How Should We Evaluate ‘Zoom’ Worship?
Tags: Zoom Meetings, Theology, Faith and Life, Technology, Christian Worship

How Should We Evaluate ‘Zoom’ Worship?

Runner Up in FaithTech Institute’s 2020 Writing Contest!

Photo by Dylan Ferreira

Systematically evaluating ‘Zoom’ worship is made difficult by the sheer volume of material currently available, most of which is grasping at different ends of the theological stick. Within my own tradition (namely, Anglicanism), much of the focus of recent material has centred on issues associated with the proximity of the eucharistic elements — a strange area to focus on, given that we humans are not in a position to rigidly define the workings of the Holy Spirit. (We might suggest that the real issue with the ‘Zoom’ eucharist is that we might not be sharing in the same meal.)

The popular focus on the Eucharist has left another area much less explored: the experience of ‘Zoom fatigue’ in relation to online worship. The concept of Zoom fatigue presents experience as a means of assessing, and a source for, theology and practice. In this piece, my hope is to examine this approach critically.

While the sense of togetherness experienced via ‘Zoom’ might provide a useful way of touching base as part of the daily rhythm of prayer, using ‘Zoom’ has also proved to be an exhausting experience for so many. Why? Well, consider for example, the way people face each other. It is true that we usually interpret sustained, one-to-one, face-to-face interaction as ‘adversarial’ in nature. Yet face-to-face has, for many, been their experience of using ‘Zoom’.

During ‘communication skills’ classes in medical school, students are often taught that they should never sit directly opposite a patient. Rather, they should sit with the chair slightly askew, or perhaps even side-by-side, to make the patient feel more comfortable. One of the points in the practical exams usually reads, ‘candidate checks that the patient is comfortable with the seating position before starting the consultation’. Simply put, sustained face-to-face interaction is exhausting, especially for those wired as introverts.

Photo by Chris Montgomery

Both church leaders and church-goers must account for this phenomenon when evaluating ‘Zoom’ worship, particularly given that our experience of the eucharist — our ‘source and summit’ — should strengthen us for service, rather than leaving us fatigued. Having said this, there is a danger in lapsing into ‘felt’ experience at the expense of wrestling with more systematic approaches; but equally, there is a danger in denying, or flattening out, the experiences of the individual in the ongoing evaluations of Zoom worship. Both approaches, when pushed to the extreme, do violence to the entire enterprise.

This tension raises questions about our approaches to experience in general, particularly as they relate to the entire theological enterprise. There are, broadly speaking, two views on the relationship between experience and Christian theology, explicitly: suspicion and acceptance. By briefly exploring each of these in turn, I hope to show that Zoom worship reflects what we believe about experience and how it relates (or doesn’t) to theological inquiry in general.

Suspicion

The first view understands Christian theology as the interpretive framework in which our experience might be understood. Alister McGrath summarises this view thus, ‘theology interprets our feelings even to the point of contradicting them when they are misleading’.¹ In this view, special revelation is the prerequisite for faith in God, which is to say trust in, and dependence upon, God. In other words, we need God’s own self-disclosure to rightly understand our experience of God in the world. This leads to a more critical assessment of experience, challenging us to interpret our experience in light of God’s past activity in the world.

Perhaps the most famous example of this perspective can be found in German priest Martin Luther’s theologia crucis, his ‘theology of the cross’. Christ’s disciples needed an interpretative framework in which to understand their experience in Jerusalem, Christ’s crucifixion; hence Jesus invested three years into their formation, travelling around Galilee, teaching them how to make sense of what was soon to happen in Jerusalem. In short, the suspicion view uses a previously established theological framework to assess experience as a source for theological thinking, while scripture, tradition, and reason provide the guardrails.

Photo by Johnny McClung

Acceptance

The second view understands experience as a foundational resource for Christian theology, respecting its place among the other sources for theology, namely: Scripture, tradition, and reason. As Friedrich Schleiermacher might assert, human religious experience can tell us about the transcendent event apart from special revelation. But uncritical acceptance will evaluate Zoom worship based solely on experiential or emotional reactions, rather than on theological, sacramental, or ecclesiological foundations.

Perhaps the clearest, and most surprising, example of this perspective can be found in John Calvin’s exposition of the doctrine of revelation in the 1541 edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Calvin argues that all God’s attributes are ‘shown fully enough in the arrangement of the world and of all creatures’, but we fail to perceive them; hence, these attributes are ‘more familiarly made known by his word’.² God’s ‘mercy, goodness, compassion, righteousness, judgement, and truth’ all ‘shine forth in the heaven and the earth’, but we usually do not have eyes to see.³ The content of general and special revelation are thus identical, according to his view; the difference is only in terms of expression.

Moving forward: a dialectical approach

This latter view engenders humility. God’s Spirit is not limited by our experience of God, neither is divine activity limited exclusively to the Church but can be seen in the world as well. Pushed to the extreme, however, this view can also be dangerous. Proponents might fail to acknowledge that our emotions can be destructive; instead, our emotions must be held accountable within a trusted community, and subject to the scrutiny of plain reason. Thus, when it comes to Zoom fatigue, we need to do more than evaluate church based on our own fatigue; we must also name it and critique it within our larger theological, sacramental, and ecclesiological commitments.

In addition, both suspicion and acceptance are in danger of fostering relativism, the acknowledgement of little or no authority outside the self. In the first instance, a person might elevate his or her own theological perspective as a kind of litmus test for experiences; in the second instance, a person might lack the criteria which enables careful discernment.

An alternative approach to both suspicion and acceptance is therefore vital. Christian theology gives us a useful framework within which our experience might be interpreted, but the framework itself is shaped and informed by our experience. Experience grounds the framework in practice and the difficult realities of life. Experience prevents any kind of framework from becoming overly rarefied; it ties it to the concrete realities of being-human-in-the-world. A difficult, although potentially constructive, dialectic is established between Christian theology and experience. It is only through resolving this difficult dialectic that the Church and the Academy might evaluate ‘Zoom’ worship in a credible and authentic manner.