Opinion | Why You Can’t Meet God Over Zoom

Maybe it was screen fatigue. My children have Zoom school. As a professor, I have Zoom teaching. With my wife deployed, we have a Zoom marriage and, now, Zoom church. Something had to give.

One recent weekend we gathered once more for Zoom church. My wife logged on from her military outpost and I logged on with the kids. I settled into my role at tech support. Two of the younger kids lingered on the couch happily coloring. As I followed along in the service, something surprised me. I looked up from the computer and saw my daughter sta

Humans disappoint, especially those we expect to share our beliefs and values. We see other believers fail to display the deep love for one another and the stranger that is commended in our sacred texts. We witness others compromise our deepest values, sacrificed for access to power. Integrity seems in short supply. We attend services where the peo

In July, researchers at Barna, a group dedicated to studying faith and culture, found church attendance in America had dropped significantly during the pandemic. I’m not surprised. I, too, have gone through periods where I couldn’t stomach a Zoom service. Instead, we open our Book of Common Prayer and worship as a family.

If bodies and physical spaces are really means by which we attempt to encounter God on earth, something immeasurable is lost when worship goes virtual. This loss becomes all the more acute during the holiday season, a time when churches are usually filled with candles, flowers and flowing vestments. Instead, the choir stalls and pews will be largel

In the months of pandemic worship, I have come to recognize that religious services, by their very nature, cannot fulfill what they promise. Services attempt to usher finite people into the presence of someone we believe is infinite. What hymn or sermon can capture that? We are chasing the wind. There are fits and starts, hints of something at the

The very inadequacy of church services, Zoom and otherwise, is a reminder we do not come into churches to encounter a life lesson on how to raise our children or to learn to be good Americans, whatever that means. Our aim is much more audacious. We are attempting to encounter God and, in so doing, find ourselves, possibly for the first time.

Anyone who has ever attended a religious service (or any event) with children knows it is a constant struggle to get them to sit still, pay attention and not distract those around them. Every Sunday in the pew is a battle of wills. But if in-person services were a skirmish, online church is war.

W.E.B. Dubois is famous for describing the Black church as “the preacher, the music, and the frenzy.” That is true enough as a sociological analysis, but to members of the congregation there is a fourth element to that mix: finding God’s own presence among them.