By Leroy Coote.
It has been a little over six months since we have not been able to meet physically in our church buildings. The main result of this is that we have had very little face-to-face interaction over that time with our church community. Human interaction is important because God has created us as relational human beings. However, this leads me to wonder: what is core to our gathering together as God’s people for church – which we are now doing online?
To start with, the core activities of church include prayer, Bible reading, the exposition and preaching of God’s word and communion. These are happening through our online service for which we are thankful. All of these core activities are designed to strengthen our personal relationship with God. However, there are secondary activities that happen when we gather together that provide encouragement such as singing, the greeting of the peace and morning tea. Most of these involve interaction which we are missing at the moment. But the key aspects that we miss from human interaction is the ability to encourage one another in our walk with God.
In my next article, I will combine the primary and secondary activities of our gathering together to worship God and talk about the purpose of all of the activities I have mentioned in this article.