Physical vs. Virtual Churches – You can only show up at one of these in your underwear.

http://www.rethinkmission.org/church/in-defense-of-physical-community-part-two/

Jake Johnson at RethinkMission is writing a series of blog posts where he rebuts the arguments of Douglas Estes in his book, “SimChurch”, regarding the field on virtual churches.  As you can tell by the title, “In Defense of Physical Community”, Jake takes issue with Estes’ conclusions and is crafting rebuttals along several topic lines.  This posting discusses the ‘cultural implications’ of the virtual church approach, as Jake sees them.

The part that got my attention was his argument that…

Now people can attend a church thousands of miles away without ever being involved in a localized community that has the concerns and ministry needs of that person’s local community at the forefront of its mind.

The mainstream Protestant denominations have struggled for the last several years to get ourselves engaged in contextual evangelism – a reaching out to the people of our communities on their terms, seeking out their needs and trying to provide relief.  As Jake says here, a virtual church severely weakens this, if not destroys it; I don’t see many leaving their computers and going forth solitarily to find mission opportunities.  I could be wrong, but we’re social creatures; we’re more comfortable working in groups, and we often get more out of our service experiences when we go in packs.  Often, part of the joy of a service trip is the journey there and back with people we come to know in entirely new ways.

And when those service trips decrease, and fewer go forth to serve as we’re compelled to by Christ, not only do community needs go unmet but people who are searching for God don’t find His hands in the form of our church members.  How many people, given a leg up by someone from a local congregation, find themselves joining that same congregation to discover the joy that drove that first member to help them?  Again, I know some will argue that we’ll improvise and come up with ways to network with others locally, though we are a member of a virtual church, and that these local networks will fill in some of the gaps left by the deterioration of the physical church.  But I have my grave doubts.

I highly recommend reading Jake’s first post and watching for his subsequent ones at http://www.rethinkmission.org.