All across the United States, congregations have adopted online worship services. They did so within a matter of days after the governors' announcements regarding the lockdowns.
The speed of the responses has been astounding. The technologies were already in place in local congregations: camcorders and microphones. Perhaps some congregations purchased them for very little money. The total investment was probably under $300.
I have seen some of the broadcasts. The sound is clear. The pastors' images are clear. Their messages got out.
Hymn singing is a problem. Choirs cannot be brought in. Usually, it is just a few people in the congregation who have some singing ability. They sing the hymns.
The texts of the hymns are put online. Anyone at home who wants to sing can follow along clearly.
Churches with organs do not use them. If somebody can play the piano or guitars, that is sufficient.
The main problem is that the pastors have been trained all their lives to turn their heads from side to side, making brief eye contact with people in the congregations. The problem is this: the congregations are looking at computer screens. Therefore, the congregations are technologically right in the center of the camcorder lens. But pastors, like old dogs, do not learn new tricks. They do not stare straight into the screen and preach. They should, but they don't.
I doubt that many pastors have Teleprompters. These are tricky to use. They work great, but it takes a lot longer to compose a sermon to be displayed on one. You have to have a device that reverses the text the way a mirror would. That's because the text has to be run through a mirror to convert it back into normal text on the glass screen that sits in front of the camcorder's lens.
The point I'm making is simple: the technology required to produce a serviceable sermon online is cheap and easy to use. I suspect a lot of churches are already using camcorders and decent microphones for shut-ins. My church does. So, there was not much of a learning curve.
PLATFORMS
There are various platforms that can be used.
A popular one is Sermon Audio. On the first day, Sermon Audio had problems. It was overwhelmed with so many churches switching to live streaming. But it adjusted by the next week.
It is possible to use YouTube to shoot a video, and then post it on the church's site. It can be embedded on a page. That works. It's not live-streamed, but it works.
If the church doesn't want the YouTube logo in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, it can use Vimeo. It doesn't cost much money to set up a Vimeo account. It's about $700 a year. It's a flat rate.
A member of this site told me that his church uses Facebook. It works fine for the congregation.
He also told me this. They can track the number of viewers. There have been more viewers than there are members of the congregation. They don't know where the viewers are coming from. They can be anywhere. It didn't cost much money to set up the account. He didn't tell me the details, but if I were a pastor, I would look into it.
My point again is simple: it was cheap and easy for churches to find platforms that have been serviceable for getting the worship services to shut-ins, or as they are called these days, locked-ins.
WHY NOT CONTINUE?
It would have been a real disaster for the economy if people had not been able to move online with their jobs. We would be in something worse than the Great Depression if this had not been possible. Because it has been possible, we are merely suffering a recession.
The same thing is true of worship services. The technologies two decades ago and the costs two decades ago would have been prohibitive for all but a handful of congregations to put their worship services online. Today, it is cheap and easy. It is really not much of a disruption of pastoral preaching.
There is a strong case for having face-to-face contact in the church spaces where people assemble before and after the service. Congregations are called congregations because people congregate. It is also better to be inside the room worshiping together, singing together, reciting the creeds together and so forth than sitting at home alone.
But there is a huge liability for American-style and Western-style worship. That liability is the cost of the real estate. It would be difficult for a revival to take place in the West that would involve meeting weekly in large buildings that are set aside exclusively for worship. It takes an acre of paved parking to hold 100 adults plus the children. An acre is prohibitively expensive in cities on the coasts, and it's very expensive in most cities generally. But what if you have a larger church? What if you want 500 adults? Then you need 5 acres. That's expensive.
The only way that a major revival can take place comparable to the Second Great Awakening from 1801-40 would be with home churches. In the Second Great Awakening, Methodist and Baptist itinerant preachers went from congregation to congregation. They were called circuit riders. In between visits, which might be once a month, or might be even fewer, local church officers had to do the preaching, lead the singing, and everything else. It required decentralization.
This was not possible for Presbyterians, Anglicans, and most European continental denominations, such as Lutherans. They had to have preachers who were screened by formal higher education. Most of them had to have the equivalent of college degrees. There were not enough of them to plant churches during the waves of revivals. So, the Methodists and the Baptists took over worship west of the Allegheny Mountains. That's where the growth was. They saved money on real estate. They saved money on pastoral salaries.
Today, the home church model could provide the real estate, but denominations are not set up to provide the training of the pastors. If there ever were a revival, what happened in the early 1800's to the mid-1800's would happen again. But, this time, it wouldn't be the Methodists and the Baptists who make the gains. They have become as bureaucratic as the other denominations. It would be Pentecostals and independents.
If the denominations want to maintain control over what is preached, there is now a way to do this: online preaching. We are seeing this today. As in the case of the site member whose congregation has more viewers than members, those viewers are not being brought into the congregation. They may not be capable of being brought in geographically. They could be in another state or another country.
The technology now exists to handle the problem of the cost of real estate if there were ever revival. Neighborhood churches could begin as soon as people in neighborhoods invite their neighbors over to worship. The couch potatoes would cease to be couch potatoes. People would learn their neighbors' names and interests. Anyone in the neighborhood could supply the space. It would be a decentralized form of worship.
The lockdowns are going to end fairly soon. At that point, there will be an opportunity for evangelism. Somebody who has been watching a weekly service on his computer or his smartphone can hook it up to his flatscreen TV. All it takes is an HDMI connection. There's not much to it. Then he can invite neighbors in. He would not be able to call this a congregation. Maybe you could just call it a Sunday morning Bible study. But, legally, it could be converted into a local congregation. But most denominations are not set up to do this. They would resist doing this. If it were a showdown between a mass revival or altering the denominational Book of Church Order, I think most of them would say skip the revival. "Let the Pentecostals run it." The Pentecostals will gladly run it.
Denominations would have to figure out how to handle communion (Lord's Supper). Denominations that require seminary-trained men to administer communion would have a competitive problem under such circumstances. They would have to adjust institutionally, or else they would have to experience what their predecessors experienced during the Second Great Awakening west of the Alleghenies. They would cease to be the dominant denominations. This is already taking place. The independents and the Pentecostals are growing. This has been going on since the late 1960's.
SUCCESS STORIES
When the lockdowns cease, I hope pastors who have had successes will continue to maintain online worship for those who want to participate in their homes.
I hope pastors who have had successes in attracting these viewers will find ways of integrating them into congregational worship at a distance. This has not been done in the past, but it is certainly technologically feasible today.
I hope pastors who have experienced successes will post articles about them, showing how they attained these successes, and what they are doing to convert temporary viewers into permanent members.
In other words, I would like to see the lemons of the lockdowns converted into lemonade: new members who are participating at a distance. Without the lockdowns, pastors would not have thought about doing this. They have been forced to do it. Now they should start thinking about converting what was a technological fallback position into a new form of evangelism and a new form of worship.
Some churches had already adopted what is known as the satellite model. A major church starts sister churches all over a city. The same pastor preaches for all the sister churches, which use big screen TVs. The model has not yet taken hold, but it does exist. Perhaps a variation of this model could be developed in order to extend the use of home churches.
It will not require any money, to speak of, to do this. It will take a re-thinking of church hierarchies, church worship, and institutional evangelism. As always, old dogs don't like to learn new tricks. But, for the sake of extending the revival, it may be time to learn some new tricks.
If you see a posted article about congregations that are taking advantage of this after the lockdowns cease, please send me a link.
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