Despite more online church options, Philip Yancey says, embodied gathering will always be relevant.
An Associated Press poll last year reported that three-quarters of churchgoers in the US plan to resume regular in-person attendance as the pandemic subsides.
The pastors I know are looking out at the empty seats with their fingers crossed, hoping that prediction will eventually come true.
I confess that during the lockdown I rather enjoyed watching church services online while lounging in my bathrobe, sipping coffee, and controlling the pace with a remote. If something failed to hold my interest, I could surf the web in search of better music or a more engaging sermon.
I’m not alone. In the UK, for example, a small percent of the population attends church on average. (The late poet R. S. Thomas, a priest in the Church of Wales, called himself “a vicar of large things in a small parish.”)
Yet a quarter of British adults watched or listened to a religious service during the coronavirus lockdown, and one in 20 said they started praying during the crisis.
As my memoir, Where the Light Fell, recounts, I’ve had a checkered history with the church. As a child, I sat through hellfire-and-brimstone sermons in my Southern fundamentalist congregation—which barred Black congregants from entering and warned against electing a Catholic president (Kennedy).
To recover, I spent a few years away from church before sampling a ’60s-style house church that substituted the Communion elements of bread and wine for Coke and potato chips.
Eventually, I settled into a more traditional church in Chicago that combined a spirit of grace with an emphasis on social justice. Moving to a small town in Colorado, however, limited my options. The church I now attend once attracted a thousand regulars—but ...
from Christianity Today Magazine https://ift.tt/vtEmOVz
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