This sure looks like an April Fools Joke but it since I have been thinking about the church as a “virtual covenant community” it actually had me going for a minute or two…

Over the last few months various discussions and thinking have been happening around the internet about the church in a Web 2.0 world.  In my own thinking as a Reformed church member the Covenant Community is central and in many ways I think the community can be preserved, even enhanced, in a Web 2.0 world.  This would be the Church Virtual I spoke of in a previous post (way down at the very end).  I’m working on a more detailed piece with my thoughts and reasoning on being covenant community in an online setting, but as I work through it, the part I am having the most difficulty with, or maybe being the most stubborn about, is the sacraments.  Well, in a post probably particular to this day, the blog Father Jake Stops The World has posted an article from “Religion World News” (a play on one of the supermarket tabloids) about a New Jersey Episcopal priest who wants to do “virtual communion.”  (The other tip off is that the byline is Princeton, NJ and everyone knows that is a Presbyterian town. ) The catch is that anyone who has thought or talked about the online covenant community must at some point seriously address the question of “what about the sacraments?”  And while this one is probably in jest, I am sure serious proposals like this have been floated.

I’ll elaborate further on my thinking in the detailed post in a couple of months, but as yet I can not get my head around the idea of “virtual communion” being reformed practice.  Yet, it is only a step or two removed from the “extended communion” that the PC(USA) has now.  (For those not familiar with “extended communion” it is the practice of taking and serving communion to the homebound by two or more trained elders or deacons following the celebration of communion in worship.  In the extended communion the unity of Word and Sacrament must be preserved but since it is extended and considered serving communion as part of the earlier worship a Minister of Word and Sacrament does not need to be present. W-3.3616(e))  And while this section was added to the Book of Order in 1997, maybe the most famous “extended communion” occurred in 1969 when Buzz Aldrin celebrated it on the surface of the Moon.

So, like the best April Fools Jokes, this one has just enough truth behind it to make it believable.  But in the direction the online community is going, it may simply be a few years before we see this for real in some churches.

Update (4/2/08) – This is not an April Fools Joke: Yesterday the company Wesley Music began offering the ability to webcast funerals from participating funeral homes for a fee.  Remote viewers would need a login password provided by the family.  More from The Scotsman.com