Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe and Producer Carl Thorpe discuss virtual/hybrid church, how it differs from other mediated forms of worship, and how virtual/hybrid church can break down barriers for people.
Transcript
MET: Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe. My producer. Carl and I would like to welcome you to a discussion about what it means to be a Christian in the 21st century. This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’ve been a rhetoric professor since 2010 and Carl has been working in church communications since 2022. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.
MET: Hello. Today we are doing the producer and the prof. And one of the reasons we decided to do so on this episode is we are talking about things that Carl has particular insight into. We’re talking about the virtual church today, which has been kind of a new way of approaching worship. Carl’s gonna talk about why it’s not necessarily brand new, but a way of approaching worship that has grown specifically since the pandemic. So Carl, do you want to give a little bit of background as to Trinity’s history with the virtual church?
CRT: Sure. So Trinity started online church services for the first time with the COVID pandemic. This was not so
METhing that we had really explored until churches had to close. Now, some of our transition was easy. We already had people who create PowerPoints of our liturgies that are displayed on screens in the sanctuary, so that was already in place for helping people follow along on Zoom. We had a video camera on hand that was connected to the laptop that was always used to project the PowerPoints. We added a microphone or two, subscribed to Zoom, and we were ready to stream services online.
CRT: Then when we opened the church back up for in-person worship, we made the decision, and we have continued with this decision to this day, to have hybrid church. That is, we gather in person and broadcast our services over Zoom. A few years ago, Reverend Deborah began streaming her sermon on Facebook Live prior to our main worship service, and we have kept those sermon streams going for the most part even now that Reverend Deborah has left, with lay leaders and supply priests putting their sermons on Facebook as well. This podcast is yet another virtual offering that Trinity started in September of 2024
MET: I think one of the things that we’ll probably get into in the next few minutes is talking about growth in church and what that means in a mediated world. And let me explain what I mean by mediated. Mediated world simply means that the world we live in comes to us through a medium or a media. So we don’t live in a world necessarily of primary communication or sources anymore. Our information comes to us through newspapers, TV, the internet. We live in a world that comes to us through the media. So thinking about the church as coming to us through the media is a particularly provocative question for us.
CRT: Yeah, we’ve talked at times about the fact that Trinity is growing right now in our reach and our audience, but a lot of that growth is online, virtual. People that tune in for the sermons, people that are tuning in for this podcast, people that attend church through Zoom. So Trinity is growing right now, both physically in our local congregation, but also our reach is growing far beyond our physical boundaries online
MET: Because Trinity, as you say, in many ways has exploded since the pandemic years. A lot of that has been via the podcast, via Facebook Live, via some of those things that a lot of more traditionally minded people wouldn’t see as growth in the sense that we’ve got bodies in the pews, but we have eyes on the screen. And that’s a very different kind of way of viewing church
CRT: Yeah, it is different, but it isn’t entirely new. I’m sure many of our listeners have seen a televised church service. If nothing else, they’ve probably seen a televised religious funeral. Those have been going on since I was a kid. These services have been helpful for people who couldn’t attend church in person for some reason, but they have traditionally been seen as a substitute, and a poor one at that.
CRT: While there was a time when the general public who attended church service filled a passive role, and therefore wouldn’t experience church very differently by watching a service on TV, that doesn’t allow for active participation and community building among those who aren’t physically in the building.
CRT: There wasn’t really a way for churches to even know how many people were watching their services. The internet changed that, however, as it allowed viewers of mediated church services to participate in active ways and be quantified. Now, some of these virtual church spaces were even fully realized 3D environments where the people leading the service and those in the virtual pews have avatars that move around in an online space.
CRT: For example there’s a Minecraft church out there where viewer avatars directly participate in the service. Before that, there was a famous online worship space called Second Life Church. Trinity, while not creating 3D spaces where avatars interact with each other, has members who actively participate in services over Zoom by reading scripture, leading prayers, or even giving sermons.
CRT: Online church, mediated church has been happening for years, decades even
MET: Yeah, and even outside of just church, I think about mediated religion or mediated theology. I grew up visiting a grandmother who always watched things like “The 700 Club” or other religious programming, so there’s always been “The Gospel Hour” or whatever it was. There’s always been people who have used whatever available technology to reach folks, be it a church service or, you know, holy hour or whatever it is. It’s always been on TV. It’s always been on the radio. Even those big tent revivals moved to media as soon as it was available
CRT: Yeah. For example, on satellite radio, there’s an entire channel that is Joel Olsteen Radio. I believe it’s just Joel Olsteen 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Sermons, prayers, call-ins. So if that kind of thing is your bag, it’s out there and available
MET: It is not mine, but that is neither here nor there
CRT: Even those kinds of programming are moving to distribution
METhods such as YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, or any number of services that allow for participants to interact with leaders and other participants through comments, live responses, and online chats.
