The English word “worship,” which comes from worth ship, involves honoring what is worthy. Worship celebrates God’s worth. Yet form informs content, as any reader of poetry knows: worship’s form, like that of poetry, marks its message.
When my family moved to a non-denominational church, I, an early teen, had to embrace the fog machine in worship. It did not take long. Nor did it take long to welcome neon lights blinking through the auditorium’s darkness, coordinating with lyrics like “Jesus, you’re the real thing.”
Though I would require years of discussion and counterexamples to learn that worship need not be irradiated by neon lights, my hardly-fifteen-year-old heart did not take long, then, to embrace fascinating embellishments of the focused liturgies I had formerly participated in. Neither does it take long for modern American evangelicals to embrace technological advancements disguised as mere embellishments of worship.
Take, for example, the latest advancement: worship in the metaverse. Evangelicals are beginning to fashion virtual reality and Mark Zuckerburg’s Metaverse for innovative worship.
A recent Christianity Today article forecasts “the first Christian celebrity of the Metaverse” – an AI gospel artist named “JC,” created by Marquis Boone Enterprises. Boone, whose website describes his “journey” to “revolutionize ministry and industry and lead this generation faith-first into its destiny,” declared, “if we don’t want to grow with technology… I think we’re going to miss a whole generation.”
The same desire to “revolutionize ministry and industry” drives some Christian leaders to hold services over virtual reality. In gatherings like that of Pastor DJ Soto’s VR Church, the first place of worship to exist strictly in VR, avatars “can sit in a pew, listen to a preacher, and talk with each other afterward—all without the need for masks, social distancing, or Zoom,” according to a report by World. Soto’s VR Church features virtual baptisms like Crystal’s, who felt she “finally found her place” at VR church.
Other pastors, like Jason Poling of Cornerstone Church, lead VR campuses, supplementing waning in-person services and serving otherwise “unreached tribes of the Metaverse.” Cornerstone also offers consulting services to help other leaders “reach all worlds for Jesus.” Poling wrote: “we believe that fewer and fewer of the people in these generations will be interested in coming to physical, IRL churches. So, we must go to them.”
While Poling’s “hybridization” of churches across virtual and physical reality may seem drastic, hybridization simply follows the recent technological trends of Western worship. As online services’ persistence suggests, we have grown accustomed to utilizing technology for supposed success in worship. Poling’s VR Christianity flows naturally from Zoom Christianity: faith that functions like a video game follows faith that functions over video conference.
A spirit of opportunism invigorates online services, made commonplace by Covid, and metaverse missions. Opportunism asks: if cutting-edge tools like video conferences and VR may “reach all worlds,” why not use them for the church’s benefit? Why abstain from the metaverse, if our end is worship and evangelism.
Such technological opportunism rejects means provided by Scripture and traditional orthodoxy for ever-new mechanisms in search of an increasingly-blurry vision of Christianity. This attitude favors the currents of the cutting edge over the instructions of that which is “sharper than any two-edged sword” – including (but not limited to) the instruction to gather together for teaching and fellowship. The modernized church must face this fact: means matter. How Christians attempt to “reach the world” affects what the world walks away with. And if Christian worship is digitized past physical co-presence, the world will not “walk away” with worth at all.
For all the Church’s worship wars, Christians historically viewed physical co-presence as “the default mode of existence,” as Tish Harrison Warren wrote in a controversial NYT op-ed. Online worship, though initially understandable, obscures this physicality inherent in the faith. Not only are we told to “not give up meeting together,” but we are told, as Job recognizes, that we are “clothed” with “skin and flesh.”
We are beings composed of dust and divine breath. We have eaten unbidden fruit but are bidden to break divine body and blood through bread and wine. We, dirtied by death, were washed into life by he who became incarnate, embraced the unclean, and bent to scrub feet. We are embodied people, promised a feast.
Scripture does not only provide a proper means of worship, including “psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs,” the sacraments, fellowship, etc. Our faith also embraces embodiment. “He knows our frame,” though digitization denies it.
Worship’s diminishment to digitization is only to be expected if, as David Wells writes in God in the Wasteland, God’s worth “rests too inconsequentially upon the church.” If God’s worth is not weighty enough to press upon man’s means of honoring him, digitized communion, baptism, and gatherings are no longer contradictory or dishonorable. But if the Church embraces a fully-fleshed sense of God’s significance for everyday life in this (painfully) physical world, gathering by given means will be enough to touch the “whole generation” disintegrated by digitization.
Embracing embodiment — unlike embracing innovation — may take time. Regardless, as Wells writes, it will require divine grace: “only God can incite the human heart to rebellion against the world, overturning worldly assumptions about what is… normative and exposing them as contradictory to his Word.”
The views and opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the values and beliefs of Cogitare Magazine, nor of Grove City College.
