The Online Church and the Sacraments

By Robin G. Jordan

Jonathan Leeman, Mark Devers, and others argue that the local church is not truly the church unless the whole assembly is physically present. For this reason online services, they argue, are not church. When the local church regathers, it cannot regather in several smaller gatherings but must regather in one large gathering.

The problem with this argument is how often in our day and age is the whole assembly physically present at a gathering of the local church. The answer is not very often. One or more individuals or households may absent for various reasons.

If we pursue their logic to its obvious conclusion, then the local church is rarely if ever truly the church. Even in New Testament times one or more individuals were likely absent whenever the local church gathered. If we again apply their logic, the true church did not exist on these occasions. The local church’s gathering was something less than the true church.

Paul may have encouraged the members of the church at Corinth to wait for the latecomers before beginning the agape at which the Lord’s Supper was celebrated. But I think that Paul himself must have realized that there were occasions on which all the members of the local church would not be present.

The latecomers were in all likelihood slaves. A slave was not free to come and go as he pleased. He waited on his master’s pleasure. To the Romans and the Greeks a slave was property. He had no will of his own.

While some slaves may have been able to have gotten away, others may have not. It is something of a stretch therefore to conclude that Paul expected all the church members to be present at gatherings of the church. Paul was well acquainted with the realities of his day and age.

We must also remember that at the time Paul wrote his letters, no one could conceive of gathering in any other way than physically. Coming together entailed coming together in one’s person in a place. But the world has changed since Paul’s time. We can now come together digitally in cyberspace. Paul’s words have a wider application. The meaning of his words has not changed. We still must come together. But the application has expanded. We can now come together digitally. A passage of Scripture, while it may have only a single meaning, has multiple applications

Nowhere in the Bible does it say that the local church is not truly the church if one person is absent. While church attendance is important, it is a stretch to maintain that the local church is no longer the body of Christ because someone is sick, out of town on business, on vacation, or sleeping off a hangover. I suspect that this view of the local church has in part arisen as a reaction to declining attendance in a number of local churches.

The body of Christ is first and foremost a spiritual entity. Believers are united to Christ and each other by baptism and the Holy Spirit in the body of Christ. The large physical gatherings of the local church are an icon that stands for this spiritual reality and points to it. So are the local church’s smaller physical gatherings. While they may not be as fuller expression of this spiritual reality, online gatherings are also an icon that represents and points to the same reality. While they occur digitally and in cyberspace, they are expressions of the body of Christ when the participants are baptized believers indwelt by the Holy Spirit.

Just as we have mixed assemblies—the believing intermixed with the unbelieving—when we gather physically, we also have mixed assemblies when we gather digitally. An individual may undergo baptism and make a public profession of faith but may still be unconverted. This is a dilemma that both credo- and paedo- baptist churches face. While we can scrutinize the lives and speech of church members, only God knows their hearts.

Some traditions charitably assume that all church members are converted. Other traditions are more rigorous but even these traditions may be wrong in their judgment as to whether a church member is converted.

It is important to bear these things in mind in any discussion of the online church and the sacraments. One of the arguments that is made against online church and its celebration of the sacraments is the argument that the online church is not capable of coming together or gathering. In pressing this argument a very narrow definition of coming together and gathering is used—a definition that conceives coming together and gathering solely in physical terms. To come together or to gather in such a definition requires that households and individuals must share the same physical space. For example, they must occupy the same room. It is a definition that does not admit the possibility of any other way of coming together or gathering.

Since the 1990s people have been coming together or gathering digitally in cyberspace on the internet. It is a new way of coming together or gathering but it is coming together or gathering. It has required us to reappraise what we mean by coming together and gathering. We are faced with the question of whether we are bound to a particular way of coming together or gathering because the New Testament writers had a limited conception of coming together and gathering. Or did the Holy Spirit who is not limited in his knowledge of past, present, and future, existing as he does outside time and space, and who inspired them, intend that what they wrote should be given a broader meaning and application? Can we assume that the internet was a part of God’s plan for humanity from the beginning?

Let us assume for the sake of argument that God not only foresaw the internet but was actively at work in its creation. Its creation was ultimately to serve God’s purposes and not our own. If we make this assumption, we find ourselves looking at the internet from a wholly different perspective. It is not an accident that is forcing us reluctantly to change our way of doing things but a tool intended for use in fulfilling God’s mission in the world. Like all tools it can do damage if it is not used properly A hammer, for example, can be used to drive nails and to construct a building. But if we do not use it carefully, it can also injure the user.

Most of the objections that I find to the celebration of the sacraments online fall into the category of “But that’s not the way we are used to doing things.” Their celebration online does not line up with our preferences. We would prefer to receive a consecrated wafer made by nuns and placed by a priest on our tongue. That is what we have become accustomed to and what we have come to prefer. The arguments against their celebration online appear to have been marshaled to support these preferences.

Like other Protestants, Anglicans recognize only two sacraments as ordained by God—baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Anglo-Catholics and “three streamers” may recognize other rites that they describe as “sacraments” but they represent divergent theological traditions in the Anglican Church and not its central theological tradition. In its historical formularies the Anglican Church views these other rites as corruptions of apostolic practice or states of life permitted by Scripture.

The Anglican Church recognizes Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as ways that God shows his unmerited mercy (or favor) and goodwill toward us. Through the sacraments God working inwardly in us invigorates, strengthens, and confirms our faith. They are not mere signs. They accomplished what God purposed in ordaining them.

It is ironical that Anglicans, while acknowledging that the sacraments are more than symbols of God’s grace but are embodiments of divine favor and goodwill toward us, seek to impose limitations upon their administration, which are not God’s doing. God does not prescribe who should administer the sacraments, where they should be administered, or under what circumstances. Jesus pointed to the attention of the Pharisees and the multitude that the Pharisees hedged the Word of God with their own traditions. In doing so, they negated God’s Word. Regrettably we do the same.

Whoever administers the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper must not only have had a bishop pray over him and lay hands upon him but also anoint his hands with oil that the bishop has blessed, we are told. Where in the Scriptures does it say that? One so ordained must consecrate the elements, standing before an altar set against the east wall of a building that has been dedicated to the worship of God. Where in the Scriptures does it say that? When they are pressed, those who make these claims fall back on the same argument. It is our theology. It is our tradition. It is our preference.

It is time to recognize preferences for what the are—preferences. We like one alternative over another or others. Because we prefer to celebrate the Lord’s Supper in a building modeled on the Medieval two-roomed monastic church with the ceremonial and accoutrements of the pre-Reformation Mass should not, however, prevent our fellow Anglicans from gathering online and celebrating the Lord’s Supper in a simple manner with elements that each household has supplied. God’s favor and goodwill, after all, are his to give, not ours to determine when and how they should be given, much less by whom. Otherwise, they are not grace. It is as simple as that.