Sunday Devotions: The Global-Local Church
A reflection on an online series of worship services
Normally, I spend these Sunday morning posts ruminating on some passage or passages from Scripture. This week, let me instead reflect on a different source: a worship experience.
Really, a series of worship experiences I’ve had this summer. While they originate with my two least favorite approaches to church (virtual and national), they nonetheless remind me of my two favorite dimensions of the church (global and local).
I don’t know just how long the Church of England has been sharing a short online service on Sunday mornings, but our family first encountered those videos during the COVID year of 2020-21. I still think there are deep theological problems with virtual church, which inherently disembodies the Body of Christ. But at several moments during that tumultuous year we had no other way to worship the God of the Incarnation than via YouTube or Facebook, and at some point my wife discovered these half-hour videos streaming from across the Atlantic Ocean.
While we’ve long since returned to in-person worship and I hope never to give it up again, every so often I do supplement my regular Sunday religious practices with a virtual visit to the Church of England. It reminds me that the Body of Christ spans all places, peoples, and time periods, and that (as one rector preached this summer) “the whole human race is our neighbor.” Last weekend, for example, one of the hymns was “Beautiful Savior” — meaning that I not only sang along to a translated German text with a choir from England, but did so from Minnesota, where an immigrant from Norway once composed the most famous arrangement of that tune.
Still more strikingly, the priest presiding over that service was another emigrant: as a teenager, he had left the Philippines for London. For that matter, this week’s officiant grew up in Nigeria and studied Spanish and French at university in Scotland.
But if one benefit of such virtual worship is the way it can remind us of the global nature of the church, my favorite part of these C of E videos is how intensely local they usually are.
I’ve long been hostile to the idea of national churches, not just because I associate them with the “dead orthodoxy” that my Pietist ancestors abhorred in 19th century Sweden but because they’ve so often fused faith with patriotism and politics. Like Substack writer Kacie M., I’ve worshipped at St Paul’s Cathedral, the largest Anglican church in London, and marveled at the stunning architecture and ethereal music, only to walk out past monuments to British admirals and generals and ask if this is “a church established in worship of Christ, or in military power and subjugation?”
But while some of these videos bring viewers inside places as famous, grand, and wealthy as St Paul’s, more often they take us to churches that are obscure, humble, and clearly struggling to pay for the ongoing work of preserving centuries-old buildings. Since the Church of England is a national church serving an increasingly post-Christian nation, its online series visits parishes that American tourists rarely see — and secular Britons rarely notice.
So while it’s disheartening to see how disinterested moderns can be in Christianity, it’s inspiring to see how invested these churches are in the lives of their communities.
Earlier this summer, for example, we encountered the tradition of Sea Sunday through worship from ancient churches near the Cornish fishing village of Polperro. Every second Sunday in July, Christians inhabiting such coastlines pray for those who make their living on the water, sing hymns1 to the God “whose almighty word the winds and waves submissive heard,” and consider the words of the Christ who called his disciples to become a different sort of fisher. We heard of the joys, sorrows, and frustrations of work that is purposeful, dangerous, and increasingly difficult to sustain in the face of a changing economy and climate.
Last week brought us to Wiltshire, and another feast that is as unfamiliar to me as it is important to the farmers of that region. Lammas takes its name from the Old English for “loaf mass,” a worship service dedicated to celebrating the first fruits of the grain harvest with the consecration and breaking of bread. Coming from a country where land once farmed by people like my ancestors is sometimes converted into campuses for megachurches, it was moving to worship with tiny English congregations whose ministry is still inseparable from the rhythms and requirements of agriculture. “I felt this sense of call to ministry to all people when I was in college,” said the Filipino curate who led the Lammas service. While he had initially trained to serve ethnic minority congregations in large cities, he accepted a first call to a rural ministry because he wanted to better know and address “those hidden poverties, those hidden needs that we don’t often see in the city.”
Then other Sundays take us into urban ministries that address other sorts of poverty, both material and spiritual. But whatever the setting, I appreciate how this series reminds us that the global church must always serve local needs. “Jesus calls us here to meet him as through song and word and prayer,” we sang this morning; however few or many respond to that call, they still “affirm God’s promised presence where his people live and care.”
Next week’s lectionary readings: Psalm 80:1-2, 8-19; Isaiah 5:1-7; Luke 12:49-56; Hebrews 11:29-12:2.
Led, in this case, by a local fishermen’s choir!