An incomplete thought

Here's a development of something I've been thinking about for a while.

Most of us realise that the way we (Evangelicals, free church people , whatever) "do church" today owes most to the heady days of the reformation, with some pre-reformation thinking, and a few modifications in more recent years. But those days were very different from now. Music has changed - but most of us have at least reflected that a little. Communication has changed. Teaching has changed. Lectures were never a very good way of delivering ideas and promoting thought: they are quickly disappearing from our Universities - at least in the one-way, non-interactive sense. I'm not just thinking about using Powerpoint [how did that Microsoft product become a generic term?]. I'm thinking that there's no good reason why people should sit down and listen to me preach a second-rate sermon, when we could watch a video together (or a live feed) of someone really gifted. And for some of us, live music is perhaps over-rated, too. I'm not saying that we need to throw everything out, just that we can mix it up some more.

But a blog post answering people who try to explain "Why I don't go to church" got me thinking (I can't remember, to be honest, how newattitude got onto my blog roll, but I digress). Let us assume, for a moment, that the New Testament Church is the thing to emulate. Suppose that it is the closest picture we have of what God had in mind for a Christian community. What is it about that community that matters? Is it gathering by the river? Or in an over-warm upper room? What does gathering together mean in any case?

People tried, through the 20th century, to do elements of "church" via TV and radio. But they couldn't replace the real thing, because there was no relationship there. Sure, we had telephones, and the combination of TV and phone has been a life-line for some house-bound people. But it could never be the relational community you get by sitting down together.

But the last two decades have given us a genuine novelty: multi-party multi-way communication, relationship, mediated entirely by electronic means. There have been a few, possibly lame attempts at "on-line churches", but that rather seems to miss the point. The church is about people and their relationships. It's about corporate action in the world which shows people Jesus. Today you genuinely can have meaningful, supportive relationships without ever meeting people, can't you? The theology of the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church implies a single Church Militant, yet the expression we have been stuck with for two millennia has been a collection of local congregations, and we've always had a certain ambivilance (outside of the Roman Catholics, at least) about the relationship of the local with the universal. We are now on the verge of being able to have a single global community. How cool is that?

I know that throwing off the local expression of church isn't fully an original idea. Indeed, I hang out on the blogs of some people who have done just that. But I wonder how far we can or should press the idea. For me, for now, I'm still persuaded that church is an important category, a crucial part of my life. But I wonder how different it could be, and yet still be church.