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If This Is You…

Every person is different — we’re all differently wired. Remember the range of reactions to the enforced isolation of the pandemic lockdowns? It was traumatic for millions, but was the best thing ever for a lot of extreme introverts and people with social anxieties — they’d been training for this all their lives.

Every church is different too, so no church is going to be right for everyone, and no honest church would claim they are. Our church is unusual — some people find it weird, others find it remarkably refreshing, even liberating. We won’t suit everybody, but we will suit some people really well.

One way we are different is that all our worship services take place online, but they are nothing like the desperate attempts that had many of us screaming into our pillows during the pandemic lockdowns. If those unpleasant memories have you already looking for the exit button, bear with us for just a moment. Back then, we too were expecting it to be temporary. But something changed.

We recognised various groups of people for whom online worship was a godsend — for the first time they felt genuinely able to participate, belong, and be nourished. Until then, we had failed to notice how poorly they were being served by our previous way of being church.

We now know that live, participatory, online worship, done with depth, intention and care, can be really good, and for some people — perhaps more than you might expect — significantly better suited to who they are and how they are wired. So who might they be?

This church works especially well for…

The categories below describe people for whom something about who we are or how we gather turns out to be a genuine fit. Even if you don’t see yourself in any of them, it’s worth reading a few — they say something about the kind of community we are and the people who make it up.

For people with limited mobility, the obstacle to church has never been theological or relational. The effects of age, illness, injury, or dependence on 24/7 professional care can rob people of what might have been a sustaining practice. One older couple told us, just weeks before the first lockdown, that it wouldn’t be long before they would realistically only manage to attend once a month. Six years later, they are still with us most weeks — online, from home, without the exhausting logistics that had been slowly defeating them. For people in this situation, and especially for those living in residential care facilities where getting to church may not even be possible, online worship is not a compromise. It is the real thing made accessible.

For people with impaired hearing or vision, a physical church building can be a frustrating place. Prayers offered from different parts of a room without microphones, print that is too small, lighting that doesn’t help — these are ordinary realities that quietly exclude people who would otherwise be fully engaged. Online, the same person can adjust the volume so that they can hear everyone clearly, magnify anything on the screen, and participate as fully as anyone else. One long-term member is hearing and vision impaired describes online worship as the first time he has been able to follow everything that happens. The building was accessible, but the participation was not so accessible.

For autistic people, the sensory and social landscape of a physical gathering — random sounds, fluctuating light levels, the social pressure of unstructured interaction before and after the service — can make church an exhausting and sometimes overwhelming experience, even when the theology and the community feel right. Online worship totally changes the equation. The sensory environment is your own space, under your own control. The liturgical structure we use is stable, predictable, and consistent week to week — which is itself a gift to people who find unpredictability draining. Many autistic people find that major obstacles to their participation largely disappear. That said, we know we still have things to learn about making worship work well for autistic people, and we genuinely welcome your suggestions.

The social landscape of a physical gathering can be genuinely daunting. The unstructured milling around before and after a service, the enthusiastic stranger bearing down with an outstretched hand, the difficulty of leaving without running a gauntlet of well-meaning conversation — these are not trivial obstacles for people whose anxiety makes unpredictable social interaction exhausting or distressing. Online worship changes this significantly. You are in your own space. You can participate fully in the liturgy while remaining in control of your social environment. You can stay for the informal conversation after the service, or you can simply click to leave. No explanations required, no awkward exits, no anxiety about what happens next.

For many people, the barrier to regular church participation is simply geographical. Online worship removes distance from the equation entirely — and for several distinct groups of people, that turns out to be transformative. For people in remote or regional areas, the nearest church may be hours away, the nearest suitable church even further, or there may simply be no church nearby that fits. For people always on the move — frequent work travelers, retirees who divide their time between a city home and a holiday house, grey nomads living on the road — weekly church participation has always required either finding a new congregation every week or simply going without. And for people living interstate or overseas, whether Australians abroad wanting to maintain a connection with home, or people from overseas who worshipped with us while living in Australia — distance is no longer the ending it once was.

