Where do you belong?

One of the fruits of the various kinds of online presence that became the norm in the pandemic is the fact that video of worship service, sermons, and Bible studies now go throughout the world.  It is not automatically a good thing or a bad thing.  There are good fruits and some not so good.  It is good that a soldier stationed far from home can tune in and be connected to a home congregation or another faithful LCMS congregation when a chaplain and especially a Lutheran chaplain may not be near or available.  It is good that shut-ins and those who have been literally locked down in assisted living centers and nursing homes may hear the sermon, pray the Our Father, and sing a hymn with fellow Christians.  It is a good thing that many who may never have heard the faith are experiencing it for the first time through an online Lutheran source.

It is not so good, however, when people who could be in church find the online offerings sufficient for their taste and neither long for or yearn to be present with God's people around the Word and Table of the Lord.  It is not so good when people equate every online offering with the good and faithful preaching and teaching of an LCMS congregation and end up being led astray by convincing but misguided folk.  It is not so good when people's preference for an online offering located far and away from their own congregation becomes the excuse for abandoning the local assembly where the Word is preached and the Sacraments administered.  It is not so good when questionable practices equate the online offering with being together in the Lord's House for the blessing of the Lord's Table (here I am thinking of online Holy Communion of one sort or another).  

We have used many things that are neither appropriate nor salutary over this pandemic.  One of them is sending presanctified elements through the mail to those who cannot or will not attend in person.  This is a version of the set up your own elements while you watch the service and then commune by long distance consecration via the interweb.  There are many versions of this practice that ought to be challenged and they ought to cease immediately.  While in some cases we may not be able to say definitively whether these are valid, they are not licit.  Although we may not be able to prove such celebrations not salutary, we cannot say they are either. Even when governments had shut down the buildings, these are not appropriate and they are certainly not appropriate now as things have opened up and many congregations (most?) have returned to a more normal schedule and practices.  We have addressed this as a church body and our people and pastors should not be in doubt about where we stand in this and yet the practices persist.

Another consequence is the erosion of parish boundaries.  No, COVID did not invent the blurring of pastoral care and responsibility for people across parish boundaries.  It has been going on for some time.  People routinely drive by one or more LCMS congregations to get where they want to go.  I understand that.  But what has changed is that while people think they are under the pastoral care of one congregation and pastor the explosion of online offerings has made it down right impossible for anyone to know who is really caring for these people.  The reality is that in choosing an online church, you are placing yourself under no one's pastoral care.  You are on your own.  Worse, you are being regularly fed and nourished by means that are not simply not appropriate but actually dangerous to your spiritual well-being.  We are not itinerant preachers with vagabond congregations spread all over everywhere but attached to a pulpit and altar.  In good times and in bad, this is a salutary and blessed thing for the faithful.  

It is time we asked of our people:  Where do you belong?  We need to know but they also need to know and be able to answer this question.  Otherwise membership means little or nothing and the Church is even more invisible that some Lutherans think.  It is also time we asked of those clergy who are serving people distant from them and only by internet means to refrain from presuming to be the pastors of these people.  You are not doing them any favors.

Some things in the wake of COVID may automatically go back to the default but I fear this is one area that will not return to the old practices and I fear the new normal is a very bad normal indeed.