The Need for A Hybrid Model

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the latest book by James Emery White, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church in a Post-Christian Digital Age (Zondervan), releasing tomorrow on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Christian Book Distributors, The Grounds Bookstore and Café, and bookstores nationwide. You can get more information HERE.

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On Wednesday, March 10, 2020, the World Health Organization officially declared that we were in the midst of a pandemic. At that time, there were only 33 reported deaths as a result of COVID-19 in the United States. One year later, on Wednesday, March 10, 2021, we were still in a declared state of pandemic with 529,023 deaths having been reported in the U.S. alone. By May 2022, deaths in the U.S. approached one million, and worldwide exceeded five million.

The pandemic did many things to our world beyond the staggering loss of life. Most have been widely reported. That certain sectors of our economy, particularly the travel, restaurant, and entertainment industries, were devastated goes without saying. In education, despite dedicated educators’ noble efforts to engage students, it was a year fraught with challenges, with many students falling behind. And as an article in the New York Times noted, many have experienced a “childhood without children”—a year or more of their lives without birthday parties, playdates and daycare. There is almost universal affirmation that our political culture, social discourse and social interactions have degraded tremendously. You will find the occasional person who believes the pandemic brought out the best in society, expressing an appreciation for the government’s response to the pandemic, commenting on the kindness of strangers, or recognizing the reduction in traffic or pollution. “However,” as a Pew Research Center report on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic noted, “these kinds of responses were so rare that researchers were unable to reliably measure them.”

These are not short-term impacts.

But few areas of our collective experience were more profoundly affected than our religious lives, and particularly our gathered religious communities. It wasn’t simply that most churches were closed for significant lengths of time or that financial challenges related to diminished giving reared their heads, or that upon reopening most found their in-person attendance significantly lower than before. We were also beset with pastoral burnout, the moral failure of noteworthy leaders, and widespread spiritual fatigue. Yet in the midst of that darkness shone a light: that a larger narrative – growing larger with hindsight – is the incredible opportunity the pandemic gave the Western church to transition to the model it desperately needed to be transitioning to in the first place. 

Early in the pandemic, I wrote that I began to see signs that the pandemic just might be the catalyst needed to turn around a declining church. What if the path most churches were on, if not forced into a radical redirection, would have guaranteed their continued marginalization, irrelevance, and decline? What if the pandemic was forcing countless churches to change in ways that would actually allow them to grow in both size and influence? 

It was true. The pandemic, early on, positively altered the church in at least five desperately needed ways.

First, churches were forced to move from a weekend-only crowd-centric approach to a seven-day-a-week incarnational approach. While every church should embrace, celebrate, and promote corporate worship, too many churches made that celebration the be-all and end-all for the life of the church. We say that the church isn’t bricks and mortar but rather a community of faith that can be strategically served by bricks and mortar, yet too many churches were never leaving the building. The church is to be in the community where it resides, attempting to reach and serve in the name of Jesus. Early on, the pandemic broke us out of our gospel ghettos and holy huddles and into the neighborhoods and streets where we live, particularly as individual Christians. We weren’t able to gather as a community of faith, but we were able to walk our neighborhoods and meet people we had never met before. 

Second, churches were forced online. You would think that the vast majority of churches already would have been online. They weren’t. I don’t mean they didn’t have a website—most did. I mean they didn’t have an online presence. Prior to the pandemic, a relatively small fraction of Protestant churches in the technologically advanced U.S., much less in the wider world, had an online campus or had ever streamed a service on Facebook. But virtually overnight, the vast majority of churches did have an online presence. Churches were finally going where the world actually lived.    

Third, churches were forced to embrace social media. Before the pandemic, most churches not only did not have an online presence but also did not embrace nor use social media. A study found that prepandemic, only 15% of churches in the U.S. were using Twitter or Instagram. Yet, as churches quickly learned, social media is the communication network of the modern world. Increasingly it’s how people relate, get their news and interact with organizations. The pandemic forced churches to learn to communicate the way the people they were trying to reach were communicating.

Fourth, churches were forced to innovate and change. Necessity, it has been said, is the mother of invention. It is also the mother of change. When you are forced to stop doing things the way you have always done them and must find a way to soldier on, you are pushed into new ways of thinking and acting. Some have opined that the seven last words of a dying church are, “We’ve never done it that way before.” In the nick of time, at least for many churches, they were having to say, “We must do things like never before.” That takes a church from seven words before death to seven words before life.

Finally, churches were brought back to mission. When all your ways of doing things are stripped away, you are left with something raw and unfiltered: your real reason to exist. When faced with, say, the inability to meet for a Sunday service, you are forced to ask yourself what you were trying to do through that Sunday service and then get about doing it. 

Then, just as we found our footing, just as we began making inroads we’d never made before, at our first opportunity we went right back to business as usual. Don’t get me wrong—there was nothing but joy in once again offering in-person services, but I can’t begin to tell you how many pastors and church leaders I heard express that the key to everything being well again was the ability to meet again. They said they hoped they would never hear “Facebook streaming” again for the rest of their lives. 

But then came the shock: people didn’t return in droves. The reason had little to do with the pandemic, which only provided the smokescreen. Churches have been seeing declining attendance for some time. The pandemic accelerated and widened the effect of two seismic cultural changes that hold enormous import for the life and mission of the church: the new reality of a post-Christian world and the digital revolution. 

In his book Think Again, Adam Grant writes of three prevailing mindsets: that of the preacher, the prosecutor, and the politician. With each we take on a particular identity and use a distinct set of tools. If our closely held beliefs are challenged, we go into preacher mode and deliver “sermons” to protect or promote our beliefs. If we recognize flaws in another person’s reasoning, we go into prosecutor mode and marshal arguments to prove them wrong and make our case. If the goal is to win over an audience, we go into politician mode and campaign for approval. “The risk,” writes Grant, “is that we become so wrapped up in preaching that we’re right, prosecuting others who are wrong, and politicking for support that we don’t bother to rethink our own views.”

Grant argues for a fourth mindset: that of the scientist. “If you’re a scientist by trade, rethinking is fundamental to your profession. You’re paid to be constantly aware of the limits of your understanding. You’re expected to doubt what you know, be curious about what you don’t know, and update your views based on new data.” But being a scientist, Grant points out, is not just a profession, it’s a frame of mind. It is a “mode of thinking that differs from preaching, prosecuting, and politicking.”

I hope that Grant’s use of preaching in a semi-pejorative way and his highlighting of a scientist in a favorable way don’t figure so literally in your mind that you want to defend the role of sermons and lambast the secular scientific mind and thus fail to get his larger point. He’s making the case for necessary rethinking that too often is thwarted by resistant mindsets. For example, he lists the four most annoying things people say instead of rethinking:

“That will never work here.”

“That’s not what my experience has shown.”

“That’s too complicated; let’s not overthink it.”

“That’s the way we’ve always done it.”

If you have ever caught yourself saying or thinking any of those sentences, you need to do some rethinking. I hope you will allow me to ask you to think about a simple assertion, even if you end up disagreeing with it in the end: We must rethink the church’s approach to fulfilling its mission in a post-Christian, digital age. The heart of that rethinking hinges on a single word: hybrid. The church must bring together the physical and the digital, and it must be a vibrant community of faith for churchgoers as well as a church for the unchurched. These twin dynamics are at the heart of the new hybrid model.

James Emery White

Sources

This has been excerpted from James Emery White, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church in a Post-Christian, Digital Age (Zondervan), order here.

About the Author

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His forthcoming book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available for pre-order on Amazon. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org, where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.

The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on X, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.