A few years ago, a dear friend of mine who lives in the UK was passing through customs at SeaTac airport on her way to spend a couple weeks visiting me and another mutual friend. As the 20-something TSA agent grilled her about why she was coming into the US and who she intended to see, he asked, “And how did you meet Jeny?”
Her answer? “Have you ever heard of a show called The West Wing?”
I first met Pam through a West Wing fan website in 1999. The internet was new to all of us back then, but I was quite taken with this “love letter to American Politics” and wanted to connect with others who loved it as much as I did. After episodes aired, I went to the message boards to chat with others about the show and found myself talking with fans from across the US and around the world. Through that show, I found a group of friends I still keep it contact with today.
Right now, staff and elders at Northminster are working hard on creating a hybrid form of worship for when we return to our church sanctuary. Many of you may be asking why we are investing time, energy, and resources into ensuring our weekly Sunday worship will remain accessible on-line. My friend Pam is one of the reasons I feel so passionate about hybrid worship.
In the year and a half since we were forced to cobble together an on-line worship space due to Covid-19 shutdown orders, we have gained folks who had never joined us in our physical sanctuary, but found us to be a peaceful and hopeful way to worship during a time of national trauma. They have been with us almost every week for over a year. Yet most of our pre-Covid congregation doesn’t know them because to do that requires two things:
1) Noticing they are there.
2) Seeing their relationship with our congregation as real.
These new-to-us folks have offered prayers in the Chat, written their wishes of peace, watched after our YouTube channel, and mailed in offerings to our church and missions. They have sent emails to pastoral staff and expressed a desire to be connected to us, but from a place that is not Loyal Heights, Seattle, Washington. Still, they have come to regard Northminster as somewhere they find hope.
What hybrid church offers us is a way for those who find entering our sanctuary to be a barrier for many reasons including, distance, bodily limitations, spiritual trauma and abuse, or illness, to still experience Northminster as their community of faith. What we have learned from this “Church in the time of Zoom” is that our spiritual connection and worship practice can be facilitated across the internet because for the past 18 months, that has been the only way we could do it.
The first time I met Pam face to face, we had been friends for over 10 years. We have continued to stay connected over Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, email, and Zoom. My kids love her visits because she is hilarious and everyone adores her accent. She has become good friends with someone I worked with at Pacific Science Center and they have cultivated a beautiful and caring friendship of their own, and I am thrilled to have introduced them.
In the two decades since The West Wing aired, my on-line friends group has continued to grow. A few times I’ve traveld to other parts of the country to meet some of them and they have come to see me. Mostly, though, we share our lives through the computer and not once has that meant we did not share real love, caring, and connection. We have gathered on-line and in-person to mark birthdays, weddings, births, and funerals. We have supported each other emotionally and sometimes financially. There is nothing virtual about them; they are my true friends.
Expanding our sense of community to include those who worship with us on-line will take imagination and will be a paradigm shift for many, yet a gift of our imposed isolation is what we once would have thought impossible has become real. Our world has been made smaller as our church community has been made bigger, and that is a future we can all celebrate together.