By Catherine Pepinster
Churches and cathedrals across Britain have embraced a digital revolution, prompted by the Covid pandemic, which has seen thousands of services streamed in the past five years. Some online services have led people to convert to Christianity and even become priests.
What began as an emergency became an opportunity. In 2020, streaming services were offered after the UK government announced a lockdown, including the closure of churches. Parishes and cathedrals then discovered new congregations that they barely knew existed until Covid.
Hybrid worship has now become the norm, with online services particularly appealing to shift workers, the elderly, the housebound, the seriously ill, those in care homes and prisons, and people wanting to try out religion.
Among the most significant developments has been the popularity of the Church of England’s national online service, first created in the early days of the pandemic. In 2024, the service, broadcast every Sunday from churches around the country, received more than 21 million views. An average of 4,000 people watch each service in its entirety.
About a third of the CofE’s 16,000 parish churches offer regular services online. Durham and Westminster Abbey are among the Anglican cathedrals that have most enthusiastically continued to embrace online services since they tried them during the pandemic.
Durham now livestreams many of its services, including the Eucharist on Sunday, as well as morning prayer and evensong. But its standout innovation has been its community of prayer that began in lockdown five years ago and brings people together several times a week.
According to Durham Cathedral’s chancellor, Canon Charlie Allen, the community draws in people from across the globe and some have discovered faith through it, including several people who have been baptised and two who have been ordained as priests.
“People first started coming to us for morning prayer during the pandemic and felt such a strong connection,” she said. “During lockdown the structure of people’s lives was gone and they found something that offered that structure in the rhythm of prayer.”
With churches locked during the pandemic, the Durham broadcasts were held outside. Now, the cathedral still broadcasts the evening Compline service out of doors. “People like the connection with nature, with the seasons,” Canon Allen said.
Within six months the community of prayer was founded, she said, “and when the pandemic came to an end, they did not want to lose it”.
Westminster Abbey, which created an Abbeycast podcast during lockdown, is now investing heavily in broadcasting so that it can offer more services online. It is installing a dozen broadcast-quality cameras around the abbey, and sound equipment, and has just formed a partnership with the Royal College of Music to provide technical broadcasting back-up. It will operate from a new studio being built in the church’s triforium and the equipment is being installed in time to broadcast on Easter Day.
A priest has been appointed to oversee online resources and run a weekly newsletter, with 11,000 readers, for the people who tune in.
Victoria Ribbans of Westminster Abbey said the pandemic had been a wake-up call: “It changed the abbey’s thinking and has given us the opportunity to start building a global Christian audience,” she said.
According to the Rev Pete Phillips, an expert on the digital church, the provision of online services means far greater access to worship than some people otherwise cannot have. He told a Religion Media Centre briefing on hybrid church that it means: “The living room couch has now become the back row of the church.”
While most parish churches focus on livestreaming their usual services, sometimes with just a smartphone and a tripod, Methodist Central Hall Westminster in London has opted for specially created online services.
It began with streaming its usual Sunday service during Covid — and their highest peak was 20,000 daily views — but its superintendent minister, the Rev Tony Miles, said: “We made a conscious decision to not go down that hybrid route and instead we put something together that is bespoke,” he told the briefing. “People want to be worshippers, not observers.”
Dr Phillips, who is also a Methodist minister, has encouraged people watching his own church service online, to be involved from home in communion services by joining in with their own bread and wine. “We are saying ‘You are a valid part of our community’,” he said.
But communion remains a contentious issue in the Church of England, with the official line being that this is not permitted online. According to Amaris Cole, the CofE’s head of digital: “We have heard anecdotally that there has been communion in online services with people holding bread and wine, but it is not to be encouraged.”
For Catholics, online communion is not permitted. Having churches open for prayer and mass is important.
During the first Covid lockdown, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster and leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, led the calls for churches to reopen for private prayer before they reopened for communal services. He was backed by other faith leaders and in June 2020 the government agreed to this.
But Catholic churches also embraced online services and have continued to do so. In one of the largest Catholic archdioceses, Birmingham, 83 parishes livestream their masses — 37 per cent of the total — with about 380 views per channel. Livestreams are not only used for regular Sunday services but also for funerals. Some parishes use online for study groups. According to the archdiocese, some newcomers have reported watching the livestreamed services before they began starting to attend mass in person.
For the Church of England, online services have also sometimes been an introduction to Christian worship before people cross a church threshold. Ms Cole said its national online services were created with people unfamiliar with church in mind, so that they could understand what was happening during worship. Information was often added to help people to find a church in their neighbourhood.
“When the national service first started, a lot of people worried that it would stop people going to their local church but has not turned out like that,” Ms Cole said.
However, Professor Scott Thumma, co-director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research in Connecticut, warned that online services could have a negative impact on parishes. “The more churches are online, the less giving there is and fewer volunteers there are,” he said.
Ben Sims, head of public affairs at the National Churches Trust, agreed: “The real crisis is church closures. The social impact of churches can’t happen if the building isn’t open,” he said.
And without real churches and their parishes, online church also can’t happen. As Mr Miles commented at the briefing: “If we don’t sustain our local churches and local community, there may be no one to offer the online services.”
