What’s God Up To?

You have to admit (unless, for some reason, you think Church has to be done in a pretty medieval building) that the Church has gone online in some style! From live-streamed services from their church buildings back at the beginning of March, the Church quickly diversified into online Agape services, FacebookLive and YouTube streamed live celebrations (sometimes with excellent blooper reels!), YouTube/FacebookLive video compilation services or pre-recorded services, and even gallery-view Zoom celebrations where families gather around a screen with other church members and during which different hosts would lead different parts of the service. With the Zoom format you can even send people off into breakout rooms for discussions or prayer ministry. Here’s a favourite advert for a service, in which Calvin Samuel’s children are merciless!

There are youth groups using Minecraft for their bible studies, church growth enthusiasts writing guides that Everyone is Welcome Online, and Alpha has jumped online across the world and numbers are soaring. Others have provided phone and/or text-based services, with vicars mastering Twilio to arrange phone call links to YouTube or Zoom audio streams, or sermons as mp3s at the end of the line. Some have hand delivered service orders around their estates and villages. Some have celebrated kitchen-table eucharists — a fascinating reincarnation of the celebration of communion by non-conformists during the late Reformation (see Steve Holmes amazing blogposts). Catholics have streamed masses by the million, or gathered people on zoom to say offices, or the Rosary, or sing songs. Cardinal Nicholls even declared that for once digital media was seen as a completely positive space!

Some, including a feature writer in the Church Times, have railed against the online Church saying, among other things, that this represents the privatisation of religion, the domestication of the Church.

Of course, the research has always told a different story. The digital Church has always enabled and extended the local Church. Nottingham University’s digital religion guru, Tim Hutchings’ research (Creating Online Church, 2017) showed that rather than decrease the number of people attending local expressions of Church, digital Church provided a safe place for people to see what Church was about — a kind of shop window for the Church. Often digital was seen as a supplementary form of Church rather than a replacement. Churches all over know this already: when they talk to newcomers, they often find that they have been viewing online for weeks or months before darkening the physical doorstep

The bigger, better question is: “What is God up to?”

The question links into the concept of ‘missio Dei’ or ‘the mission of God’ — the idea popularised in “missional theology” that God is a missionary, God initiates mission, he is a sending God. But that also means God is out on mission “in the wild”, as it were. He isn’t beholden on the Church starting mission. He’s been on mission since the dawn of Creation. In fact, Creation (however you think our beautiful world came to be) was his first act of love as missioning God: the provision of a place for us to be, to steward, to care for. Indeed, the Church needs to find where God is active in the world and join God in his ongoing work.

So to ask the question, “What is God Up To?” is a pertinent question. We may think he’s bemoaning the fact no-one is in church (buildings) — in fact I think that couldn’t be further from the truth. I had a conversation last week with one of the world’s leading missiologists and husband of the awesome Olive Fleming Drane. In our conversation, we began to look at some of the reasons why we might find more people encountering God “in the wild”. Here’s Revd Prof John Drane in conversation with me on the blessed Zoom!

The first thing to remind ourselves is that in a time of national crisis, it is no wonder that people turn to God. This is a threshold moment for all of us. Will we or our loved ones get the virus. Will we survive? Will our grandparents? Will our children be safe? With such deep questions at the front of our minds, and for many lots of time on their hands, digital becomes the place to explore those questions.

Across the news, we see people turning to God.

We hear of people asking Siri how to be saved. We hear of COVID19 survivors encountering God at death’s door. We hear of a Church serving the nation, blessing the nation. That song, the UK Blessing, itself a kind of transmission of God’s grace to those who listen.

But is it people to turning to God, or people being attracted to God’s presence? Which comes first God’s love or our need to be loved?

The numbers of people viewing services online ticks on up with mounting evidence that this is not just digital novices innocently reading FB views and being amazed. Micro-research projects I have seen, and encouraged, prove the numbers have evidential truth. Some churches are 45% up, some 300% up, some 1000% up.

But it is deeper than that.

