Futurechurch

This one isn't likely to make me many friends.  Let me start by saying that I have no specific disdain for religion or religiosity.  Life's hard, and I think people should be free to take their comfort from whatever source they can find it.  That said, I do not personally subscribe to any particular religious belief or practice.  I'm not an atheist, but I'm not a theist either.  This post isn't about religion per se, though I'm sure that some who read it will make it so.

My grandmother's recently embarked on a crusade to save her church.  The dioscese wants to close several small churches in the area and build a new one centrally.  Ostensibly, the rationale is that a) it's an old building and will cost more and more to maintain as it ages while at the same time, b) the population is dwindling, providing less and less revenue to maintain it, and c) the number of priests available to run is is shrinking.  I also suspect (because I'm a jaded, cynical person) that they've had an offer from some greasy developer to buy the land to build a strip mall or a bank or something else equally unnecessary that shall soon become another vacant blight on the Poconos, but of course I have no proof of this.

The arguments makes economic sense to me, and despite my fond memories of the place - when I was small I would pretend that a friendly shark named Mr. Onkers lived in the stream that ran down the hill next to the church; I'd sit on a cool rock in the shade in the sticky summer morning and have long chats with him while my grandmother said the Rosary - I find the logic for closure difficult to refute.

In any case, Grandmama's asked me to do some research on old churches in London, her thinking being to refute at least the 'because it's old' part of the argument. Fortunately, you can't swing a dead cat in this town without hitting several venerable old piles, so the effort hasn't exactly taxed me.  With the kids in school and Michele out for the morning, I've had a bit of time to think about the question of the the future of churches - not of religion itself, but the physical plant used to deliver it. 

Now, I haven't been to church in years, and my experience is limited to the Roman Catholic rituals, so I may not be in the best position to talk about this, but I will anyway.  It seems to me that in this increasingly disconnected world of ours, any delivery method for anything which requires people to actually BE somewhere at a specific time to do something that they aren't absolutely compelled to do is destined for obsolescence.  I might still have to go to the DMV on their ridiculous bureaucratic schedule to get my license photo taken, but I can buy my groceries and do my banking on my own schedule.

As a parallel, I work from home a bit. I could work from home a lot more because my company encourages it. WFH has actually allowed my firm to shed some expensive real estate, plus most people who work from home will work during the time they would normally spent commuting, so the company not only saves money on space, but gets more of my time for free. I'm also more productive, at least with some of the more cerebral activities which don't require me to interact presonally with others, because there are fewer distractions than at the office. I don't work from home more mainly because I don't have a comfortable chair, but also because I like to get out of the house and see people.

It strikes me that maybe the same might be true of worship. It seems to me that, in the same way that my job can be delivered to my house, there are now better ways to support people's need for spirituality than to require them to turn up, showered and shaved and wearing uncomfortable clothes on a Sunday morning to spend an hour daydreaming about golf or tennis or the poolboy and then rush out and try to run each other over in the car park in their haste to get away. Why not deliver worship online?  Why not allow people to worship at their convenience, from the comfort of their home?  Why not make people with religious expertise and teaching available from a central location over the phone or via the Internet? 

I guess one argument (apart from the obvious heretical nature of this idea) would be that going to a physical church at a certain time provides an opportunity for people to interact with each other and to support each other's faith; an agrument which, I must admit, has a certain resonance - the same disconnectedness that allows me to skip the two hour scrum on the tube and be done with work in time to eat dinner with the kids cuts the other way too.  Staying inside alienates me from my neighbors, makes me socially reticent and robs me of the opportunity for broadening my experience. 
 
But couldn't churches - the buildings - then, address this issue by providing a much-needed forum for human interaction, rather than necessarily a place for worship?  In this model, churches wouldn't need as many physical buildings, and those needn't be designed as impractically as they are now - with their enormous open spaces that are costly to build, costly to heat and cool and costly to maintain.  Churches could be multipurpose spaces, or even shared spaces in existing community centers or offices.  They would be more intimate venues, allow people to interact and support each other rather than merely being mass recipients of a one-way message.
 
For my grandmother, this model wouldn't work.  She has her way of worshiping, and that's fine, and I'll help her in whatever way I can.  But I wonder how the model will change to suit the times.  I wonder if churches will evolve?