we've been doing that for a long time. And so we've kind of acclimated to that.

And so maybe a screen preacher or maybe streaming online the sermon, like that doesn't feel so strange because we already kind of have been doing that with cassettes, CDs, podcasts.

And I even, I think the same response is kind of held true for people who have watched Church at Home on YouTube,

on Facebook through COVID this current season, is most of them say like, yeah, like all the sermons fine, but like the thing I miss the most is like the worship.

Right, which like we could go on a whole tangent there because I don't love referring to musical worship as worship, but like.

It's a term we got to use for familiar. Yeah, right. Right. Um, but like they miss the musical aspect.

They miss singing corporately and being in the presence of that.

Um, but they don't necessarily feel that quite as keenly with the sermons. I, I, I, I kind of think it's a little bit neutral,

But I think it's a little bit of context, reason, intention, a little bit of calling,

to. Really?

Maybe. I think some people, I can look at a pastor and I can say, all right, the way that you're executing ministry is not the way I would execute ministry.

And that's got to do with my personality. It's got to do with what I feel like I'm particularly called to do, the way I feel convicted about doing ministry.

But particularly, it's like a secondary issue.

It's not for me. But I could say like Craig Grichaud, like VR church is something I probably just, I don't like. and.

But I would kind of just like say like, I don't know that. So I would kind of put it that way.

See, here's my thing though. It's like I don't know and I don't know, I'd be willing to bet Craig if you're listening to this podcast, you know, send us a comment, let us know which one it is.

I don't know that Craig would say that he feels personally called to engage in that type of pastoral ministry.

I think that what he would say is that a foundational theology of the church would lead us to believe that that's an area that we have to be in.

I think there's a distinction there because if we approach the issue with a, no, the church should be in all places, in all ways, in as many environments or modalities as it can,

And it doesn't really, like personal calling then really doesn't function into the equation.

It should be a, then it becomes a question like, well, not Craig, why are you in VR?

Why are you in the metaverse? The question gets reversed on us is like, well, why aren't you?

You know, why aren't you? If it's about personal calling, I think that worries me a little bit because then we're

talking about like, you know, much of ministry or at least that aspect of ministry is leveraged against the personality of the one at the helm.

And yeah, that could take the church in a very positive direction into areas of ministry that are really important and valuable, but it can certainly, we've all seen it do the opposite where a church is like a dog with a bone on a pet project that just is like,

just reeks of dishonor to the Lord.

So I, you know, I...

Yeah, I wonder about the question of whether or not it is calling or how it functions in terms of the nature of the Church. It's maybe a little bit of an unfair question to ask or an unfair question to come hard down on a singular answer because,

I don't even think it's a fair question to ask. Well, if Jesus had access to Facebook and streaming equipment, would the Sermon on the Mount be live streamed?

I think that's an interesting question. What he livestreams his teaching. I think it's fun to have conversation about conjecture around that.

What would WWJD, what would Jesus do? But that's really all it is, is conjecture.

We couldn't say with any form of authority that this is definitely what Jesus would do. That's like, you know, I don't know.

You know, maybe to push a little bit, I had a friend, he was a communications guy and he was always telling me, he's like, Luke, medium is the message.

So he was always just like, and he meant it kind of not in an embracing way, but in a Medium through which you transmit a message if is not appropriate will override and destroy the message,

If you're communicating it through a so what you say, it's how you say it. Yeah a little bit. Yeah, and so like.

There is like.

Podcasts videos like watching on a screen like is a.

Say pretty Like information transfer that way.

It's pretty good. And like if we were to just say, if we were to kind of maybe take all the different aspects of a Sunday service and say.

And say like kind of classify up kind of different parts of the service and say well the sermon is probably the most information heavy. Involves the mind and so is probably maybe just like.

Again i'm looking at this i'm not asking any spiritual questions right now i'm asking like hyper practical questions the message itself is. Probably pretty format well suited.

To that medium.

The worship, not quite so well, because it's meant to be participatory, and it's hard for us all not to feel like we're kind of watching Blue's Clues or Dora the Explorer, the map, the map, right?

When we're trying to like, that's my experience. I don't know, some people love worshiping along on television, that's fantastic. I have a really hard time with it.

I feel like I'm participating with Blue's Clues. And so like for me, participating in musical worship over a screen is near impossible for me.