MET: Okay, this is kind of a personal observation. I think I have shared maybe once or twice that when I was growing up, we moved around a lot. I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty details of that, but I didn’t have a personal attachment to any particular place. It’s interesting that I didn’t really think of place as being that important to me until I was in grad school or even until I moved to New York.
MET: And really, when I moved to New York, place became much more real to me just because I had left the place I knew, and then I realized, oh, place made a difference. But when I was young, we moved around so much that I never really attached the importance of place to church.
MET: I never would have thought, “Oh, this is an important place to worship.” That never occurred to me. And I think another part of that was seeing so many different ways of worshiping and all those different places. And we always went to very traditional churches, but there’s a different iteration of that wherever you go.
CRT: Of course. And as I’ve said in previous episodes, I did not have a singular church that I went to growing up. We went to a lot of different churches just depending on schedule.
CRT: But I went to all Catholic churches, Which meant you got a different sermon, but they were doing all the same readings, the same order of everything. So for me, place didn’t really matter at all for my upbringing in church because church was the same more or less wherever we went.
CRT: Now you growing up going to Baptist churches, obviously each church is going to be different because there’s not a set liturgy. So I think we had two different reasons why we didn’t really see place as so
METhing important. For me, it’s because it didn’t really matter which church I went to, it was all the same.
MET: And for me, it’s because I went to so many different places that I didn’t have time to get attached. That’s really interesting because you’re right, we did have such different experiences with worship. So when I was a child, I knew that worship happened in church, but I didn’t think of each specific church as special. It was just the place that I went, right? Not the church in Brackettville. The church in Brackettville was special.
MET: Don’t look up Brackettville. It’s just a small nothing town that you’ve never heard of on the border. These were just the places that I went. And if you don’t know anything about Baptist churches, they’re, as Carl said, not particularly liturgical.
MET: and they don’t put a big emphasis on communion. So it’s not like you have to go to church to take part in this particular thing in order for church to be church.
MET: So it’s not like you go and be a part of this community that takes part in this one sacrament. You don’t necessarily have to be there to take part in that one thing that makes church special.
CRT: Yeah, you know, that was definitely a huge focus in the Catholic Church. You had to be there to take communion. It was, in many ways, the whole point of the mass. But even though I was there most Sundays and received communion, I didn’t really interact with the community at church growing up.
MET: I really did.
CRT: Yeah, I mean, I shook people’s hands during the passing of the peace, and I might’ve said hello to the priest when leaving, but that was about it.
CRT: And part of this is because I went to a Catholic school from kindergarten through eighth grade, but church on Sunday was so
METhing that we went to on Sunday, and that was it. I didn’t go to a Sunday school. I didn’t go to Bible study or anything like that
MET: I went to all of it.
CRT: Yeah, I know you did. So the place didn’t hold any special meaning to me.
CRT: We showed up, often with no time to spare, did the prayers in unison, shook some hands, took communion, and that was it. If people hung around afterwards for coffee and fellowship, we never stayed. Church was just this hour or so of time that rarely crossed my mind when I wasn’t actually there.
MET: As we talk about community, I want to ask you about so
METhing I know that is very important to you. The church’s mission that I know you’ve always been concerned about is how do we help the marginalized and the needy? How does the virtual church do that?
CRT: So I think one of the things that the virtual church does is reduce many of the barriers that might keep people away. Let’s start with the barriers that some of Trinity’s own members experience the virtual church has reduced or eliminated. The first and most obvious barrier is physical location. We have members who do not live in New York State, either for part of the year or full-time. Virtual church allows them to continue to be active members of our church. We have members who are local but cannot attend in person, be that because of health concerns, transportation, childcare, or any number of other reasons. As I said before, we have members who volunteer for active roles during worship and perform those roles over Zoom.
CRT: We have had baptisms, weddings, and funerals streamed over Zoom where family and friends were able to attend that might not have been able to do so due to distance. Reverend Debra’s last Sunday at Trinity was even attended over Zoom by some of her family in South Africa. But I also wanna talk about people who experience other barriers to in-person attendance at church.
CRT: People who worry about their appearance being appropriate for church. People who have experienced harm at churches in the past and find it difficult or impossible to walk into one of those buildings again. In today’s political and social reality, immigrants, whether they are documented or not. People who suffer from social anxiety. Virtual church can allow those people on the margins to attend worship, get to know the church and its people. Some of those people might one day feel comfortable trying in-person worship, but even if they never do, they’re able to be sustained spiritually without those barriers. Virtual church also helps people looking for a new church, especially those who are exploring different denominations. Someone can log into one of Trinity’s Zoom services and try it out before showing up in person. Speaking for myself, I can say that visiting a new church has always been overwhelming for me. I could see myself wanting to try out a new church virtually a few times before attending in person if we were looking for a new church home.
MET: I know when I have attended virtual church at Trinity, one of the things that is kind of delightful is seeing people who have moved away from Trinity and come back to be a part of that community.
