The other day, I wrote about 5 Core Elements to Be a True Online Expression of Jesus. I’d like to think it was a good article, and you should read it and leave a comment. Now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

All caught up now? Good. One of the terms I threw around was telepresence. While I would love to say I coined that word gilded in its shiny pants goodness, I did not. The first time I saw it was in SimChurch by Douglas Estes. In the book, he describes this theological concept of togetherness as described in Acts 4:32, but in the context of doing it online. His summary of the concept of telepresence is thus, “Telepresence is typically defined as being present at a spatial or geographical distance through the help of technology.”^[1]

Now where does this concept of telepresence come from? Estes expands on that as well.

One of the big problems with our learned Western view of presence, besides the fact it’s abiblical, is that it doesn’t take into account how modern methods of communication, especially computer-mediated communication, can create new forms of experience that are not limited to purely physical interaction.^[2]

Using any number of tools, telepresence can be realized. Some of these tools include Skype, FaceTime, Facebook chat, Tokbox, etc.

Thanks to the gift of technology God gave us; we can have a presence with people even when they aren’t there. Sound familiar? It should as this is the very same concept Old Ma Bell used to promote her nationwide telephone system. Remember the touching commercials about “reach out and touch someone” from the 80s?

So how does this work today? Simple, I’ll use myself as an example. My wife, Shannon, had surgery today at Tulane University’s Lakeside Hospital. Even though a distance of from a few hundred to a few thousand miles separated us from friends and family, I knew we had their loving support. And thanks to Facebook and Twitter, many of those friends were in the hospital supporting us via telepresence all day long.

Let’s apply that to the concept of online church now. Many church planting movements use the cry “one Church, many places” to lead the charge and telepresence is one tool we have to get there. Think about it this way, after issuing the Great Commission, Jesus establishes His telepresence in our lives in Matthew 28:20, “…behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (emphasis added).

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the surgery went fine, and she’s recovering nicely.

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1. Douglas Estes, SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009), 63. [↩]
2. Ibid. [↩]