While the pandemic is pushing churches to forms of digital/remote worship, you’d expect this to foster disembodiment, giving license for further “ex-carnation” as Charles Taylor puts it.

But I’m seeing the opposite: remote worship is revivifying the *parish*.

Let me explain.

As everyone worships online, it would be easy for everyone to act like consumers and flit to other productions and streams—you can “go to church” anywhere, in a sense. No doubt some are doing that.

But I’m also seeing people even more hungry to worship with their congregations.

There are thousands of local congregations that no one hears anything about who are innovating ways to care for their parishioners and embody the specificity and warmth of the community they know—their “parish”—in digital forms.

If these digital platforms were just distributing “content,” this would—let’s be honest—just be a lot of redundancy.

But that’s not what they’re doing.

They are trying to recreate *communion*, the mystery of being the body of Christ *in place*, even while the sinews of that body are stretched by our isolation.

The innovation that is happening, then, is often aimed at recreating a sense of being-with, worshiping together, the embodied solidarity of being a local congregation.

So this trying experience of being distant, separated, remote, could turn out to be a season of learning to be a more *in*carnate community of faith—an embodied, located *parish.* The digital could, paradoxically, be a way to renew the local.