In the world before the global pandemic, the question of digital church was relegated to futurists and megachurches, to church planters–cum–app developers. Without a doubt this question of digital church was already too late, though. By the time that 2020 happened, it was no longer a question of whether digital church would become normalized but of how rapidly that normalization would unfold and transform the church.
I come to this question as a skeptic and a realist. I wrote a book in which I said that the church is one of flesh and blood, yet I spent much of 2021 talking with people about digital church. I attend a church that does not—and probably will never—have an online campus but that still calibrates the timing of what it does on Sundays for how it looks for television. I teach in a university that, like many universities, believes education requires more than the distribution of information and yet is deeply committed to providing education in online modules.
I mention all of this as a preface: digital life is immeasurably with us, and thus it is a little too late to engage in something like digital discernment. We cannot discern whether we want the water to be wet. Digital church is now with us, and so the question before us is not whether it should be, and not whether or not it is useful, but whether digital church is coherent. Christ has renewed humanity, creating a new world in the shell of the old, and if church is the name we give for that sign of contradiction and change, what does it mean for our faith to have digital church?
Digital Church as Missional Vista
In his book Hybrid Church, James Emery White approaches church as an entity that emerges in and through its use. Mission is the central focus of the church for White, and with the digital world now a central feature of ordinary life, he argues that mission must move online. And despite including Marshall McCluhan’s caveats that a message is inseparable from the medium in which it appears, White speaks positively of the emergence of digital church:
The only way to continue the human interaction and transformation the church uniquely provides is to bridge the digital divide. It will take the digital to both maintain and, in areas where it is desperately needed, call people to the physical. I am contending for thoughtful engagement of digital tools for the sake of the evangelistic cause.[1]
White’s fervor and desire for cultural engagement is palpable. He opens with a meditation that draws together phenomena of a post-Christian culture and a digital one, and the overall ethos for the book is one urgent communication: Christians must communicate, now, and in this dawning way.
The book’s approach, thus, is one of ambivalence. On the one hand, it acknowledges the documented effects that digital media have on human psychology, conversation patterns, and sociality, whereas, on the other hand, it contends that Christianity can make use of these technological norms to bring new people into traditional emphases on baptism, communion, and physical communities. It is a book caught between worlds, maintaining a traditionalist vision of church community—one rooted in sacraments, small conversations, and discipleship—while seeing these goods as being compatible with a digital infrastructure, digital marketing apparatus, and digital campuses that decidedly push against the formation of these goods. In his chapter on the online campus, this tension becomes acute, when, after emphasizing the need for physical community and sacraments, the moderator of his online church module concedes that there’s never a need to leave the online ecosystem for such physical things.[2]
The emergence of a new digital landscape for churches seems to pose questions beyond White’s emphasis on evangelism. Whatever else there might be to say about the ability of digital engagement to break through algorithmic noise, White’s book leaves us with an ambivalent vision created by his functionalism about church. If what church is about is accomplishing a series of tasks, then it seems that his détente is untenable: that is, if his online church moderator has already decided there is no need for the physical engagements White values, then the sign is on the wall that this arrangement is already crumbling.
Digital Church as Emergency Emergence
In contrast to a functionalist vision of church, in which the church is determined by the tasks it performs, there are visions of digital church that take seriously McCluhan’s dictum that the “medium is the message.” From these perspectives, a digital world occasions not just a change in delivery but a change in the substance of what church is. Consider the controversy that erupted online in 2022 when Tish Harrison Warren, then a New York Times columnist and Anglican priest, voiced the opinion that because church is an embodied event, one in which people partake of the sacraments together, churches should ditch their live feed and maintain in-person services.[3] The logic of her argument was straightforward: sacraments require not just priestly confection but are Christ’s presence. Thus, taking the sacraments requires bodily presence and not virtual viewing. The ensuing backlash chastised her for being insensitive to the immunocompromised or unable to conceive of the suffering of others. But regardless of what we think of Warren’s view, these kinds of debates are clearly very different than the functionalist ones.
