I wrote this back in 2017, but I’m reposting it because I believe that the principle is also relevant to online church in the UK during lockdown. We need to be set to receive as well as send.
I’m old enough to remember the early days of the internet, when cool people with slow, clunky modems surfed the web. In those days, the net was all about reading. You clicked from link to link and waited for a page of text to appear before moving on to the next thing.
There were two types of internet users, the clever ones who put material on websites, and the rest of us who gratefully received what others produced.
It’s not like that, today. These days anyone with a mobile phone can log onto Facebook, load photographs, post comments and wish people on the other side of the world happy birthday. Today, everyone, wherever they are, can be involved in putting stuff on the web. Sometimes those in what we call developing countries are better positioned than the Western world.
As it is with Facebook, so with mission; it’s no longer one way traffic from the experts to the receivers, but from everywhere to everywhere as the whole church gets involved.