Over the last month or so, I’ve heard from several family members and friends that their wards are trying to wind down online church. There are variations, of course, everything from announcing that there will be no more Zoom church to making the link available only to people who get approval from the bishop (presumably because of health or familial issues).
I’m not clear on whether these are ward, stake, area, or general church initiatives. But I am clear that this is a terrible idea, made more terrible because nobody has explained the underlying reasons to restrict or eliminate online church.
The most immediate reason it’s a terrible idea is the current omicron wave, which sickened as many as 1 million people Monday alone, is quickly filling up our hospitals, and is just as quickly shutting our schools.
But while the omicron wave is an immediate rebuke to shutting down a widely-available online church option, it’s not the primary reason I think it’s a terrible idea. The current wave will end (with luck, as soon as this month!). At some point, the pandemic will end (though probably with Covid becoming endemic).
But even in a post-pandemic world, I can’t think of a single compelling reason to eliminate an online church option.
Look, for the vast majority of us, in-person church is a better experience. After nearly two years of Zoom, I won’t cry when I can stop using it except on rare occasions. And I think most members will return to in-person church as soon as they feel safe going.[fn1]
But there are people who, for various reasons, find it extremely hard (if not impossible) to go in-person. For some, that’s a temporary state. New mothers, for instance, often stay home for several weeks after having a baby. Plenty of us have had surgery or a cold that keeps us home. A transplant can require someone to stay home for months. But, for the most part, people home for familial or medical reasons will eventually go back. But imagine if they could participate for the time that they’re homebound. It would give them the spiritual and community benefits of worshiping with their wards for that liminal time period.
People travel (or, at least, travelled!) for business, for family, for pleasure. And sure, sometimes they can attend a ward where they are. But they can’t always. The option to attend their home ward online would, again, be a benefit to people who would love to attend but can’t.
And for the elderly and those with limited mobility, immune problems, or other issues that make it hard to arrive at church, sit for long periods of time, or otherwise attend, the choice may be between attending online or not attending at all. And it seems to me that attending online is a far better choice than not attending at all.
Like I said above, I don’t know why the wards that are shutting down online options are doing it. But I can posit a couple reasons.
The first, and I suspect most likely, is inertia and comfort. For all of us who are older than four, the majority of our lives we have had in-person church. Many of us feel comfortable with it. The shift to online was forced by a pandemic and seems like an exception to the norm. And people are often eager to get back to the norm they felt comfortable with.
But if it’s not inertia, maybe it’s because church leaders (at whatever level these decisions are being made) are afraid people will stop attending and shift to online. And on the margins, there may be a handful of people who do that. I suspect, as I said above, that most will prefer an in-person experience to an online experience. But assume that some people decide online for a bad (or, rather, “bad”) reason. So what? It seems to me that attendance online is better than no attendance at all. And it similarly seems likely to me that the person who quits attending in person for “bad” reasons is likely to quit attending sooner or later anyway. But if we believe that church participation is beneficial, it seems like attendance online is better than no participation at all. And preventing some people from shifting to online doesn’t, imho, outweigh the benefits of allowing people who can’t attend (for “good” reasons) to participate.
Or maybe it’s a question of budget. After all, the church bases stake budgets on quarterly sacrament meeting attendance. I assume that that attendance doesn’t include online attendance. But there’s no reason it couldn’t; the church could definitely figure out how to include online attendees when determining how to allocate money.
Maybe the reasoning is something different. And maybe it’s more compelling than the two conjectures I just discussed. If there is a compelling reason to end a general online option for members, though, it seems like the burden is on the party ending the online option to explain the reasoning.
Jesus taught that “[t]he sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath.” I would argue that, similarly, church meetings were made for us; we weren’t made for church meetings. As such, the church should work hard to meet members’ needs, rather than requiring members to conform to the church’s inertial preferences.
[fn1] And frankly, it’s an indictment of our response that we’re not concerned about people feeling safe. But between the anti-masking and anti-vaxxing rhetoric that has been prevalent among, if not a majority, at least a significant (and loud) minority of our membership, I can understand not feeling safe at church right now.