Preaching to an Empty Room
Today marked the first time I have preached a sermon to a live camera absent a congregation. I typically preach just once a month or so, so I have been spared this awkward endeavor until today.
There are two major takeaways I want to share with you.
The first is simply this: pray for your pastors.
For how grateful I am that we live in an age where this flexibility is possible, this was a sad and strange thing I did today.
To spend all week preparing a sermon with the faces of your people in mind, only to then deliver the word to a camera, blind to who is on the receiving end, is just... sad and strange.
I spent 40 minutes preaching to a little red light bulb, trying in my mind to imagine my wife sitting in front of me, since I knew she was watching at home with the kids. When I was finished, I was immediately tempted to check the viewer count. Had my church shown up to worship with me today?
Church, most of your preachers are pastors first. We’re not televangelists. We are local church shepherds. We do what we do out of love for Jesus’s flock in our communities. And when we can’t be with our flocks, it is disorienting. Most of us didn’t get into ministry to put out YouTube sermons. We preach to rooms we know of people we love. While we are preaching, we are looking at the faces of our flock— we see your smiles, your head nods, your tears, your anger, your shifting in your seat. We know when the Spirit has struck a chord in the room, and to hang out there and preach some more. We know when our stupid jokes have fallen flat. When we mess something up, we are at ease as we expect to receive grace and encouragement from people who know and love us back.
As I think about my every word being passed around social media to be viewed by many I have never met, it forces me to rest in Jesus (and gladly, I can.) It forces me to believe that the Holy Spirit and the gospel are sufficient to outshine my own inadequacies as a video preacher. It presses against my insecurities.
But ignoring all that— we just miss our people. This is absolutely no substitute for gathering with our brothers and sisters and worshiping our Lord together. We want to be together again. So pray for your pastors. That’s the first thing.
Secondly, another pastor friend of mine today remarked what a miracle Zoom or Facebook Live would have been for the Apostle Paul, who longed to commune with his brothers and sisters in the faith, and had to rely on letters from prison to get his heart out to them. So pray for your congregations who are beginning to miss the blessing that modern common graces afford us.
We are all fatigued at this point with virtual church. This is not how we were designed to function, I acknowledge that. The novelty of this thing has worn off for most of us. A lot of us can’t stand the thought of sitting in front of a computer screen again. Logging in feels optional.
Pray your church will stay the course.
Historically, if local churches quit fighting to gather in whatever ways they could muster just because their ideal gathering method wasn’t achievable, many vibrant church bodies today would have been snuffed out a long time ago. The underground church is going through much greater difficulty than we are. Will we forsake coming together because we have a computer screen between us for a few months?
Pray that your church will fight to see virtual gathering as a common grace in an uncommon season, and that they will remain engaged with the body as closely as possible until we can be together again soon.
This is all your pastors want. To keep the family together while it has to be apart.
Pray for your pastors, pray for your churches.
