“Forsake Not the Livestreaming of Yourselves Together”

Allan Stevo sent me an article entitled, “What Is Missing From “Home-Churching.” It articulates six objections to fake, online “worship”:

1. Digital cannot replace incarnational. Protestants, Orthodox, and Catholics all agree something divinely appointed is happening when the Body of Christ gathers. This is lost when we are gathering at home… 
2. The absence of the Lord’s Supper. …
3. The immediate and jarring transition back into family life. The moment the benediction is given [online], we stand up, shut down the computer, pet the dog, and walk back into the kitchen. What a letdown.  … what cannot be replicated at home are the once-a-week opportunities for a series of quick hugs, brief check-ins, and all the rest of the physical hubbub that happens only in a large family gathering in the local church.
4. Singing as a body. … 
5. The anchor of the Sabbath. ….our whole week revolves around the Lord’s Day—corporate worship, our family rituals and habits, and rest—and the upcoming six days of work/study/play depend upon it. Losing the gravity of that anchor (not helped at all by the ever-evolving and destabilizing nature of the COVID-19 crisis) has created a feeling of listlessness. …
6. The artificial separation of life and death. … Life on this earth is but a vapor, while eternal life with the Lord Jesus Christ awaits all who believe in him. Not being able to worship alongside older folks and younger folks and all the ages in between diminishes the incarnational aspect of the Body of Christ. We are physical, palpable reminders—with our ailments and our bodies slowly declining—that this is not our home, that we were bought with a price, that we are simply pilgrims on a journey. …

Meanwhile, Pastor Rich Little also endorsed in-person worship when he emailed me this week:

There is not one line in any of the twenty-seven books [of the New Testament] that even remotely attempts to memorialize a dead Jesus. … When 2 or 3 meet in the name of Christ (Matthew 28), He is literally there in His Word (taken from scripture, made living in the oral preaching where the Pastor is guided by the Holy Spirit to give Christ in law & gospel). This is why we place a heavy emphasis on corporate worship (at least we do in the Lutheran tradition) because we encounter Christ in the external (spoken) Word. Coming to church as a Christian is not mere ritual designed to stoke some feeling of “inner spirituality” like religious rites in other world religions. We meet to encounter a very much alive and present God & Savior in Christ the Living Word. Nor can we substitute “virtual” or “online” so-called services … as that is not an encounter with God’s living, flesh-and-blood humanity because it’s filtered through an inanimate machine.

AMEN!

Finally, a recent snail-mailing from Voice of the  Martyrs contained this pledge:

The more that persecutors seek to restrict access to God’s Word, the more we will send Bibles. For every Bible they destroy, five will take its place. 

Uh-oh: Parson Goat must be shouting “Romans 13!” right about now. After all, if his parishioners can sustain themselves on Livestreamed “worship”  to honor the diktats of godless politicians, why can’t our persecuted brothers and sisters cease clamoring for the Word out of respect for their despots?

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