Because the screen is primarily a receiving, it's not participatory. It's voyeuristic.

Yeah, exactly. And so having asked no spiritual questions in that, just thinking like practicality about content and the way we want people to interact with it, the sermon does lend itself to the

medium of streaming, recording and all of that.

But that does bring back to a question of like, does physical presence matter enough?

Like, I don't know, like is there, like I want to hear your thoughts. I've been doing a lot of the talking, but I want to hear your thoughts now.

Like, is attending church online just as good as attending church in person?

No. Okay. Like categorically no. And I would say like the reason that I would say no to that is because I think it is impossible,

to overstate the importance of personal relationship with other believers in a person's journey of faith with Christ, Christian faith.

To backtrack a little bit into piggybacking on what you said, there are always going to be certain mediums or aspects of, let's say, I'm just talking about Sunday worship,

that are more suited or more appropriate for the medium of capture and send out.

Because they do, as a standalone, they do function in a way that can be probably useful. But I think that says also a few things about, and I don't think you're not saying this.

Yeah. No, I'm only revealing kind of half of my hand here.

Sure. Right. That it maybe betrays a little bit of the way that in general we approach and view the worship service as a whole or the gathered community.

But we've, I think, we've underplayed our hand in modern Christianity at the importance of the lived experience of doing the Christian faith, walking the Christian walk, living

the Christian life alongside others.

We've been slowly.

Over a long period of time, but it seems like in the past decade or so, like we've supercharged the reality of more and more personal isolation from one another that has created.

A break in actual like person to person relationship, right? That, I mean, we look no no further than like the comment section on any social media post or any YouTube article or any YouTube video or news article or whatever. Right.

And even myself feel more free to say things that are out of character for me on that,

in that medium than I would if something that I'm commenting on you right now, right? Right.

Or anyone else that's in like actual personal physical proximity and relationship with. And so the growing chasm of actual physical presence and actual physical relationship.

Takes I think sometimes our character to a place of not seeing other people as actual people and just makes them things out there. I think if I were to distill everything maybe.

Down into one primary thought as it pertains to is the streaming revolution of everything a good,

bad or neutral thing, I think that there are aspects of it that are good. What I would say that there needs to be a heavy heavy very very serious warning for the church to not cheapen.

Actual, physical, human, eye to eye, face to face, hand to hand, all the voices in one room, community with one another. Right? And I think we could do some work even theologically to trace back the meaning and the usage of both the Greek and Hebrew words that they used to communicate like a community of faith or a called out people.

Imagined that they would live in isolation and see that as a suitable substitute for the actual gathered community where we do sing in one voice and we do have one faith.

Baptism, one savior and God and father over us all. And so, you know, there, I mean, candidly.

There have been times where I've considered as pastor, as a pastor here at Conduit at least, of saying, you know, like I would, not because it's practically difficult.

Because we can make it happen, but from a philosophical or theological standpoint, like saying, Thanks for watching.

Are we doing a disservice to the nature of and to the nature of actual Christian community by saying, oh, if you can't be with us, just watch here. It's like, that's the same thing.

It's not the same thing. Yeah.

And there are, I mean, we had this conversation, we've had this conversation before in regards to like watching our live streams and seeing who comments and seeing, you know, You know, hearing people say at some point, you know, at the coffee shop, oh, I watched you guys online this week.

And we're like, we had no idea. We had no idea that this person was watching.

No, you know, and it leaves me saying, it leaves me saying like being like almost like hyperventilating in my soul about like, like I feel the weight of, I feel the weight of

responsibility for pastoral leadership in their lives without ever knowing who they are, without never looking them in the eye.

I feel like they're just looking through a peephole in the door of actual authentic Christian community.

I know others who live up here in Jamestown will say, hey, what church do you go to?

They're like, oh, I watch a church down in Florida every Sunday.

That's becoming more and more like my pastor is in Florida like No, your TV show is hosted in Florida. Yeah, but where's your community?

Right. Well if we were to put this like if we were to rewind five years and we were to ask somebody What's your church and they would say oh such-and-such pastor on television at 11 o'clock at night. Mm-hmm.

Right. Like anybody of any like real theological understanding of what the church is would say,

no, it's not. Right. Right. That's not your church, right? Right. Right. Church is not a building.

Church is not a live stream. Church is not a channel you subscribe to.

Church is a community made up of people that you know. That you know. That know you. That gather together worship Jesus and practice the sacraments.

