Unpixelated (Brent Roam)

Your letters they all say that you're beside me now

Then why do I feel alone?

I'm standing on a ledge and your fine spider web

Is fastening my ankle to a stone.

~ Leonard Cohen, Marianne

Looking back at my article, Same Mission, New Methods, from April 2020, I see conviction, enthusiasm, and a dogged determination to carry on the mission of One Family Church despite the disruption to our methods. I stand by everything I said and everything we did to adjust to the new reality. However, what I do not see in my article is a thorough appreciation of just how inadequate a digitally connected community would be. I knew the church would keep functioning as an organization, but I didn’t realize what a hit we would take as an organism—a body—the Body of Christ. 

By God’s grace, One Family Church emerged from the pandemic healthier, larger, and more committed than ever. We lost some family members to physical illness, emotional decline, and ideological spinouts. We weathered some heated rhetoric from the left and the right. However, by and large, we emerged from the pandemic still in love with God and each other. We emerged victorious, but with more scrapes and cuts than I anticipated. I thought the pandemic was going to be a roller coaster—it was more like a train wreck. 

I didn’t realize how disconnected many of us would become. I didn’t realize how quickly some of us would spiral into ideological vortexes through the numbing of our perspectives by cleverly calibrated algorithms. I didn’t realize how fragile our relationships could be, and how easily our inner lives could be manipulated. I didn’t realize how emotionally frail we all were. I thought we were made of thicker stuff. I thought the invisible substance that bound us all together was stronger than it turns out to have been. I thought our union was tethered by a three-fold cord, but in some cases, it was a fine spider web. The pandemic did not break us, but it sprained us. Being together remotely was like kissing through a pane of glass—it looked like it might work, but it got old fast. 

During Advent this year, I preached about the Incarnation, the embodiment of God in the flesh. Of course, as long as I’ve been a Christian I’ve believed God became human, but now I have a deeper understanding of why. For God to be truly known by us, truly relatable to us, truly intimate with us, He needed to move off the page and into skin and bones, blood and sweat, tooth and nail. We needed to smell Him and touch him, not just hear His voice in the bush or see His words on the parchment. If Christ Himself had to incarnate for the sake of intimacy, what makes us think we can genuinely relate remotely?

As it turns out, pixelated people are a poor substitute for the real thing. YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok are made for consumption, not community. They are good for entertainment, not intimacy. A screen is not a face. A pixel is not a pupil. An emoji is not an emotion. A like is not a touch. A heart is not an arm around your shoulder. What I know now that I didn’t fully appreciate then was that for a church to be a church, for a people to be a people, for a community to be a community, we have to be together in the flesh—shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, flesh to flesh, unpixelated.

Brent Roam is the founding pastor of One Family Church in St. Louis and previously served as Chair of the Board of Trustees for the Carver Project.

Read Brent’s previous article from 2020: “Same Mission, New Methods”