Ever since the Covid 19 Pandemic started, the acronym WFH, which stands for Work from Home has become common everyday vocabulary. This widespread phenomenon of getting work done away from the office has also given rise to the meteoric success of online video conferencing applications like Zoom. With this new reality comes a new set of protocols on the Dos and Don’ts for a work-at-home culture. Companies, in their quest to maintain business continuity, have invested much to ensure employees get all the required resources to perform their best at home without compromising on productivity.
However, WFH is also the acronym for another reality that Christians have to get used to. I’m talking about Worship from Home. As a result of the MCO, our corporate worship has for some time now taken the form of online streaming or broadcasting. The question is: Do we take as much care in our Worship from Home as we would for in-person worship or even when compared to our attitudes when working from home? Research in American has found that one in three practicing Christians have stopped attending online services. And only about half of those who log on each Sunday attend their own church service while the other half admits to streaming a different church service other than their own, essentially “church hopping” digitally. In FBC, we have noticed that our number of views to our live-stream service have averaged about 150 for the first service, with the numbers peaking long after the service has started and declining as soon as the sermon is finished! Even assuming an average of 2 persons sharing a screen, the estimated attendance would only be 300, a far cry from the 600 to 700 people who used to come to our physical service on Sunday. Perhaps we need to re-examine the mandate and importance of our corporate ‘gathering’ on the Lord’s day and restore Worship From Home to its proper place in our lives.
In the Bible, there is no shortage of accounts of God’s people gathering to worship Him. In fact, the word ‘Church’ comes from the Greek word ekklesia, which simply means an assembly or a gathering. In Acts 2:42-27, we read that the early believers “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” and “Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.” Later, in Acts 20:7 and 1 Cor 16:2, we read of the early Christians gathering on the first day of the week (Sunday), a tradition we continue today to give thanks and celebrate our Lord Jesus’ resurrection and the richness of the salvation He has given us.
And if our gathering on Sunday is to come into God’s presence to worship Him, what should our attitudes be? May I suggest the following thoughts when we Worship from Home:
- Our WFH should be Christ-centred rather than Man-centred.
In a culture where the ultimate aim is the pursuit of one’s personal happiness and comfort, and where self takes precedence above all else, it’s easy to come to church service with the expectation of being “served”. And so, even for well-intentioned Christians, we may unconsciously hope that our church will serve up for us an eloquent sermon or music that’s pleasing to our ears or even prayers that focus more on what we want rather than what conforms to the will of God. Not that a good sermon or great music or prayers for our needs are wrong in themselves, but our edification and experience are not the primary focus when we come to worship. It’s not about us as much as it is about God! It’s about coming with the intent and expectation to honour and glorify Jesus who is the reason and reality for our worship. God is not an abstraction but as a Person. Worship is concerned with both His praise and His presence. Our WFH should be sacred with a sense of reverence.
With the rise in video conferencing, the internet is full of guidelines on good etiquette when using the technology for work. For instance, they will tell you to dress appropriately (no pyjamas please!) or to ensure that your background space is presentable (no laundry basket!). Do we adopt the same care and attitudes when we come for “service” on Sunday morning when no one is watching us now? Are we mindful that we are coming into the presence of a Holy God?
I remember around this time two years ago, I had the opportunity to attend a Chinese New Year function that had the Agong as its guest-of-honour. It’s incredible the amount of effort that went into the preparation of his visit with a seemingly endless list of royal protocols that included what we were to wear, the colours to avoid, where to stand, how to greet and so on. And all these for a human king whom I did not have a personal relationship with or emotional attachment to. While I’m not advocating that we be legalistic on how we present ourselves, I do think we need to maintain some basic decorum when we come to meet our King of kings. How about coming on time to begin with or even a few minutes earlier for a time of silent prayer and meditation? After all, service begins at 8:45am and not when the sermon begins. Do we dress casually as we normally would at home or do we dress more formally for church as a mark of respect?
As a church, I think we need to desperately recapture a lofty concept of who God is. He is the Ruler and Judge of the whole Earth! Let’s remember that our God is the same God who told Moses to remove his sandals because he was standing on holy ground (Exodus 3). He’s the same God who provided Isaiah a glimpse of His power and glory that immediately reminded the prophet of his own unworthiness. In other words, let us regard the space we come into for worship as sacred. Let us come to worship with an attitude of humility and reverence, for our sacrifice to God “is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise” (Psalm 51:17)
- Our WFH should engage our hearts and transform our lives.
The danger of watching a service unfold on a screen is that we reduce our involvement as mere spectators to an event rather than a full engagement of our faculties in the act of worship. When the music starts, are we content to just listen and be entertained or do we rise to our feet and sing out loud to be fully engaged? When we listen to the sermon, are we just ‘downloading’ into our minds a monologue (a TED talk as Arnold once put it) which may be intellectually satisfying and even inspirational; or do we allow that information to transform our lives by going beyond our heads to our hearts and eventually to our hands as it propels us to act in obedience to the will of God (James 1:22)? Sunday worship should be a transformative experience that binds us closer to God and to His people.
- Our WFH should give us a longing to come back to worship with others in-person.
Our isolation from the rest of the body of Christ is akin to the early Christians scattered all over the Roman empire because of persecution from the authorities. Peter called them the elect exiles of the Dispersion (1 Peter), except this time, we are hiding from a virus. Our current situation should cause us to long for the day when we can once again meet face to face. Bodily presence matters and worshipping from home is but a poor substitute for in-person corporate worship where we can hear one another’s voices, greet each other with a handshake (holy kiss?) and fellowship over a cup of tea. After all, our Corporate Worship is supposed to be a foretaste of the gathered church depicted in the Apostle John’s vision in Revelation 7:9, where “there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb”
With WFH a necessity at the moment, FBC is trying to make our online worship a more holistic and engaging experience, which is why on March 14, we will be switching to a Zoom format for Sunday service. More information will be provided in the weeks to come. In the meantime, let me leave you with an interesting thought from Pastor Jay Y. Kim, author of the book Analog Church which takes a fascinating look at the implications for the Church in a digital age. Jay made a distinction between a Church Online and an Online Church. The first is a gathering of God’s people wanting to engage and participate in the life of the church while the second is a packaged product to be downloaded and consumed. One is a community while the other is a commodity. Which one is FBC?
Leong Yew Lum