In continuing with some of my response to Robert in the previous post, I see many other “advantages” offered that Church’s should have AS AN OPTION to further interaction, extending our knowledge of each other (like becoming privy to numerous stories and asides and opinions we may have never had occasion to know, and we certainly don’t think to ask).

The point is often made that ONLINE cannot REPLACE face-to-face. True. I agree. But, on the same token, sometimes face to face is just intimidating, or just not able to deliver some of the kinds of sharing that COULD take place , if only more of us who have any inclination to write, would do so as a favor to helping our community get to know us. What “inhibits” us in our face to face life? Time is one. I am quite sensitive, a great deal of the time, to “keeping people” from something else, or sensing that they need to leave, or maybe WRONGFULLY or mistakenly sense this due to my doubts as to whether this might be of interest to them, or whether that person even likes me or wants to hear ANY of it. So often, we keep it to ourselves. I know I did for years, on many occasions, when I shouldn’t have. But when the online revolution hit, I found a place to be heard, a nd I know so becuase people told me and responded to me and let me know that my visions were makning sense to them, or that they sensed similar things.

Add to this the way that the modern Church, in so many cases, are NOT AT ALL the places where “everybody knows your name”, and even where they do, it is not a place where one feels that they are going to “be known”.

That this is NOT the case is SO frustrating, especiallysince I read about and since visited the Church of the Saviour in Washington , DC, and experienced some of the power of a community that was also enthused about this idea of what Church is…..after that, I was spoiled for life. I can no longer be satisfied with Churches where we sit and listen to sermons and have stuff “pushed at us” like some self-help bookshelf, and miss out on the opportunity to know one another. The “testimony” is relegated to a “once-in-a-while” , “special treat” kind of deal. That’s just plain disobedient. That is “shirking our responsibility” as a BODY of Christ. A BODY…….all of us…..we are a BODY. The hand does not say to the eye, “I have no need of you”, or the hand does not say to the foot, “Foot, you just stay still and let me do all the talking”. We don’t talk about the role EACH of us has in mission. We don’t talk about CALL (except in context of full-time ministry postions).