The pastor who calls people home to their bodies

Why the sacraments are the most countercultural thing the church does. Part 5 of 6, six shifts shaping the next decade and the kind of pastor each one is asking for.

People increasingly live somewhere other than where they are.

Our attention is often elsewhere, on a screen, in a feed, attending to a notification waiting to be checked. Friendships are increasingly elsewhere, held together by sharing reels, mediated by text, and communication via emojis. Our pleasure sensors lit up elsewhere, through a screen rather than a person. Some even process their grief elsewhere in front of followers on TikTok rather than in a community. Our world’s sexual imagination is elsewhere, formed by algorithms often before a single real conversation is had about it.

The body, the actual flesh-and-blood reality of being a human being in a particular place at a particular time, is becoming an inconvenience and an afterthought. A thing that gets in the way of the real life that’s happening somewhere else.

Im 40 years old, I still remember what the world was like before the internet and personal computers. I was married before the iPhone 1, and was pastoring a church before social media (bliss). Yet I still feel the forces and pulls to increasingly live a disembodied life. I find it hard to be present at times; I feel the withdrawals when away from my phone. I know i must enage in some counter cultural practice to have stay sane and have anything to offer to my family and world. It's difficult to abide in Christ when never unplugged from everything else.

So let’s stop and look at one of the most theologically significant shifts of our age.

Because the Christian faith is, at its core, a body-affirming faith. It begins with a Creator who declared embodied matter very good. It centres on a God who took on a body. It promises not the rescue of the soul out of the body but the resurrection of the body itself, be it a new one.

And we are now pastoring to a culture that wants, by and large, to be done with bodies. Well, I don't think it does. I think it longs for and pines for pure embodied experiences, but it's lured away by lesser things that demand a lower price and leave us increasingly disembodied and discombobulated.

By the numbers

Average daily screen time among US adults now exceeds 7 hours. Add work screen time, and many people are looking at a screen for over half their waking life.

Gen Z averages around 9 hours of screen time per day. Among teens, 41% spend more than 8 hours daily on screens.

There are more than 19 million active users of virtual AI companions globally. A growing number now form primary emotional attachments to entities that do not have bodies at all.

In-person social contact among US adults aged 15–24 has dropped by approximately 70% since 2003. They are not less social, they are differently social. They are social through screens.

Sabbath observance outside religious communities is effectively extinct.

What it’s exposing

That much of contemporary Christianity can also be disembodied if we are not careful.

This is the uncomfortable part. The disembodiment of the wider culture has crept into the church, and we’ve absorbed it without noticing.

Worship has, in many places, become content to be consumed rather than something to be entered into. People watch a service the way they watch Netflix. They attend through a screen and call it the same thing as gathering.

Discipleship has often become information transfer: read this book, listen to this podcast, take this course, rather than the patient, embodied apprenticeship that Jesus modelled.

Communion has, in some quarters, become a symbol so abstracted from the physical act of eating together that we’ve forgotten it was supposed to be a meal.

Prayer has, for many of us, become something we do on an app while we scroll, rather than something we do with our knees on the floor, our eyes closed, and our bodies still.

Bible reading, if it happens at all, is reduced to a verse of the day or listening on the way to somewhere else.

A faith that began with God taking on flesh has, in places, become a faith we can attend through a screen.

Now please don’t hear what I’m not saying. Online presence has its place. Livestreams reach people who couldn’t be in the room. Podcasts help people on commutes. Social media is a way to be in people’s worlds. The internet has been a remarkable gift for the church in many ways, and I’m not arguing for less of it.

I’m arguing that on its own, it is not enough. And that we have, in many places, swapped the embodied gathering for a content experience and not noticed what we lost in the trade.

The internet is a tool, and all of its energies should be used to draw people into an embodied experience of faith.

If our answer to the disembodied generation is more digital ministry, more content, more reach, more screens, we may be offering them more of the very thing already forming them away from the body.

What people will hunger for is not more content. It is presence. Actual, breathing, embodied presence.

Observations were already being made in the midst of COVID about how much pastors were realising that their congregations were being more discipled by their online networks than by the actual physical community God placed them in. That's a difficult landscape to pastor in, and many have then increased their engagement in the digital world, and that’s wonderful, but we must also call people back to be embodied in the world, community, church and life God has physically placed them in.

What’s required

A pastor who calls people home to their bodies.

A pastor who insists, gently and persistently, that the body matters. That presence matters. That the meal you ate together matters. That the hand laid on the head in prayer matters. That the water you are immersed in at baptism matters. That the bread eaten and the wine drunk matter.

A minister who understands that the church is not, primarily, a place to hear ideas. It’s a place to encounter the embodied life of Jesus through the embodied life of his people.

