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Pastor Jay's Blog

You Can't Live-Stream Church

 

During these days of pandemic and our attempts at social distancing, many of the larger churches have resorted to live-streaming a service.  Dressed in your Sunday-best p.j.s, you can sing along to songs and hear a sermon right from your couch. This is not a surprising move. Many churches are already catering to the online experience.  You can pay your tithe online, submit prayer requests, connect on social media and hear as many sermons as you can stomach.  

So here is the question: is this church?  Can you get all you need with an internet connection?   The answer is a whopping NO. As has been said many times, the church is not a building, it is people.  But the church is also not an internet connection of digitized people. In this day, we need to remember that church is not sermons, Christian music or anything other thing you can just watch.  

Church is a covenant community of people unified together by the blood of Christ and the indwelling Spirit.  Church is a living body of a defined number of people that touches, speaks, moves, responds, reacts, serves and more.   This local group of people with all this constant activity cannot be digitized and beamed through cyber-space. There are a thousand different things happening when the saints gather, and you get maybe three of them through a live-stream.  

What are these 997 other things that happen during a gathering?  You see the tears of a discouraged mother and you ask what is happening.  You are prayed for and hugged by someone who has been tracking with your particular trial.  You watch the example of a leader as he poses a wise question to a friend. You are chastened in your hard-heartedness as you see a suffering saint offer up thankful worship.  You take communion and break the one bread with this one body of believers that you also have committed to.  

You can’t live-stream any of this.  But this is what the church does. The church is a Spirit-indwelt covenant community, where each part is being used for the sanctification of the whole as they interact with one another.  To talk about live-streaming church means you are infected with the entertainment mentality that is run amuck in our culture.  

If the church pauses its meetings for several weeks, and you want to listen to sermons while you stay home that is fine.  Every Christian should be encouraged to read the Word, read some edifying books, listen to a sermon and more. But don’t call that church.  You are not doing church unless you are with God’s people. In fact, “doing church” doesn’t even make sense. You don’t do church; you fellowship with the church, grow with the church, love the church, minister to the church.    Until that happens, you are either a saint longing to join with the body again, or just another consumer tuning in because “why not.”