Internet Pastors & Online Churches

I was recently targeted for an advert by PrayForMe. This is what it does:

PrayForMe is the leading online marketplace where pastors can represent their services, connect with new parishioners, and earn money by offering spiritual guidance and support. Whether you’re looking to expand your ministry or find new ways to serve, PrayForMe is here to help you reach a global audience.

Accompanying the text are photographs of be-cassocked, smiling clergy, who assure prospective patrons that this is perfectly legitimate. And these are the listed benefits:

Expand Your Ministry: Reach a global audience and grow your community.

Earn for Your Services: Set your rates and get paid for the spiritual services you offer.

Flexible and Convenient: Manage your schedule and services from anywhere.

Trusted Platform: Join a network of pastors who trust PrayForMe to support their ministry.

And what services can I provide on this platform?

Mentoring: Offer personalized spiritual mentorship to parishioners seeking guidance on their faith journey.

Prayer: Lead prayer sessions to support parishioners in their times of need and to help them seek divine intervention.

Education: Conduct educational programs (sic) that deepen parishioners’ understanding of theology, scripture, and their faith.

Confession: Guide individuals through private, confidential confession sessions to help them seek forgiveness and spiritual renewal.

Speaking with Pastor: Engage in one-on-one conversations with parishioners, offering spiritual advice, support, and pastoral care.

Preliminary Lessons: Guide new believers through introductory lessons to help them understand the basics of faith and spirituality.

Of course, this is of no interest to me whatsoever. Notwithstanding my concerns about confession and spiritual mentorship, whatever that is, my instinct is to tell someone to join a local church rather than to stare into screens and phones from the comfort of an armchair or bedspread. I have already encountered that peculiar feature of twenty-first-century church life, the ‘Internet Pastor’, on several occasions. He is usually an older man whose ‘call’ to ministry no existing church was ever able to affirm or accept, whose frustration Call caused him to resign his association and seek internet followers, instead. These, largely middle-aged women, recently divorced, or with unbelieving husbands, think him a wonderful man and provide him with the respect and kudos he knows he deserves. He, for his part, delights to reply to their emails, caters his Bible teaching for their preoccupations and finally provides them with a pastor who can give them the greater share of attention which previous ones seemed unwilling, or unable, to do. This loose cannon, who is accountable to no-one, gleefully mentors and moulds his handful of misfit men and lonely women. They may regard this online community as their lifeline, their safe space or their spiritual hobby, to which they come and go as they please, fitting it in between the pleasures of early retirement. There are no tedious welcome rotas, mass washings of teacups after the service or church cleaning afternoons to be arranged and signed-up for. 

There is certainly a case for joining internet churches and online Christian groups, however. People who are housebound, for instance, or who live on remote Scottish islands, or reside in the middle of Tehran where open church-going is a pending death sentence, might all justify ‘membership’ of web-based congregations and the ministry of internet-based pastors and preachers. For everyone else, however, I would venture to suggest- and I am likely to cause offence, I know- that ‘internet church’ is the spiritual equivalent of online pornography. The phone or computer screen renders one a spectator to something that is meant to be intimate and designed to be enjoyed in person. In His word, God determined that both sexual relations and public worship would be physical expressions of deep, inner desire, and only exercised under particular conditions (congress between a man and a woman, within marriage; corporate worship would be in the presence of others with whom one shares the Lord's Supper under the sound of God's word). To watch from afar is simply voyeurism, visual thrill-seeking derived from observing other people do the real thing, or what appears to be the real thing. Both are strangely addictive and eventually harmful, for neither is truly authentic. Let me be clear, please: I am not opposed to people watching services online or downloading sermons. I would be a hypocrite for uploading ours to this website if I were. But if you are a Bible-believing Christian and that is all you do, repent. It is not PrayForMe you need, but prayer for you. 

And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.

-Hebrews 10:24-25, New King James Version

Image by Brian Cragun from Pixabay