The Internet Is My Parish

This week many pastors are settling into how Easter services will look. Meanwhile, I have been thinking ahead about What’s Next. As I have written before, what normal will look like Post-Covid-19 will be more like Post-9/11, Post-Katrina than Post-2008 Housing Crisis. The effects will be long-lasting. Not only with sickness, grief, and economic hardships but also socially. We will be less likely to shake hands in the future. We will be more likely to wear masks when we go out in public. Our children will grow up all too familiar with social distancing. I do believe our children will also have fonder memories of our “time together” (quarantine) when they are much much older.

For the church, there are more unknowns out there. There seem to be a few camps that were forming before Covid-19 took over our daily lives. Those camps were the Mega Church and the Micro/Missional Church. The tension between these two philosophies was coming to a head in late 2019 and early 2020. The Micro/Missional philosophy was probably correct, even prophetic, in the need to move away from the Sunday Service as the centerpiece of “church” and move more towards relationships, discipleship, and intentionality. Now, the leaders of these movements were not always full of tact when expressing their thoughts, but I do believe they were on the right track.

Meanwhile, the Mega Church movement has been great at gathering and reaching people. Some may dismiss the “show” and production on Sunday mornings (or Saturday nights, or Mondays, or On-Demand), but most of these churches and leaders have been doing excellent work. This work creating an in-person experience has moved out from under their feet.

Here is where the opportunity for both comes into play. The Mega Church now has an opportunity to focus. Become more intimate, relational, even missional in their approach. These larger churches benefit from having a vast reach already. They probably are better set up from the production standpoint for videos and creativity. Now, they simply need to focus on becoming intentional with those whom they are reaching. Likewise, the Micro/Missional Church no longer only speaks to those in their living rooms. If they record a message, or a gathering, and upload to the internet, the reach goes world-wide. Pastors need to realize this reach. No longer will they only be able to reach those within their physical community. The internet is now their community. On June 11, 1739, the famed Methodist preacher, John Wesley, said “The World is my Parish.” Well, today collectively, pastors can say, “The internet is my parish.”