[OBW]

While I agree that we can meet with anyone anywhere, anything besides a one-way meeting (live streaming of a sermon, for example) is fairly problematic once you have multiple points of access. At some level it may be worse than meeting in a huge room with 4,000 people at the same time. At least everything going on is visible to all.

But I think that this whole location thing is missing Lee's point. And maybe even the points that the Bible actually make on the subject (few though they be). Lee is not concerned about how easy it is to meet. Despite the many "halls" that seat only 100 or so in Taipei, he restricts how people would physically meet by a series of criteria that he claims is only one item, and that is "locality." As high-sounding as it may seem before you actually try to vet it for scriptural significance, it is not the basis upon which the LCM has ever met. It is just a formulaic overlay that clearly no one else would use (or at least few would use) behind which they can hide a series of other "musts" to really be the true church.

Moving back to online meetings, for all the possibilities of real connection in an online environment in limited circumstances, I believe that for the most part trying to make church as simple as joining a chat room or streaming a sermon, or other technological method is a way to fool ourselves into thinking that we met when all we did was observe. I fear that suggesting such things as viable is just providing an excuse for those who really don't want to connect to fool themselves into thinking they did. I don't really have a lot of problems with the idea of a mass video of a live sermon to difference locations where many people actual engage with each other, join in singing and other aspects of corporate worship, and are only "online" relative to the sermon.

Once the whole thing becomes remote, then the idea of meeting has been short-changed. No matter what kind of technological marvels we can come up with, there is something to be said for real, flesh-and-blood gatherings of people. I cannot declare that the Bible would forbid such a thing. But you have to consider whether even a lot of such meetings might fool us into thinking that we have not forsaken the assembling of ourselves together when we really have become little more than people who sing karaoke with the computer and listen to YouTube videos of faux worship as some computer graphics show us a "room" full of personal avatars who are animated by the computer as if actually engaging with others when there are no real others to see or engage with.