Dispatch Faith: The Empty Ecstasy of Digital Crowds, by Brad Edwards (Pastor, The Table Church (Lafayette, CO); Author, The Reason for Church: Why the Body of Christ Still Matters in an Age of Anxiety, Division, and Radical Individualism (2025)):
Should Christians support Black Lives Matter? Fifteen years ago that question would likely have been asked in good faith by a Christian in my congregation. But when someone in our church texted that question to me in early 2017, it had long since become a litmus test.
I wasn’t the only pastor to notice that sometime around 2014, church visitors and members alike began opting into or out of a church based on cultural and political alignment. That trend only accelerated during the pandemic. Many pastors, myself included, missed the significance of that shift because the early signs were still downstream of long-standing theological differences among Christian traditions (e.g., women serving as ordained clergy). But by 2020, alignment with socio-cultural positions became such an overwhelming priority for the typical churchgoer that agreement with theological principles became an afterthought.
This is just one of the clearer symptoms of a deeper shift in the American psyche. We’re in the midst of a fundamental change not only in what we view as ultimately important, but also from where we derive meaning. In an April 2024 article in The Atlantic, “The True Cost of the Churchgoing Bust,” Derek Thompson traces that shift to the widespread abandonment of religious institutions (emphasis added):
Finding meaning in the world is hard too; it’s especially difficult if the oldest systems of meaning-making hold less and less appeal. It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what we lost.
More than any other change upstream, the “dechurching” of 40 million people over the last 25 years has severed society from long-standing sources of meaning. The culture wars have escalated from a mere conflict between divergent worldviews into an existential crusade for meaning. And as I have written in my recently released book The Reason for Church, these symptoms will continue until we deal with the root of what ails us: exchanging “durable forms of our common life” for disembodied counterfeits of historically proven sources of meaning.
Where institutions (e.g., a local church) provide meaning through shared purpose and belonging, these “digital crowds” promise meaning through easy belonging and affirmation. But because their meaning and belonging are both digital and conditional, neither are durable or transcendent. …
The alternative to digital crowds: spiritual greenhouses.
If the first step in any recovery is admitting we have a problem, we need to accept that abandoning institutions and instead seeking the digital crowd has robbed us not only of meaningful connection, but also of our connection to meaning itself. The result is a society that increasingly resembles cut flowers—an organism with the appearance of life but that is nevertheless doomed to wilt. Undoing that damage will require more than quitting crowds cold turkey or embracing our inner Luddite. To inoculate ourselves from the false transcendence, anti-vision, and disembodied escape of digital crowds, we have to also recover the goodness and beauty of institutions.
Thankfully, we already have access to potent spiritual hardware designed for exactly that purpose. The transcendent meaning that we long for—indeed, that we’re made for—lies in the most counter-intuitive, universally cringe, and eagerly abandoned institution of the last 75 years: the local church.
To be fair, we Christians are often guilty of what Peterson so memorably cautioned: We are just as prone to treating our church like another digital crowd—an interchangeable vehicle for meaning with a cross slapped on the front door. For many, “church” has become just one of many ways to escape ourselves, but no church can compete with Silicon Valley on that. Nor should we try. We are made for more than digital crowds.
At their best, churches are spiritual greenhouses for cultivating a fundamentally different way of seeing, living and, therefore, making meaning in the world. They embody the true and better story of humanity—imperfectly, of course, but how else would a story of grace be embodied? For Christians, ultimate meaning is derived from the gospel: the “good news” that God took on flesh and entered into human history not to make enemies or destroy them, but to make his enemies his friends. To rescue us. The more we embody that gospel week-in and week-out, the more we ruin our appetite for anti-vision and the more belonging to others infuses our lives with the gospel’s transcendent meaning.
That said, our hope is ultimately not in a church’s ability to mediate meaning. If all that took was belonging to others, we wouldn’t have any more reason for rechurching than we would for reconnecting to any other institution. The only way belonging to a church can offer us the transcendent meaning we long for is because it is from within and through church that we experience belonging to a transcendent God. This is the universal human need that the first question of the Heidelberg Catechism seeks to address in asking, “What is our only comfort in life or death?” And its answer, “That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ,” is only fully apprehended and experienced among the Body and Bride of Christ.
That alone is more than enough reason for church.
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