(Relevant) In 2018, Judah and Chelsea Smith had a vision for City Church in Seattle, Washington: a new kind of church experience. This church would feature worship, teaching, community, opportunities to serve — basically everything common to the church as we know it, with one caveat: it’d be online. To the Smiths, this app represented a new kind of virtual experience that would offer church to a new generation more comfortable with digital relationships. They called it Churchome.
The announcement was met with no small degree of skepticism at the time but that was then. Now Churchome’s style of Sunday service has become the norm for almost every church in the country. The coronavirus pandemic has flipped a lot of assumptions about what church can and even should look like on their heads, and whatever you think of Churchome, there’s no denying that it has become an accidental pioneer of our new normal.