MET: I know we have members in the Carolinas who are here every Sunday. Now, okay, you knew this was coming. I’m going to take some communication theory and throw it at this because it’s what I do.
CRT: I’m shocked
MET: I know. Everybody pick your jaws up off the floor. Okay. This is actually very pertinent. I wanna tell you about this dude named Marshall MacLuhan.
MET: Now, I’m gonna be very honest, this is not my area of expertise. I know a little bit about Marshall MacLuhan, but I don’t know a lot. Marshall MacLuhan is one of the godfathers of media studies. Media studies is adjacent to what I do, so I’m gonna give you some overviews. But Marshall MacLuhan started with this idea, and he kind of gave us this little axiom that the medium is the message. And what that meant is that the meaning of your message is embedded in the medium. Let me give you an example.
MET: The meaning of your message has a lot to do with where it comes from. Okay, that might not make a lot of sense, but let me put it this way. If you hear a soundbite and then read the same thing in a newspaper headline and then see the same thing on Twitter or X and maybe click on it, you have seen the same thing in three different places or heard it.
MET: But do you register it in the same way in all three places? And many people would say that comes across differently in different mediums. So if you hear a headline, and it can be a ridiculous headline or a serious headline like Trump has three heads. If you hear that on the radio versus do you read it in a newspaper, and depending on the newspaper, it could be different in different newspapers, do you react differently? And in many circumstances, we kind of do. The medium matters as to how we react to these things. The medium matters as to how we understand these things, and that can be generational as well, too. For some people, depending on their demographic, tweets are very different than what you read in the newspaper, even if they say the same thing.
MET: So for this particular theorist, his idea was that the medium is as important, if not more important than the message. Now, there were plenty of other people who said, “No. No, no, Marshall.” There was this guy, Kenneth Burke, who I’ve mentioned many times before, who had this silly little anecdote where he told this story where his assistant came in and said, “Oh, Mr. Burke, I’ve got this message for you. War has started in France.” And Burke said, “Don’t tell me the message! What is the medium? I must know now.” Right? There’s a certain point where this kind of becomes ridiculous. I mean, we have to know what the message is. But it makes sense that we recognize the medium matters.
MET: For example, if you hear a priest’s sermon on Sunday morning in the sanctuary versus if you hear a sermon online, is that a different experience? And many people would say, “Yes, it is,” because there’s that live experience in one, but then there’s that mediated experience in the other. You’re in the sanctuary, you’re surrounded by people versus maybe sitting on your couch with your earbuds in at home. And that’s an important question for virtual church, because we’re sharing so
METhing as serious as the gospel.
MET: How does the gospel come across in different mediums? That’s one of those things we have to consider when we think about virtual church. And I’m not saying, “Oh, every person who does communication should be thinking about communication theorists.”
MET: No, no, no, no, no. That’s not what I’m saying. But I do think if we’re going to create community, if we’re going to share these messages, one of the things we have to consider is how does the medium affect our messages as they are received? Does that make sense?
CRT: I think it does, but that raises a really sticky question. So if the gospel message changes somehow because the medium changes, then in this sense, is this a new translation, a new interpretation of the gospel?
MET: I think that’s a fantastic question. Reverend Deborah and I have talked in the past about translation quite a bit, and we know translation is when you move from one language to another, and that causes slippage. So the question is, as you say, does translation from one form, like visual to audio, make a difference?
MET: Is that translation or is that just medium? How do we ascertain media meaning? So for example, what is the difference between a sermon on Sunday morning and a project like our podcast? How do they differ? What do you get out of them? So if you go to church and you never say anything and you are never involved, did you just receive the message?
MET: Then is your experience of the faith that much difference than a podcast? Because you’re not involved. But if you go to Bible study and you listen and you interact, then your faith is very different from a podcast. I don’t know. It’s just so
METhing I’ve been thinking about
CRT: Yeah, I don’t know. I struggle with this idea that the gospel changes based on whether you read it on the screen or you hear it, or you read it in the Bible yourself. I get that the medium changes, like what you said with a headline versus a soundbite versus a tweet. I get that. But it gets uncomfortable when you’re talking about the gospel
MET: 100%, and that’s why I think this is a question that those of us who engage with the church virtually can think about as worship. I think Carl has given us a lot of really great material to think about, and more importantly, Carl has helped expand Trinity’s virtual reach in kind of unanticipated ways in the last few years.
MET: Obviously, we here at this podcast think there is so
METhing valuable about having a faith community or at least learning about faith outside of church walls. And for those of you who keep coming back, we guess you do, too. We actually hope to return to some of these topics in future episodes and talk about sacraments and maybe even liturgy in a virtual church. This is one of those episodes that invites your feedback. If the virtual experience has been a big part of your faith, let Carl or I know about it. If you think the brick-and-mortar experience can never be replicated or replaced, tell us that, too.
MET: And if you’ve been moved by both, we’d love to hear it.
MET: Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, https://priestandprof.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@priestandprof.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church. Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.
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