Yeah. Like go out on mission.

Go out on mission. That is Ecclesiology 101. 101. Right.

The like now we're a little bit more accepting of maybe an answer. We would not have swallowed Five years ago, right?

Right There is like I just don't want it to be I just don't want it to be a wolf in sheep's clothing Yeah, you know, well, so there was something interesting that happened right when kovat struck. So.

I've done counseling. I've done counseling for a lot of years and like personal counseling for me. I'm not counseling people I'm in coming in receiving counseling.

And during COVID, right, could no longer meet in person with my counselor at the time.

And we switched to doing online counseling. Telehealth has become like a massive thing, right?

Because of COVID.

But I remember switching from doing in-person counseling with my counselor and switching to doing, I think we were doing Zoom at the time.

Everybody was on Zoom. I received a waiver from the counseling center and from my counselor I had to sign. Part of that waiver included that I acknowledged that the therapeutic benefit of being counseled

online was not as significant or was going to be to a lesser degree than when I was meeting with my counselor in person.

I'm assuming that that's tied to some study. I'm not a counselor, but assuming that that statement is tied to a study that physical

actual presence with a counselor has been shown to provide better care, better therapeutic results than over a screen.

I had to sign a legal thing acknowledging that that was a fact and that I knew I was going to get a subpar counseling.

Not because my counselor was changing or I was changing, what we were talking about was changing.

Nothing changed except for the fact that we weren't in the room together anymore. And obviously for them to have that document ready and for you to sign, it's been a well-established principle that the physical presence of another human being in the room with you is a therapeutic,

advantage over staring at a computer screen.

So if it matters in counseling, by golly, it ought to matter in how we worship. I would think so. It's kind of at least my argument there.

I, you know, so I'll reveal my whole position. I think that streaming, recording, all of that is best.

In is great as a substitution when we can't have the actual thing. So if we have, if, if I'm, if we have someone who's quarantining, we have someone who's maybe a shut in.

Someone who's unable to be physically present, they're sick, they're sick, they're traveling, they're sick, they're traveling, right? Live streaming the service is the best thing you can

have. Agreed. I get it. Like, I would still maybe like if you're traveling, my preference would be for you to just participate in another church that you have, if you can while you're traveling.

I think there's benefit to that. I think, you know, we get to see with different eyes, different how different congregations. I think that's beneficial. But, but live streaming, like that's That's the best thing that you can get apart from actually being physically present for,

church.

And then there's that. I see that as an appropriate, okay usage of it. I see also it functioning as a front door to a lot of people.

Prior to COVID, I know that like the, I think the statistic was somewhere like people would watch three to five sermons of a church before they would come and step foot in for the first,

physical in-present person visit they would come.

That was like if you were going to go looking for a church, looking for a place to come, you're exploring faith. Before you ever came to a church, you were listening to a couple of sermons.

You were just trying to get all the information you could out of the website, trying to build up a lot of confidence and then come in.

And so now live streams, service recordings, all of that functions as a front door, as it were, a bit of an entryway of saying, okay, well before I like...

You know, get up early, get myself put together. Like, why don't I just see what this church is about and see if there's like, okay, well, like, cause you know, you can go to a gazillion different

church websites. They all have the same thing on the, I believe statement. They all have the same mission statements. Like it's all the same. So like when you're actually genuinely looking for a new new church. You can see it. Like what are the people where, what's the culture,

the demeanor there in the room? Yeah.

And so like, and that's what I did when I was, when I was job hunting or when I've been, when I've moved and I've needed to find my own personal church, like I,

I went through their websites, went through their social media and I tried to find as much as I could about the church before I would like take a whole Sunday to go.

Because if you visit four different churches and trying to find a church that you're going to make a home, that's a whole month of like, because it's not like you can go to like five churches in a single Sunday,

physically.

So I see all of that as like somewhat, I can see that as a positive value added.

But the area in which I become vastly uncomfortable is the perpetual, I have the opportunity to be at church.

They live five minutes away, but they're just sitting on the couch. Yes.

Yeah. And, or they live 20 hours away and there's a church down the street.

I, you know, I would, and I've talked with people who were over in countries where faithful churches are hard to find.

