Yeshua Explored
31st January 2022
Hybrid Church
How do we navigate through the many voices?
(This series of articles was written at the beginning of the first lockdown in March/April 2020 and before any churches had explored the idea of hybrid churches)
Previous articles are still available on the Premier Christian radio website – https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Blogs2/Yeshua-Explored – (until they finally pull the plug!)
We had gone back to worshipping God at home … but with others! We had returned to the original model of the early Church. Now we see interesting possibilities, particularly in the light of the Hebraic mindset that I have been writing about for years. It showed us that all of us can grow in faith and even fellowship, despite the fact that we don’t have direct face-to-face access to “fellows”. Even ignoring lockdown, there are many Christians who have become solitary believers. Perhaps they live in remote locations, or perhaps there are not any Bible-believing fellowships nearby, or perhaps they have been hurt by local Churches, for various reasons. We now all have the possibility of being in fellowship with like-minded believers … at the touch of a button, or the click of a mouse. We can take this further and consider a Hybrid Church that can start to emerge. One where small numbers of like-minded believers meet together in a home or an assembly room, but are fed through virtual links to a wider body of teachers, intercessors, prophets and, importantly, Christians of wisdom and discernment, enabling us to live accountable lives and to shield us from the false teachers and false teaching that is rapidly becoming a feature of the modern Church.
Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. (2 Timothy 4:2-4)
The point I am making is that a small local assembly doesn’t have to have all of the answers, but can feed from those who can help. We all need each other and as long as we can trust each other and don’t become yet another denomination or structure, we can truly function, I believe, in the way the Church has always meant to be, a horizontal functioning body, where the only vertical arrangement is with God Himself.
Just as a body, though one, has many parts, but all its many parts form one body, so it is with Christ. For we were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink. Even so the body is not made up of one part but of many. (1 Corinthians 12:12-14)
Perhaps this is a forlorn dream. The reason for my pessimism is when I observe the knee-jerk reaction to Flockdown from many Christian leaders and communicators. Perhaps driven by fear of losing members or reputation, they feel that the best way to react is to pour out volumes of content, mostly over YouTube and Facebook and often in the form of live videos imposed on your data-stream. The honest question that we, the “consumer” needs to ask is, do we really need another angle on what’s going on? It is overkill and it devalues the medium, as well as the gospel, if it is motivated by desperation rather than authentic nudges from Holy Spirit. In truth, over time, the cream will rise to the top, for the simple reason that the “less useful” broadcasts will suffer from the well-trodden path of disapproval, people will just switch them off or avoid them or “un-friend” them!
It is worth examining, at this point, the two ways that we “consume” data from the internet. When all we had were islands of websites scattered around the internet, the way we looked for information was to actually visit these websites to see what they could offer us. We did this either by typing in their URL (unique identifier e.g. http://www.saltshakers.com) or using a search engine (I actually remember the days before Google when we used such services as Ask Jeeves, Altavista and Lycos). This methodology was known as pull, in the sense of pulling in data that we have chosen. Then came social media, which was quickly seized on by marketeers, who realised that they could use the world of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc. for their own purposes. Control subtly moved from us to them and we found our inboxes, data-streams, profiles etc., bombarded with messages at all hours of the day, often preceded by a little beep. Of course, we too seized on this, particularly with text messaging and the popularising of WhatsApp, bombarding each other constantly with communications of all types. This methodology is known as push, with data pushed at us, whether we like it or not (though we can switch it off … with the fear that we might miss out on something – this is actually a syndrome, FOMO, fear of missing out!) The basic premise here is that control is not with us any more, often dictated by clever algorithms ‘pushing’ marketing messages at us because of the ‘relevance’ to our profile or lifestyle.
The reason why I mention this is that I believe we may go full circle, driven by the sheer overload of information thrust at us. Enough is enough, we cry (perhaps). What we really need is to return to the pull concept, where we choose where we go in the virtual world. It has to be so, because, even in the Christian world there are so many voices, we can just end up with filling up our brains with knowledge – some of it dubious – with no time or understanding as to what to do with it. Either we choose our own journey, or we work with a trusted curator for our explorations, secure in the knowledge that we are only feeding from the messages that are relevant to us and our walk with God. Let’s not be drawn into the paranoia, desperation or devious plans of others and begin to take charge! To achieve unity in the Church we need to understand and engage with what is real.
And this is the blessing of Flockdown, new possibilities for engaging with God and with each other, alongside the current ways we are already doing so with success. This is what I have called Hybrid Church and we will return to this soon, to look at practicalities.
This is an extract from the book, Flockdown: Is the Church out for the count?, available for £5 at https://www.sppublishing.com/flockdown-263-p.asp