There has also been a profound shift in the number of people engaged in praying the daily offices, regularly, at different times of the day. A ComRes/TearFund poll talks of 25% viewing online and are praying more. We hear of increasing in Alpha Online, of Bible Study groups, of myriad social action project demonstrating the love of God around the country (see below).

Peter Lynas from the Evangelical Alliance has been playing with some google trends results over on his Twitter stream, pointing to more people searching for church, Bible, gospel, and then comparing prayer to vaccine, church to testing. If you do more long-term searches, these figures are not as positive as they seem — searches for “church” are actually declining during the pandemic.

But there is a rise — you just need to look a bit further. So, if you look at the trends in the UK during 2020, there was an initial peak trend for “online church/mass/service”, which seems to be projected to rise again as we enter a post-lockdown period where the best of both worlds might be needed for a while to come:

But the real shifts are around more open spiritual terms — a shift to “prayer”, “Jesus” and “God” (“online mass” is included at the bottom as a control line). Indeed, the shifts in the UK for these three terms are not matched if you do the same search for the USA, France, Germany or China. There does seem to be something happening here with google searches/trends across the UK:

I spoke in a webinar with James Nored last week alongside John Drane, who talked of the response of welcome to his own offer of spiritual care for the people of his local area — not to offer church services or rites, but to offer something more directly to do with care and spirituality.

There is a rise in online engagement with the Church. But there is an even bigger rise in online engagement with God.

Another way to explore these trends is by looking at the most popular Bible verses searched or shared during the crisis. In my own research on trneds in Bible Engagement in Digital Culture, I showed a shift towards therapeutic texts and a shift away from God or Jesus being mentioned in Bible verses. Youversion noted a shift in popular verses being shared/searched during the crisis and the other main site, BibleGateway, ratified the same kinds of shift. Lifeway offers the following list:

Hebrews 13:16 — Don’t neglect to do what is good and to share, for God is pleased with such sacrifices.

Psalm 91 — The one who lives under the protection of the Most High dwells in the shadow of the Almighty. (v. 1)

2 Chronicles 7:14 — [A]nd my people, who bear my name, humble themselves, pray and seek my face, and turn from their evil ways, then I will hear from heaven, forgive their sin, and heal their land.

2 Timothy 1:7 — For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power, love, and sound judgment.

Philippians 4:6–7 — Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Note that each of these verses mentions God. More than that, many of the verses make God the main subject of an active verb: “God is pleased, I will hear from heaven…”, “God has not given us…”, “the peace of God will guard”. Whereas in the therapeutic verses, we tend to be the subject of the sentence (like in a selfie), here God is the subject and centre of the verses. It’s a notable shift that people seem to be preferring to go with God than with the therapeutic selfie-culture which digital has so often promoted.

The Church in the UK, indeed the UK per se, seems to be going deeper into God. Praying more, reading the Bible more, doing community more (yes, not less — have you set up Zoom coffee mornings yet?), reflecting more.

Of course, this does not factor in the brilliant work being done to care for/feed the vulnerable, provide support for children’s work and parenting, and all the brilliant work being done by the church which appears nowhere near a digital screen or in online statistics — read Alice Whalley’s article in the Church Times (£). And, the thing is, this is a worldwide phenomenon which I have witnessed/discussed with ministers and pastors in China, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, Ukraine, Germany, Kenya, South Africa, Denmark, UK, USA, Canada…If you were a preacher, you might be preaching:

God is moving. God is taking his people closer to himself. God is pouring out his grace.

So many people across the globe have experienced God online during the COVID19 pandemic that who could deny that God has always been there pouring out his grace upon us all. The Church has gone through a mini-revolution in the last few weeks and many weary workers bear the wounds of sore eyes, headaches and frustration about how tech needs to wrestled into the service of the church. But let’s not forget that the digital supports the local, offers a safe place for people to see what we get up to in our closed church buildings. When we get back to celebrate communion, to hug our congregations, to share the peace, to meet locally, let’s also do the digital.

Let’s have the best of both worlds where all might meet with the living God.

And a huge round of applause for our church leaders, ministers, pastors, technical teams, preachers, musicians, youth workers, teachers, carers. For everyone who has enabled a digital revolution that has been led by God. This is missional church — going where God is leading, working where God is.