Revisiting the Distanced Church: Friends in the Cloud

Photo by Mike Swigunski on Unsplash

In an older post, I made reference to my contribution to The Distanced Church, a project by Professor Heidi Campbell that collated reflections from theologians and church leaders on who the Church was being lived when it was forced to do so under conditions of lockdown, which made a terrestrial gathering of the Body of Christ impossible.

As an update, Campbell has this week provided a follow up volume entitled Revisiting The Distanced Church.

In my chapter in The Distanced Church, I wrote about how the Body of Christ was being stretched as it pierced the barrier that divided the real from the digital, but nonetheless made that Body of Christ present to me.

While that past work was more theory laden, the chapter in Revisiting the Distanced Church - entitled “Friends in the Cloud” - is a much more personal piece, one that was sparked by the transitions that I have had to make this year.

There I reflected on how I had inadvertently become the guinea pig to test out the theories I had laid out in the previous work. In the same way that I talked about the stretching of the Body of Christ in cyberspace, I found myself experiencing that stretching as I found myself far from friends and loved ones. I also saw the stretching and testing the limits of my own theorems.

The good news is that the theorems seem to pan out, although I found my confidence getting more qualified as those theories came into contact with the texture of experience. The stress points of my more theoretical work seemed to turn not so much on the presence of the Body of Christ, which I continue to argue is real, but on the shape of my desire in the face of that presence.

This experience affirmed that old chestnut that our hearts desire eternity. Part of that desiring for eternity, however, is also desiring for the fullness of the object of our desires, which also includes the fullness of the presence of that object. This includes not only mere things, but also persons, communities, friends and family.

To read my thoughts in full, my essay can be found on page 107 of Revisiting the Distanced Church, which is available for free download. The first volume of the series, The Distanced Church is also available for download for free.

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