Instituting a Virtual Church

Hi! I'm Rev. Joseph W. Taber IV, pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Lowell, NC. That video is almost 8 years old. I made it as an assignment for a seminary class entitled "Theological Grounding and Development of the Virtual Church," (Dr. Watkins loved long class titles).

Now we find ourselves HAVING to reshape our traditions in order to respond to the leading of the Holy Spirit in this age. The institutional church will not emerge from this global pandemic unchanged.

As we move forward there are two things about me that I need y’all to know.

The first is that I’m a huge geek.

Not, was a geek in high school, although I was that too. I’m still a geek. My sermon manuscripts have footnotes. I get excited about minor grammatical changes between biblical translations. I enjoy reading minutes from Session meetings. I have a favorite part of the Book of Order: F-1.0301. If you don’t have that particular line memorized, don’t worry, I’ll come back around to it.

Right? Huge geek.

The second thing you need to know about me, is that I’m a millennial.

Yep. One of those. Generation Y. I’m not a borderline millennial, I’m right in the middle of that generation. One of the characteristics of my generational cohort is that, by and large, we don’t trust institutions. It’s not that we hate them on principle, and want to dismantle all of civilization out of a sense of entitlement or laziness, it’s just that we have seen institutions fail again and again and again.

I was in sixth grade when I watched police officers in Littleton Colorado wait outside Columbine High School while shots and pipe bombs went off inside. Institutional law enforcement failed those kids. I was in 8th grade when the Florida recounts and hanging chads arrested the election of 2000, and the democratic institutions floundered amid minor technical difficulties. I was in 9th grade when two planes hit the Twin Towers in September of 2001 because institutions of intelligence gathering hadn’t talked to one another. I was a senior in college in 2008, when the very financial institutions that were supposed to have oversight over the economy led us into the great recession. The educational institution which had helped raise me had promised me that student loans were worthwhile because a college graduate made an average of $1,000,000 more than a high school grad over the course of their career, and I graduated in 2009 to an economy with no jobs. Now here I am in 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic that government institutions failed to adequately address in its early stages.

What’s more, my Dad was the Executive Presbyter in Western North Carolina while I was growing up, so I got to hear stories of how the institutional church failed their members, their pastors, and each other.

And yet, here I am, serving the institutional church. I get benefits from that institution through the Board of Pensions. I am very involved in my Presbytery.

So it’s not that millennials hate institutions and want to tear them all down. That’s not us. We just don’t trust them, because we have seen how human failings creep into human institutions, and those institutions are not always strong enough to bear the load.

So it alarms me when I see Presbyterians trusting institutions more than we trust God. I see a pattern of my fellow Presbyterians trusting our institutions more than we trust God, and it is alarming.

When we make decisions based on what is best for our endowment, that’s trusting our institution. When we preserve our buildings rather than building relationships, that’s trusting our institution. When we try and recruit members for our congregations rather than making disciples for Christ, that’s trusting our institution. When we worry about taking a stand because it will mean losing members, that’s trusting our institution. When we change up our bylaws and books of order in order to ensure that we can ignore a problem, that’s trusting our institution. When we refuse to take responsibility for our actions and hide behind tradition, that’s trusting our institution.

F-1.0301. My favorite part of the book of order. Huge nerd. “The Church is to be a community of faith, entrusting itself to God alone, even at the risk of losing its life.” Remember what I said about it coming back up? “The Church is to be a community of faith, entrusting itself to God alone, even at the risk of losing its life.”

This tome of our institution, our Book of Order, by which every Pastor, Elder, and Deacon has vowed to abide, reminds us that we are not to entrust our community of faith to our endowments or buildings or committee structures or staffing models, but only God alone. We are to trust God, even if that means the institution falls away.

The Church, as an institution, in the means by which people of faith have served the LORD for centuries. It is an instrument through which God has done amazing things. It has gathered hands and hearts to do ministry together and to teach the commandments Jesus taught his disciples. Yet we do not put our faith in the church. We entrust ourself to God alone, even if that means risking the life of the Church to do so.

If the Church is serving itself, and trusting only in its institutions, then it’s missing out on the new life that God has given it. If the Church is protecting itself, then it has lost sight of its living hope. If the Church refuses to risk its own life, then it is missing out on the pure and enduring inheritance that cannot perish. But if the church is willing to step out on faith, to risk failure, or even death, then we have a chance to see God do amazing things through us.

The institutional church will not emerge from this global pandemic unchanged. We can change in ways that recognize what God is calling us to do, or we can change by declining into irrelevancy.

I vote for trusting God.