Going to Church Online

One of my responsibilities as a Professor of Worship is to keep tabs on new developments in my field. For a while now, I’ve been wanting to try out “online” church. Over the past few months I’ve had the opportunity to visit a few different churches and share a little of what I experienced. Since I didn’t have any teaching or music responsibilities at my church this morning, I thought I’d attend church “online” and see what it was like.

Central Christian Church in Las Vegas is the only Christian Church I know that has an online service, so this was my default choice. They have two options: the online campus and the Facebook campus. I brought up both pages and the Facebook video stream seemed a little better, so I logged into FB and experienced the service this way.

The service opened with a worship set, and as you’d expect, the music was very good. The worship team opened with a really creative blending of “Joy to the World” and Chris Tomlin’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” that began with the string riff from Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida.” It was a brilliant arrangement. The rest of the set was fairly standard guitar-driven modern worship, but done well. I was intrigued by their cover of Mercy Me’s “Little Drummer Boy,” and thought it was interesting to use as a congregational song. (On a less spiritual note, I also thought one of the guitar players looked a lot like Jon Favreau, the actor and director of Iron Man, but that’s beside the point.)

So how does it work to participate in group singing in the comfort of your home? I guess it depends on your perspective. I turned the sound up a little louder for this section of the service to try and duplicate the feeling of being at church. This worked to some degree, but the bottom line is that you can’t really duplicate congregational singing sitting in front of a computer alone. I did, however, really enjoy and appreciate the music and sang along part of the time.

After the music the worship leader encouraged people to greet one another, and said hello to people attending online.  (I said hello to the others attending the Facebook service – I recall there were about 13 of us.)  Then there was a video just for those online, and host mentioned that around 4,000 people had given their lives to Christ via the online campus, and over 2,300 had followed through with baptism. The host also encouraged us to donate online and thanked those who give online on a regular basis. He also mentioned that about 3,000 people a week attend an online service at Central.

After the video came the sermon by Jud Wilhite, Senior Pastor of Central Christian. It was a great message on the “love story” of Christmas. Very solid and biblical. Anyone who accuses huge churches of being shallow in their preaching obviously hasn’t heard Mr. Wilhite. He is a great communicator and his message was practical while being relevant and theological. Very good stuff.

At the end of the message Jud called people to commitment in a way that is very familiar to anyone from a Restoration Movement church.  He led people in a “sinner’s prayer” style moment, and the online service ended at this point. I asked the host what would happen if someone wanted to be baptized, and he said the next logical step would be to click on the prayer or help buttons on the side. This made sense to me, and simply seems a different way to do what we would normally do in a Christian Church. I am guessing there are additional instructions given in the live service.

What about communion? It’s standard practice to celebrate the Lord’s Supper weekly in the Christian Church. However, there was no mention of it in the service, and no mention of it on the online campus page (at least from what I saw). I watched part of the next service, and asked a question about how they do communion. They celebrate communion on the first Wednesday of each month, when all their campuses come together, and also a few times of the year on the weekends. For those attending the online service, it’s simply not a part of the experience.

I enjoyed interacting with people via the Facebook setup on the site. It takes the online experience beyond just “watching a video stream” and gives you the chance to makes comments or ask questions. This is a good example of a component to online church that you can’t find in a traditional experience.

This is just a summary of my experience with their online service. I’ll do a follow-up post with some further reflections.