Here’s what such a pastor knows.

Its the embodied life that has led to all my biggest transformation moments. Being in the room when a message was given, and the Spirit was moving, that I needed to hear. I've gone back and listened to the ones that have hit me the most, and it’s not the same on the podcast, though God can use that too. It's going forward to ask for prayer, to be vulnerable, and to have someone lay hands on me, cry with me, and believe with me. It's the prophetic word that gets stirred when people are looking at each other that has left me forever marked. It's the relational difficulties I have had to walk through, apologies I have had to give, forgiveness asked for and received. It's the conversations with people that, in any other universe other than church, I would likely ignore or avoid that form Christ in me.

The pastors of the future need to know that the body is not a problem to be optimised. It is a gift to be stewarded. The current culture’s relationship with the body, alternately neglecting it, hating it, obsessing over it, and dissociating from it, is the opposite of a Christian posture.

They know that the gospel doesn’t bypass the body. It works throughthe body. Grace travels through matter. That’s why we have bread and wine, water and oil, hands and faces and tables and rooms. Not as decorations. As the actual means by which God comes to his people.

They know that you cannot disciple someone you never see in the flesh. Not really. Online content has its place, but the deepest formation happens in the same room, over time, with the same actual people.

They know that the worship of the gathered church is not a content delivery mechanism. It is the most embodied thing a person will do all week. Standing. Sitting. Singing. Speaking. Eating. Drinking. Being touched. Being seen.

And they refuse to apologise for any of it.

There’s a deeper instinct here too. A pastor who calls people home to their bodies is also calling them home to time and place. To the actual neighbourhood they live in, rather than the digital tribe they participate in. To the actual people in the pews, rather than the imagined audience of their scrolling. To this hour. This room. This life.

This is profoundly counter-cultural. The current age is desperately trying to convince our people that real life is happening somewhere else, on someone else’s feed, in some other version of themselves. The pastor of presence quietly says: no. The real life is here. The real life is now. This body. This bread. This table. This neighbour. This is where God meets us.

The screen can simulate connection. It cannot deliever the belonging we crave.

The ancient root

The sacraments.

For two thousand years the church has known something the disembodied age has forgotten. That grace travels through matter. That the Spirit of God uses physical stuff, water, bread, wine, oil, hands, breath, words spoken aloud, to do its work in human lives.

Baptism uses water. Not symbolic water. Real water, plunged into, with a real body. The early church understood this so deeply that they often baptised people naked, to signal the totality of the new life being received.

Communion uses bread and wine. Real bread torn. Real wine, or juice :) poured. Actual physical eating and drinking, together, in a room. Not a mere metaphor. A meal.

Anointing uses oil. The laying on of hands uses touch. The kiss of peace, in the early church, involved actual lips on actual cheeks.

The early church’s witness was scandalously bodily. They ate together. They washed one another’s feet. They shared physical possessions. They laid hands on the sick. They were, by Roman standards, embarrassingly tactile.

And it is no accident that the centre of Christian theology is an embodied moment.

God did not save the world by sending a message.

He sent a son.

He took on flesh and dwelt among us. He ate. He slept. He wept. He bled. He died. He rose, bodily. He ascended, bodily. He will return, bodily.

The Incarnation is the deepest argument the church has ever had against disembodiment. It is the gospel’s quiet, scandalous insistence that bodies matter to God.

The contemplative tradition has always carried this. Benedict’s Ruleshaped a whole rhythm of embodied life: when to eat, when to sleep, when to work, when to pray. The medieval mystics talked about prayer with the body, posture as theology, the senses as gates of grace. The liturgical traditions have preserved, through every cultural shift, the simple insistence that the church is something you do with your body, not just something you think about with your mind.

In an age of avatars, presence is a type sacrament.

A practical move

This week, build in one moment of embodied presence to a gathering you lead.

Lay hands on someone you’re praying for. Wash a colleague’s feet. Set a real table and slow the meal. Anoint someone who is suffering with oil.

Make eye contact in the prayer line. Use the person’s name. Touch shoulders during the benediction.

And in your own life, get off the device more. Walk outside. Cook a meal slowly. Eat with people. Touch grass. Pray on your knees. Read a real book. Hug your kids. Show up.

We are not brains on sticks. We are embodied people God loves.

The pastoral life is not, finally, a content-creation enterprise. It’s a way of being a body in a community of bodies, and helping them all encounter the embodied God.

What’s next

That was the fifth shift. The pastor who calls people home to their bodies.

(If you’ve just landed in the series, Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 are all worth backing up for. They build on each other.)

One more to go.

Next instalment: the pastor who builds trust in a cynical world — A call to a life of character not just charisma