A report out today from Mission Network News describes something I keep turning over in my mind. Iranian believers — living with isolation, with persecution, with economic hardship pressing on ordinary households — are finding fellowship and spiritual support through online gatherings. A satellite television ministry called SAT-7 reaches them two ways, one of their leaders explains: broadcasts beamed down from a satellite, and the internet.
Think about what that actually looks like on the ground. Somebody sitting in a room, maybe alone, maybe with one or two others they trust. A screen. A voice speaking the name of Jesus in their own language. And out of that, fellowship. Not a substitute for fellowship. Fellowship.
Paul wrote to a church he had never visited
There is a letter in your Bible written to believers the author had never laid eyes on. Paul says so plainly: "For I want you to know how great a struggle I have for you and for those at Laodicea and for all who have not seen me face to face, that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God's mystery, which is Christ... For though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and the firmness of your faith in Christ" (Colossians 2:1-2, 5).
Read that again slowly. He is struggling in prayer for people he cannot pick out of a crowd. He says their hearts are being knit together in love across a distance he cannot cross. And then the strangest line of all — he says he can see their good order and the firmness of their faith. He is not there. He sees it anyway.
That is not a metaphor Paul reached for because he had nothing better. That is a man describing something the Holy Spirit does. The Spirit does not travel at the speed of a courier. He is already there. He was in the room in Colossae while Paul sat in confinement praying, and He is in a small apartment in Iran while a believer leans toward a screen, and He is in a living room in Ravenna on a Tuesday morning. One Spirit, no commute.
What this guards us against
It is easy to assume that the real church is the one you can shake hands with and everything else is a thinner version. I understand the instinct. I would never argue that a screen is as good as a hug, and the Iranian believers in that report would trade the stream for a room full of brothers and sisters in a heartbeat if they could. Gathered, embodied, in-person worship is God's good design and we should not be casual about it.
But the opposite error is just as real, and it is quieter. It is forgetting that the church is enormous. That while you sleep, people are singing. That the body of Christ you belong to has members you will never meet, praying in languages you do not speak, under pressures you have not felt, and your Father knows every one of their names.
When you grasp that, two things happen at once. Your own gathering gets more precious, because you suddenly realize what a gift it is to simply walk into a building unafraid. And your prayers get bigger, because you stop praying only for the dozen faces you can picture.
Pray for people you cannot picture
Here is the practical turn. Paul's struggle for the Colossians was prayer. That was the whole of it. He could not visit, he could not send money, he could not fix their circumstances. He could labor for them before God — and he believed that labor reached them.
So it is worth asking: when was the last time you prayed for a believer whose face you could not picture? Not a cause. A person. Someone switching on a broadcast tonight because it is the only church service available to them.
That is part of why Mission Sunday on November 1 matters here at Outpouring. It is not a line item on a budget or a guilt trip about generosity. It is the week we lift our eyes and remember that the family is bigger than the room — and that the same Spirit who meets us when we sing is at work right now in places we will never see, doing the only thing that has ever made a Christian: making Christ real to a human heart.
Some of us are praying for things that have not broken open yet, and I do not want to tidy that away. Keep praying. The Spirit who finds a believer through a satellite signal in Iran knows exactly where you are sitting, and He has not mistaken your address for someone else's.
Absent in body. Present in Spirit. Held by the same Shepherd, who does not have a far side of the world.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.