It is here that Richard Burridge’s Holy Communion in Contagious Times is a welcome addition to the conversation. In his book, Burridge takes the role of an ethnographer, describing the various solutions proposed by various dioceses with empathy and curiosity, offering thick descriptions of what it looks like to take Communion in the program Second Life or how one diocese attempted to offer Communion through a Zoom platform, which allowed for communicants to see each other’s faces. He considers questions of pastoral intention, lay need for Christ’s presence, and the possibility of lay preachers to expand sacramental reach of the ordained and surveys ten positions taken by various church bodies during the pandemic, ranging from eucharistic fasts to solo Communions, from cyberchurch simulations to simultaneous webcasts. Burridge approaches the question of digital life and church as one evoked by an emergency situation, sharing the options without taking a position of his own.[4]
But for Burridge, there are certain elements without which the church ceases to be the church, such as ordination or that the sacraments are particular and local entities, consumable in person. And within these assumptions, a curious range of possibilities emerges, some of which are more limited than others. For example, Burridge describes drive-through Communions and expanded homebound services or toys with the possibility of the sacraments being distributed by the laity instead of the clergy by asking what kinds of training and confirmation an expanded laity might need to operate in this way. He explores the Second Life phenomenon, not by diminishing sacramentality, but by asking in what ways avatars may be extensions of the flesh and blood self into digital space.
The idea of avatars is treated by Burridge not so much as an emergency accommodation but as a clarified description of reality that the emergency has surfaced. He asks whether digital life is now so wrapped up in our understanding of existence as to make hard-and-fast distinctions between digital and nondigital life moot. If digital life is so thoroughly enmeshed with what it means to be a human, then—under the right conditions, such as an avatar—Burridge suggests that online church remains an intelligible option. For an avatar—as enmeshed with the person behind the image—would be an extension of the self, capable of receiving the digital extension of the physical Eucharist.
What is intriguing about Burridge’s description of this proposal is not that it alters the eucharistic logic of church but that it makes the eucharistic presence more ubiquitous by accepting that what humans are, and thus, what the church is, is more expansive than we previously thought. The pandemic has not so much changed what the church is as it has exposed what was already the case: church is a complex space insofar as what humans are is not limited by physical space. The argument here is not that God can overcome physical limits but that human limits are not what we thought they were.
In Burridge’s work, the metaphysical commitments of church are those of the sacraments; what is signified in the Eucharist is also true about creation more broadly—the “world in a wafer,” as William Cavanaugh has eloquently put it.[5] And thus, the caution with which Burridge edges toward an online celebration is not one driven by function but by a creative commitment to what church is. The COVID pandemic has illuminated creaturely life in a way that now cannot be unseen, and so with this newfound sight, Burridge suggests we must texture our understanding of the kinds of humans church happens for.
Digital Church as Emergent Reality
Jeffrey Mahan approaches the question of digital church not as a tool to be employed (White) nor as an occasion to expand existing theological commitments (Burridge) but as invitation for church to be theologically revised. With Burridge, we saw that world events provide an occasion to expand existing notions in modified ways, but what appears here is a reversal of the terms. As Mahan puts it, “Faith must adapt to the communications needs and norms of people in different contexts,” where faith means “a bodily practice rooted in a sensual encounter with the sacred.”[6]
Already we are in different territory, for what is central to Mahan is not, as with the previous two thinkers, a defined set of tasks (White) or set of theological assumptions about what a person is (Burridge). With Mahan, the meaning of church follows from an emergent sense of self forged in and through a shifting digital terrain. There is, in other words, a way out of viewing “tradition as a sort of data bank to be accessed, edited and reused,” for what is central to any designation of church is whether it proceeds authentically from the emerging sense of self of the practitioners.[7]
At one level, this occurs all the time, even within distinct church traditions—Christian practices from other parts of the common story are put to new use and recovered to great profit. But what Mahan means is not just this but that church is an emergence from within a digital-cultural matrix which may or may not subsequently turn to the language of Christians to articulate what is happening. Digital culture, and their ensuing connections, are unalloyed goods in Mahan’s description through which the Holy Spirit is bringing new forms of connection into being.
Behind these flowery descriptions are a number of incoherences.
