Against the Algorithm: In Praise of the Parish

Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash

Local church communities can appear as retrograde curiosities in the age of increasing technology and globalisation. We may say as we drive by: ‘What does this throwback to the 1950s have to do with modern life?’

But the parish church offers a quiet but profound act of resistance against the great machines that want to seize our humanity from us. It operates at human scale. It is real, not virtual; organic, not mechanistic; familial, not individualistic. You are not curated by algorithms but shaped by neighbours. You are not known as a profile but as a person. The parish does not promise efficiency or growth. It promises presence - and that turns out to be the thing of which we are most starved.

The Problem: Life at Inhuman Scale

In the brave new world, we are supposed to inhabit a technological utopia where everything is global. Our lives are increasingly scaled up to global platforms and global audiences. We experience the thrill of seeing ourselves as global citizens, linking with people in far-flung places whom we have never met. Our attention is guided by algorithms determined somewhere in California, so that our outrage or our sympathy can be farmed.

Technology and globalisation are not evil in themselves. But they tend to prefer abstraction over attention, efficiency over presence, and individual choice over mutual obligation. They promise a kind of radical freedom from the chores of ordinary connectedness.

The temptation for the church is to try to match the efficiency of the technological utopia we now inhabit - to become an engine for the delivery of a religious service.

The Parish as a Counter-Form of Life

The stark question posed to us by AI, however, is: what is a human? What are humans for? If AI can do so many of the things we can do, then what is left for us? All of a sudden, we find that a description of human life in utilitarian terms is completely inadequate. If the machines can do what we do better than we can do it, then that way of seeing ourselves and our purpose becomes redundant.

It’s a chilling thought.

What the parish church offers is a way of being human together at a moment when we are about to discover that being human is primarily about relationships. At a local church we find ourselves not treated as an audience or as a user. We are not valued for our functionality. We are one of these people, in this place.

We gather as bodies with our bodies, forming a body. Voices strain, not quite hitting the notes. Children fidget. The biscuit crumbles in our fingers. We sit awkwardly in a pew. And … it all takes time. Like an oak tree, growth is slow. Relationships are uneven. People arrived damaged and leave partly healed. There are people we have to learn to like.

Churches do develop ‘strategies’, of course. And they have issues that require efficient use of resources. But you cannot curate a family.

A parish church invites that kind of commitment. It isn’t about taking what you need as you need it. It is about life together. It is about being and belonging - becoming an ‘us’. It’s economy is the economy of grace and gift - not merit and exchange.

When thinking about church services, I am tempted to use the word ‘professional’, in the sense of ‘I want all the elements to be of professional standard’. But the right word to use is ‘amateur’ - a word that comes from the Latin word for love. That is: we are committed to making what we do in church an expression of our love for God and for one another.

Why This Matters Now

I’ve already noted that the development of AI has brought us to the question of what the point of being human is.

But there are some other reasons why, right now, the parish church needs to remember its calling. Loneliness continues to rise, especially amongst the 18-24 year olds, despite all the allegedly wonderful connectivity that we share. Identity is seen as something we self-author - something we write as the authors of our own lives. This gives it an inherent fragility. A self-curated self has no core. And meaning is sought increasingly in experiences (which I can purchase) rather than in commitments.

The parish church resists all three of these by placing us in a non-negotiable proximity. We are, in church, embodied creatures who are in the same place at the same time. (Do you remember how Batman used to end? ‘Same Bat-time. Same Bat-channel. There was a kind of unity fostered by turning into a show that you could only see at the same time and on the same channel. Today that’s ridiculous: we stream what we watch when we want to. Church, on the other hand, can never be a matter of convenience like that. It is wonderfully inconvenient).

In church, we find our identity in baptism into Christ rather than performance or curation. We are not who we decide to be, but who Christ says we are - and thank God! The existential relief of this is quantifiable.

And we teach that love is something that you practice rather than feel. Not that affections are irrelevant, but we don’t wait for those. This is a community whose teacher taught us to ‘love your enemies’. If you don’t get that, you don’t get Christianity.

Christianity was never designed for frictionless distribution. It was designed for tables, neighbourhoods, and long obedience among familiar faces.

The Quiet Radicalism of Staying

In a mobile, globalised world, in which everything is optional, everything is contingent, every bodily condition (even life itself) is a problem that technology claims it can overcome: staying put becomes a moral act.

It is a determined act of resistance.

Turning up to meet with the same people under the same Lord is profoundly counter-cultural. Showing up in person is an act of resistance against the power of the algorithm.

The parish church will never trend. It will never scale. And that may be precisely why it still knows what a human being is.