And my recommendation to someone in that situation is find the best church you can find and supplement maybe with another church, but don't make an online church your home if you can't. I think

being with people, physically taking communion, which is its own whole topic of like, we the Christian world in which we live in and the type of churches that you and I come from,

like preaching is the significant thing that happens on Sunday. But the large mass majority of history, communion, was the single most important thing that happened on the Sunday.

It was the proclamation of the gospel. That the Eucharistic liturgy was and is the proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ to people.

And you have to be physically present. You have to be physically present. I want to be, like, and I think it should, you know, I want to work extra hard to be clear here that this is not a treatise against.

Online things. No, we're not. In as much as it is like, it's kind of defaulting to that.

Because what I'm actually trying to say is my main point is not that like technology bad, you know, right.

What I'm saying is that there is.

If you are a person. who earnestly and genuinely desires to follow Jesus closely, to grow in your faith, that there is no substitute for the physical presence of the community of faith.

There is no substitute for relationships are the currency for change. They are the place where change happens.

And there's just no substitute for that. And so as a person or as a pastor who, like with all of my being and with all of my life and with all of my energy and gifts and all of that, all of my calling wants to see people,

genuinely transformed to the image and likeness of Jesus Christ, to live like Jesus, to love like Jesus, to serve like Jesus, it leads me to a place of saying, yes, online everything has its benefits.

There is no substitute for participating in a community of faith.

It becomes like the church becomes a laboratory for how to live like Jesus lived, how to love like Jesus loved, how to serve like Jesus served.

Served. It's impossible to know how to forgive.

If you're never around people who could hurt you. People who need to be forgiven. Right. It's impossible to know how to humble yourself in service before the Lord.

Without surrounding yourself with people who you may consider to be lesser than you, right? Or that you have an opportunity to serve. It's impossible to know how to live like Jesus,

in isolation because Jesus lived in relationship. He lived in relationship with people who betrayed him, who loved him, who caused problems for him, who served him, whom he served. And so.

If we are going to pursue life, love and service like Jesus did, then we need to be in relationship with others and like, yeah, the church is messy.

Yeah? Yeah, the church is not, well, you know, because that's one of the questions like I was gonna pose to you is like, what would you, as you know, like as a pastor, what would you say to someone who said, you know, like.

No, I think this is good enough for me to just sit home and watch.

Like, I suppose this is like getting a little bit into maybe another topic about like church hurt,

And like the reasons, the reasons why someone would choose to stay home rather than to be,

in relationship or community with others, what would you say maybe to a person?

That's probably a pretty long answer. Yeah, I mean, briefly I would just say like, if I was talking to an actual flesh human being, right, I'd have a pastoral response.

I would say, honestly, what I would want to do is I'd want to just tell me your story.

And in telling their story, I would want to hear the hurt, I want to receive it, I want to hold it, I want to do all of those things.

I want to even apologize. I want to maybe speak truth.

What would Jesus say? What would Jesus have rather the church have done? of those things. But in doing that is illustrating the very point of the Church. If I have this

conversation with somebody and they're like church hurt and I talk with them and I apologize and I seek to point them to Jesus amidst that hurt and if that's effective, well the thing The thing is that the reason that happened is because we sat down and we had a conversation face to face.

The point of the church is that.

Like they're not getting that the thing that hopefully at the end of that conversation my prayer would be that they would feel a little bit of healing a little bit of like recognition maybe a little bit bomb on that wound. I didn't get it from watching church online.

I got it from.

The physical administration of someone who is prayerfully trying to be Jesus to them in that moment.

That's what church is. The place where you experience healing, restoration, and redemption for the hurt that you've experienced in church can only happen in church, not by yourself.

But also the greatest command, right? Commandments of love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself cannot fully be done by yourself.

You can't love your neighbor as yourself without your neighbors.

Do you think there's room in this conversation to bring in some form of like incarnational theology?

Yes. So, you know. I mean, that's like the core of what we're, that's the deeper core of what we're.

Of ecclesiology. Yeah. Really. So, yeah, like, so the idea there that would be that, you know, God in his sovereignty.

And in his transcendence could have by divine fiat, right, do this, said this, arranged the pieces of life and eternity in a certain way and then just been like hands off, isolated from humanity.

Right. Like if we take God's omnipotence, His all-powerfulness, His control of all things, God could have snapped His fingers, said humanity is saved.

Or this is what's going to be like, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, Right. And he could have been done. But instead, became human. He became flesh, right? Exactly.