If church is an emergent social network, rooted in self-authenticated practices, not only does this not need to be connected to any Christian language or concept to occur, as Mahan has said, but what occurs cannot be judged: it can only be embraced as true insofar as it has meaning for the practitioner. This does not prevent Mahan from appealing to language such as “best practices” or “good” to describe particular versions of digital engagement, but what these valuations could mean apart from their ability to facilitate a person’s sense of self, I do not know.[8]
Throughout the book, Mahan insists that the church needs to be more networked or that congregations conceive of themselves beyond traditional theological bounds, but these dictums are not issued as adaptations to an emergency (Burridge) or responses to an evangelistic need (White); they are comportments to emergent norms of selfhood that are ultimately determined by digital connections. In Mahan’s book, the mediating factor that draws people together is a Holy Spirit who is indistinguishable from an algorithm, such that people’s individuations are held together not by common commitments of doctrine or even considerations of what is meant by God but by the fact they have all been drawn there together by a still small voice that winds up being nothing other than the internet’s mysterious operation.
Bringing Together Digital and Church
The basic thesis assumed by these books appear to be the following: digital and church name two forms of life, both with their own norms for how people relate and what creatures need. The breadth of difference between these terms and how we should interrogate them, though, is subject to debate. For White, the use of the terms is tactical; for Burridge, a noncommittal posture of inquiry remains central; for Mahan, an assimilation is at hand, with church needing to embrace a new digital ecosystem.
But the common question they put forward is something like this: can there be a marriage of these two terms, with their divergent sense of how history works, what God is like, and thus, what God’s people are to be like? It is here that White and Mahan, despite their divergences on theological presuppositions, begin to sound remarkably similar: the functional ecclesiology of White and the emergent ecclesiology of Mahan are, in the end, both committed to function before form. Burridge, by contrast, maintains the distance between the terms, recognizing that there may be some critical work that digital life does on our conceptions of church but that, in the end, there is something substantially different: digital life is, for Burridge, more like an alternate form of mediation between persons, a different kind of intelligence; it is not simply a tool that can be wielded so easily.
To name church as a functional concept assumes a posture of knowledge about ourselves and about God that is primed, I think, perfectly for digital church, but not in the way that White and Mahan presume. A functional account of church presumes that the forms of our world can be adapted to fit the functions, and as both White and Mahan describe it, this adaptation is a mostly positive development, with respect to either mission or religious authenticity. And it is this vision of church that make them both, it seems, more susceptible to the way in which digital culture may change not just the offices, ordinances, or habits of the church but also the ways in which digital culture alters whom we gather with, how we worship, and ultimately, our vision of whom we worship.
The unintended effect of Burridge approaching his topic as an emergency situation is that he acknowledges that the adaptation of ecclesiology to a digital culture is one that is provoked by events beyond the ordinary rhythms of life. In an emergency, it is unclear yet what norms will remain and what will never be again. Insofar as Burridge—in contrast to White and Mahan—detects a distinction between the terms digital and church, his situational posture of inquiry leads to surveying alternatives, and surveying alternatives leads to a set of fairly modest proposals, neither emergent nor anxious, neither driven by the rise of the nones nor perceptions of institutional irrelevance. It seems that only this kind of awareness can generate a creativity capable of being aware of digital culture as a principality and of what it means to be the church within a world captive to such a master.
[1] James Emery White, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Reflective, 2023), 61.
[2] White, Hybrid Church, 129.
[3] See McCluhan, “The Medium Is the Message,” in Understanding the Media: The Extensions of Man (New York, NY: Signet Books, 1964): 1; and Warren, “Why Churches Should Drop Their Online Services,” New York Times, January 30, 2022, https://archive.is/f3Nqn#selection-423.0-423.46.
[4] See Burridge, Holy Communion in Contagious Times: Celebrating the Eucharist in the Everyday and Online Worlds (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2022).
[5] See Cavanaugh, “The World in A Wafer: A Geography of the Eucharist as Resistance to Globalization,” Modern Theology 15 (1999): 181–96.
[6] Mahan, Church as Network: Christian Life and Connection in Digital Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021), 9 and 3.
[7] Mahan, Church, 41.
[8] Mahan, Church, 19.