For LGBTIQA+ people and their families, it is not online worship that makes us more accessible — it is who we are. Regrettably, this community often still experiences rejection, exclusion, or conditional welcome from churches. And the default assumption about a Baptist church is likely to be that it is not a safe place. We understand why that assumption exists, and we’re sorry. We’re not perfect either, but we keep learning, and our welcome of LGBTIQA+ people at all levels of our church is unequivocal, long-standing, and not up for debate. We may have been the first Baptist church in Australia to make that commitment formally, and it has never wavered. If your experience of church has left you assuming the door is closed to you, we’d like you to know that even if our church door was still physical, it would definitely be open to you. Click here to read more about this.

Grant Hill
Grant

“Family and friends are important to me. Now due to the seriously disabling impacts of my MS, I no longer travel interstate. In 2020 when my dad passed away in my home state of Tasmania I was able to attend his funeral via zoom. Due to the community lockdowns others also couldn’t attend in person so for once I didn’t feel disadvantaged. I value being able to participate in the life of the Open Icon church and being online makes it possible.”

Dr Armand Léon van Ommen

Centre for Autism and Theology, University of Aberdeen

Author of Autism and Worship

“Open Icon is a church that is serious about belonging – the belonging of everyone, the belonging of neurodivergent people. Open Icon takes time to listen, and genuinely values the participation of autistic and other neurodivergent people. If that is you, you may well find a spiritual home here.”

But for some people, online worship does bring real trade-offs

Online worship does some things well — even very well. But it doesn’t do everything well, and we’d rather be honest about that than oversell what we offer. For some people there are genuine tensions worth naming, alongside whatever positives there might also be.

The prospect of yet another screen-based gathering can trigger a fatigue that has nothing to do with the quality of what’s on offer. The medium itself has become associated with obligation and exhaustion. We don’t have a solution to that — only the observation that worship-Zoom and work-Zoom feel quite different to most people once they’ve tried it, and the fatigue lifts for some.

For students for whom Zoom has become inseparable from lectures, tutorials, and study groups, connecting with others through a screen may feel like work or obligation. We understand that, and we won’t argue with it — only invite you to find out whether worship with us feels different.

The picture is mixed for families with young children. The absence of physical space, physical activity, and the company of other children is a real loss that online worship cannot fully replace — children need to run around, touch things, and be with other bodies, and we miss having them with us in that way. But some parents find unexpected compensations. Getting children organised and out the door can be exhausting. And many parents were constantly anxious about whether their children’s restless energy was distracting other worshippers — now their children can move freely between prayer and play in their own space without bothering the grumpy old man in the next pew. Parents also don’t have to worry about whether the church did proper background checks on those supervising their children. We can’t fully replace what’s missing — but it isn’t all loss either. And our kids proudly participate in leading prayers in our worship, just like the rest of us.

As we said at the top, every church is different — shaped by its history, its people, its convictions, and the particular way it has learned to do life and faith together. And every person is different — shaped by experience, temperament, need, and the particular wounds and longings we each carry. So a perfect fit is probably a needle in a haystack, and the choice of a church will always have an element of compromise. And perhaps that’s a good thing. We’d never grow in our capacities for love and grace if we lived without any challenges.

So, would this church be a good fit for you? What if you are not in one of the groups identified above that especially benefit? Most of us aren’t. Most of us are here, not because it is perfect, but because there is a combination of things that make it really good, and the things we’re not so keen on are things we can live with and work around. Whether it’s the theology, the spirituality, the community, the liturgy, the earthy honesty, the participation, the willingness to sit with pain, or even the online medium; if a few of those are finding echoes in your heart, perhaps we are worth a go. Or a few goes — assessing a new church and its worship is a bit like learning a new worship song, you can’t really enter into it as prayer until you’ve sung it enough times to no longer be trying to guess what’s coming next.


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