The fullness, as Paul says in Colossians 1, like the fullness of God was wrapped up in who Jesus was. You know, the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen the one and only.

We have seen His glory, the one who comes from the Father, full of grace and full of truth. And so, So there was a unsatisfactory relationship in transcendent isolation between God and creation.

It was not satisfactory. And so God satisfied the isolation that was brought about by sin.

And offered his very presence in his son Jesus to walk with us, to be with us. Through faith in Jesus, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, like the relationship between us and our,

Heavenly Father between God and us can be, it's intrinsically like inseparable through the dwelling of the Holy Spirit. So I think that there's even like the deeper.

I think God gives us an example that life is built for relationship, close relationship, but not isolation, and that while you may have relationships other places, well I have

relationships at work or my family or whatever, right?

That again, there is no substitute for the relationships that we have and the unity that is.

That is proclaimed through a common faith in Jesus Christ.

I mean the early, like we'll go super, like the early church, one of the big things that's in the New Testament, it's not, I don't think it's, it's not named using the term Gnosticism,

but that's what a lot of Paul's letters are addressing, is this early Christian heresy called Gnosticism. The simplest way of describing that is simply that like the spiritual is more

important than the physical, right? That we need to somehow escape the physical body to become.

Spiritual beings. And the funny thing is, is that we've kind of forgotten how much the early church fought against that heresy. And we are Gnostic. Or we're just never told. Or we're just just never told, right? Like for some people listening, they might just be like, what is Gnosticism?

Spelt with a G actually, G-N-O-S-T-I-C. Right. So it's an old heresy, but like it's very prevalent. Like we, me and you often use the term of like, we're not just brains on sticks. A lot of times the way that like,

church ministry is done and the reason we don't feel comfortable with someone just choosing to exist in an online church way, it's because you're not just a brain receiving

information. You have a heart, you have a soul, you have a physical body. God created all of those things, is redeeming all of those things, and at the end of all things, we will have physical bodies. There was something also to be reminded of is that Jesus Christ,

right now has a physical body. Jesus didn't become spirit again. He remains his physical body with his physical wounds.

His body was resurrected. Right. The resurrection is bringing back of what was physical into existence.

So physicality matters. Touch matters. Touch matters.

And by choosing, knowingly choosing to disembodied ourselves through technology is unincarnating the church.

That's a really harsh way of saying it, but I think it's a true way of saying it. I agree.

So, but just to kind of like bring us back to what I think is kind of the core here is not so much that you and I are taking a back to all technology or to streaming itself. No, no.

What we're hoping to do, and I think the clarity that this conversation's maybe created for both of us is that what we are advocating for is a positive, clear understanding of presence,

space, and the physicality of the church. It's not that we don't want people to ever watch a a church online for any reason, is that we want people to understand why being here.

Being together is important, beneficial, healthy, and necessary for being a church.

Yeah, 100%. Like I said, I don't want to poo poo all technology because it's- We're using it now.

Yeah, you're listening to it because of it, right? We'll press the go button on the live stream this weekend and we're talking about options for Bible study capture and so that

we have that content. It's not that, it is once again. I'm not seeking to devalue the use of technology in worship in particular. I'm seeking to elevate the understanding and the importance

and the priority of physical presence in the community of faith as a way in which to experience the presence of God with those who are seeking to walk with Jesus, to receive in an incarnational

way, not just a content way, to receive in an incarnational way the proclamation of the gospel and to live in relationship with others who are in the community of faith.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Well, I think that's plenty for today. I think yeah, that's a little bit of content.

Of course, there's lots of nuanced perspectives on this. There's 100 different things you can disagree in about that. That's fine. The whole purpose of the podcast is uncut.

We can't deal with every single nuance, although we may understand them and have wrestled with them ourselves. You might be listening or you might be watching and you might say,

hey, I would really like to hear what your thoughts are about this topic or about this idea or this this cultural phenomena or this aspect of faith or theology or whatever.

And so we have created an opportunity or a pathway for you to do that.

It's a mailbag. And it's a really easy, it's a phone number that you text and we get those texts, not to our personal phones, but we get those texts.

And then when we have a full mailbag, whatever that means, we'll break it out and we'll, in an uncut way, without having prepared ahead of time extraordinarily or anything like that, we'll deal with those questions and try and get some of those things answered for you, at least in the best way that we know how.

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