Reading scripture aloud in public is a shared experience. When lay readers reads aloud in church, they are engaging the congregation in the public reading of scripture. The reading is a live event. It happens in real time and space. It’s a shared experience between the reader, the congregation and scripture.

There was another good article in the Sunday New York Times yesterday morning:  Internet Church Isn’t Really Church, by Laura Turner.

The article addresses the importance of the live in-person worship experience. There are an increasing number of innovative live-streaming, and app-based worship supplements and alternatives available online. They may offer relief to many from the struggle to get to church on Sunday morning. Ms. Turner presents the case for making every effort to get to church. She’s come to the conclusion that worshiping together, in person, is essential to the Christian experience. As she puts it, “…being together is the whole point.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Why we need to be together

Ms. Turner presents good reasons for the need to be together.

She references the Gospel of Mathew and a letter from Paul in support of the idea of community. The church offers a sustaining community. As we are discovering, the community offered by social media and the virtual reality of online is a different kind of community. It has it uses and benefits, but it can ultimately be isolating and constantly remind us of that isolation.

There are apps that promote daily (hourly?) quotes from the Bible. We can access nearly any version of the Bible (fully annotated) and a tsunami of video church services, sermons and commentary online. Those can be wonderful resources but we shouldn’t think of them as a perfect substitute or sufficient alternatives to gathering together in church. A diet limited to online Bible quotes can reduce the experience of the Bible to a random collection of memes and aphorisms. All true, but all wanting for context and the sweeping power of the narrative voice.

According to the article, people who regularly attend church services also enjoy health benefits, including lower blood pressure among the elderly, better sleep and a reduced risk of suicide.

All good.

To this, I would add a benefit: the ability to hear the Gospel read aloud. The church service allows you to focus on scripture and the experience of hearing scripture read aloud without distraction. In enables those in attendance to fulfill the role of the listening audience; to experience the Gospel as a member of an actual community, not a virtual community.

What we miss when we are online

When we participate as individuals in an online experience, either synchronous or asynchronous, we are separated and removed from the rest of the audience. We can’t see, hear and feel the reaction of other members of the audience. We miss participating in the collective response. The online audience has all of the personality of a TV laugh track.

When our participation is limited to the online experience, we are likely to be more passive members of the audience. We’re likely to internalize what we see and hear more quickly and impose our own narrative, our own interpretation, or own agenda on what we hear via a recording or live stream.

The environment in which we consume online media is noisy, less focused than the church sanctuary. We miss the opportunity to greet our neighbor, the smells of church, the tactile, the feel of seat cushions, the faces  in the choir, the whispers of patient parents quieting their children and the physical engagement of standing to sing hymns and bowing heads in prayer.

Online, the personal identities of the worship leaders are amplified by tight video shots and a screen dominance that far exceeds what is available to them in most church sanctuaries (except those that are specifically equipped for outsized multi-media production experiences.) Our goal as readers is to lose ourselves. The camera and mic tend to accentuate US.  In a live reading, the space, the presence of the audience, the role we play as reader, all function together to reduce the person of the reader and place the emphasis on the encounter with scripture, where it belongs.

 We need one another

Ms. Turner concludes that we need one another. Indeed, we do. The reader needs a listening audience. Not just clicks or “views.” The audience needs an engaged reader and other members of the listening audience to be present. One of the most uncomfortable experiences I ever had was to discover that I was the only person in the theater watching the 10PM screening of a film in a deserted downtown movie theater. We need one another.