Before I begin, a clarification is in order, if only because people asked for a recording of the hymn I described in last week’s eNews message.

For starters, yes, we do record our worship services. The audio recordings are kept and given to those who genuinely need them, which I’ll come back to in a moment. In the meantime, know that the device we use to capture the service is fed straight from our thousand-year-old microphones directly to a flash drive. In other words, the recordings are, by no means, a spectral capture in crisp Dolby stereo. Above and beneath and around the liturgy’s voice, there are a multitude of ambient sounds you’d expect in a room bearing several hundred people. Thankfully, the spoken word survives the ordeal reasonably well. You can hear the lector reading and the pastor preaching clearly enough, and without much annoyance. But what does not fare so well is the music. It sounds like it’s being performed and sung from inside a gigantic oil drum.

In short, the recordings do what they are meant to do, which is to preserve the Word of God preached and read. However, they do not showcase the liturgical experience—and I’m perfectly okay with that, for a couple of reasons.

One of the reasons we do not share our services with anyone other than shut-ins or other folks in genuine need became especially clear during COVID. Not long after so many in society became terrified, even as we gathered in person, I warned the Board of Elders that providing a virtual alternative would inevitably give people an excuse to stay away—not out of necessity, but out of convenience. And as it turns out, I was right. While it didn’t necessarily happen to us, plenty of studies have discovered it did, in fact, happen to countless others. Indeed, American Christendom experienced a significant shift. Duke Divinity School’s Faith & Leadership initiative found that most congregations that normalized virtual worship during COVID never fully regained their in-person attendance, ultimately returning to in-person worship with 10% fewer people than before. The COVID Religion Research Project found that as many as 25% of regular churchgoers in America now regularly rely on online worship as a viable substitute for in-person gatherings.

Gathering these things into a singular thought, my sense is that what began as an emergency measure became, for many churches, a long-term standard for deliberate displacement. People settled into watching rather than attending, observing rather than gathering.

And yet, the Bible does not treat worship in this way. That’s because it does not consider the actual assembly as optional (Hebrews 10:24-25). Christian worship is, by design, incarnational. We do it together, in person. It is God’s people gathered in one place to hear, confess, receive, and sing. We do this in one another’s presence. We’re the Body of Christ, and that’s how a body works, together with its other parts (1 Corinthians 12:12-27).

So, what about service recordings? Well, we record and share our services as a care for those who truly cannot be there—the shut-in, the homebound, those whose bodies no longer allow them to gather without real difficulty. These are exceptional cases of care. I’ve always considered the service recordings as functioning sort of like an artificial heart. It’s not ideal. It more or less sustains when what should be there cannot be. In the meantime, for the healthy among us, we resist broadcasting beyond this threshold because we do not want to train anyone to believe that artificial substitutes are equivalent to the real thing. Again, an artificial heart does not replace a healthy, living one. In the same way, virtual presence can serve in cases of genuine need, but it is not the same as real presence.

But there’s still more to this.

Returning to where I started, after last week’s note, more than a few people asked if I had a recording of the service. I was going to disregard everything I just said and share a short clip of “What Child Is This” from our Children’s Christmas service. I really was. But then I listened to the recording. As I did, I ran squarely into what I mentioned before.

Our service recordings are not very good—and I like that they’re not. Yes, the hymn as it was sung that night—the children’s voices, the organ, the words—all these parts were technically present in the recording. But at the same time, they weren’t. The recording did not capture the moment. To understand what I described last week, you had to be there. If you weren’t there, then, well, you missed it.

Along the same lines as what I’ve already written here, there’s something about being in the room. It’s something no microphone can seize, and no speaker can reproduce. I can only tell you about it—the way the sound moved, the way the congregation was pulled into carrying the lyrics, the way time seemed to slow during the second stanza of “What Child Is This,” as though its words really were pressing down on all of us with a theological weight you could actually feel. Sure, I could play the recording for you. You’d hear the music and singing. But you cannot experience the surge of a moment when truth lands heavily, and everyone in the room is caught in its blast radius.

That only happens incarnationally. It only happens when you are there.

This is not a critique of recordings. They serve a purpose. Again, we consider it a kindness to shut-ins, travelers, and those whose bodies or circumstances truly prevent them from gathering with their Christian family. Thanks be to God for such tools. But they were never meant to replace presence. They cannot. They do not.

Christian worship is far more than content delivery. It’s not something you consume efficiently while cleaning the kitchen or working in the garage. It is not background noise for Sunday morning coffee or something you “catch up on” later in the week. Christian Worship is a holy and deliberate interruption to everything else in your life. It is God gathering His people to Himself at a time and in a place to feed and sustain them with His gifts of forgiveness.

Even better, Christian worship is where the Word is not merely read but actually addressed to you personally—where the Sacrament of Christ’s body and blood is not something thought about but actually received. You open your mouth, and you eat and drink. It’s a place where forgiven hearts sing praises to God, and what they sing isn’t just sound, but it’s borne by the space itself—by breath and wood and pipe and stone and people standing shoulder to shoulder confessing and resonating the same truths together (Colossians 3:16).

The night we sang “What Child Is This,” the hymn was not so moving or impressive because it was technically flawless. It was powerful because, in a sense, it was inhabited. Indeed, Kantor Newman painted the text gloriously. And yet, the text was painted not only by him, but by the space, by the gathered Church, by the shared attentiveness of people who had come expecting God to do what He has promised to do. And He did (Isaiah 55:10-11). That’s something you cannot download and listen to during the car ride to work.

Now, may I say something plainly and pastorally?

As we stand on the doorstep of a new year, if you have been away from church, come back. If attendance has slipped into something occasional, make it deliberate again. I’m all about New Year’s resolutions. I’m already planning mine. Perhaps you could embrace and use the tradition to recommit to attending church.

Now, be careful. Don’t do it because you feel attendance somehow checks a box and proves your devotion. Don’t do it for any reason other than you know you need what God gives you there. You need to be where the hymnody—God’s Word put to music—is not just captured, but encountered. You need to be where your sins are forgiven out loud (John 20:22-23), where death is named from the pulpit and defied from the pews, where joy is shared by the rest of the Christian body who believe and confess the body’s head, Jesus Christ, together (Ephesians 1:22-23).

Quite simply, nothing compares to being present.

You know as well as I do that this coming year will bring its share of noise, distance, and disembodied substitutes for real life. Resist the lie that these are enough. The Christian faith has always insisted on incarnational truths. So go. Stand. Sing. Listen. Receive. Let the gathering of God’s people in holy worship do what it was always meant to do—which is not merely to pass through your ears, but rather, to take hold of you completely (Psalm 95:1-7).

I assure you, nothing compares.