In defense of online church

Hat tip to Gena for pointing me to this spirited and interesting defense of the online communities that various churches are building. A couple of my more favorite excerpts:

Let’s lay aside for a moment that nowhere in the Bible does it preclude online church, in any way. Let’s lay aside the fact that church history almost nowhere would lead someone to conclude that a virtual church is not valid (the lesson of church history is that new formats for church always go through a period where they are attacked as invalid). Let’s lay aside the troubling truth of the testimonies of meaningful community that are coming out of online churches. Let’s lay aside the problem that most (all I’ve read) of the blogposts criticizing virtual churches are based on cultural factors, pop psychology, materialistic misreadings of a few New Testament verses, or worse, citations of famous pastors who have doubts.

People are led to believe that members of online churches all connect to their video-game church as anonymous zombies in a Tron-like world. Supposedly these virtual (fake) Christians never really know each other, it’s all a façade, and that this is the sum and total of a virtual church. The real truth is that every virtual church I’ve ever attended has flesh-and-blood people in virtual (real!) community with other flesh-and-blood people whose primary meeting place is in synthetic space. Note I said primary! Because every virtual church I’ve encountered has worked very hard to put into place ‘regular’ aspects—from baptisms to small groups to mission trips—in order to help build real community across the board. Critics aside, no virtual church I’ve ever met is trying to be virtual-only (not that that would be wrong, but it would be like starting a church in a building and only being the church in that one building—why would you do that?)

n this myth, critics single out the lack of ‘physical contact.’ But isn’t that why God invented megachurches—so we could avoid physical contact? So that people could go to church ‘together’ but sit so far apart as to never touch or physically know each other? Of course, I’m largely kidding, and come to think of it, this happens in my small brick and mortar church, too

I just may have to buy this author's book. His name is Douglas Estes, and the book is SimChurch.