We’ve all seen those warnings on drug commercials and medications. Communicated in small print and rapid recitation is the fact that prolonged use can produce long-term adverse side effects.

While I wholeheartedly applaud the Church’s current creativity in utilizing an online presence amidst this crisis, I am concerned about the long-term adverse side effects. So, even as we minister now, we must keep the long-term in mind, and shepherd the flock that the Holy Spirit has made us overseers accordingly (Acts 20:28). 

What most are doing now, gathering around our computers isolated in our homes, is not church, and we must communicate that.  It is the best available alternative, and the Church is not a building but a people. Yet, we must be aware that this new paradigm may be very appealing to some and quite unappealing to others, and accurately assess why.

First, we, as a people, tend to be lazy and, like the students that I witness daily at my daughter’s school bypassing the paved sidewalk to carve a barren path in the grass, will take the path of least resistance. This new temporary stopgap measure of online worship and small groups may appeal to many, given its ease and relative anonymity.

And advancing technologies will continue to provide new possibilities; however, just because we CAN doesn’t mean we SHOULD utilize them. Our standard for accountability is sola scriptura, and our motivation is the full spiritual maturity of our people in Christ (Col. 1:28).

Second, there may be a large group of church attendees who find this current scenario woefully unappealing…for all the wrong reasons.  Drawn in by large, emotional worship experiences, quality production values, and state of the art facilities, some find themselves longing for a quick end to quarantine.

Truthfully, many of them are unsaved. Sadly, the church today is full of unconverted people, often drawn by false teachers, tickling their ears with false gospels, cheap grace, and self-help talks disguised as sermons, bereft of sound doctrine.

And while it is certainly an occasion for joy when an unsaved person chooses to observe a worship service of believers, it is also important to remember the primary purpose for worship. 

Steve Lawson in his book, Famine in the Land, states

These first gatherings of the church were designed primarily for edifying believers, not for evangelizing unbelievers. Of course, they were reaching out to the unsaved, for “the Lord was adding to their number day by day those who were being saved” (v. 47). But this “evangelism explosion” was the result of their teaching, not the stated purpose of it. They gathered for edification; they scattered for evangelism. The primary focus of their corporate worship gatherings was for building up the believers, not for reaching seekers. When this priority becomes reversed and the church meets primarily to save the lost, the apostles’ teaching soon becomes compromised and diluted.

And what of believers frustrated amidst this current scenario?  R.C. Sproul in his book Truths We Confess, states the following about this statement in the Westminster Confession of Faith:

Saints by profession are bound to maintain a holy fellowship and communion in the worship of God.

Our purpose for assembling together is to worship God, to offer the sacrifices of praise. If people are leaving church because they are bored, that is revealing. The answer is not to put on dramatic presentations on Sunday morning or to include Christian rock music or any other form of entertainment. If people are bored, they don’t have a sense of coming into the presence of God. No one has ever been confronted with the living God and walked away bored.

So while the current online prescription is the only available, let’s beware the danger of long-term exposure to anything less than a biblical expression of a worship service.