MICHAEL HUERTER. The Hybrid Congregation: A Practical Theology of Worship for an Online Era. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2025. Pp. 171. $25.99 US.
The Hybrid Congregation accurately describes how pastors and congregations adjusted in fits and starts to the Covid-19 pandemic. Through interviewing Heidi Campbell, professor of digital media at Texas A & M, Huerter was able to capture, near the beginning of the text, the overall sentiment of congregational leaders who felt ill-equipped to function in virtual platforms. Those same congregational leaders felt a lot of decision fatigue, at the time, which funneled them away from trying new technologies. Huerter’s work fills a gap by highlighting the possibilities new technologies provide to the church. Huerter also provided me with new terminologies, including the phrase “mixed spiritual ecology” to describe how people in faith communities will experience ministry in the years to come, benefiting from both online and offline platforms.
Additionally, I appreciated the three examples of online communities toward the end of Huerter’s text, especially descriptions of how each of them helped build a sense of community and shared experience for their participants. I was struck by the idea of how virtual reality can provide its users with experiences that are not readily their own (i.e., selecting an avatar that impacts one’s self-perception in some way) as a way to better understand their neighbors as themselves. An additional layer of Huerter’s text was a specific look at music in virtual spaces. To that end, Huerter’s interview with DJ Soto, leader of Visual Reality Church, invited me to consider how music can be enhanced with the aid of virtual reality.
I didn’t always find Huerter’s writing style to be all that helpful. At times Huerter’s cut-and-paste approach can be seen. One paragraph is a mashup of four other authors’ works, which provides for a disorienting and confusing experience for the reader (78). I found myself often wishing that Huerter would have referenced the works of other authors by building on them with his own fresh thinking instead of quoting them at length.
Huerter set out with the goal of proposing a way forward for church music that uses internet technology. Huerter’s contributions include an accurate description of how congregational leaders adjusted to new technologies during the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of those technologies (i.e., it’s not possible to create sung harmony in Zoom meetings). Still, I didn’t find Huerter offering anything new. Huerter did remind readers about the importance of shared connection to subvert the cultural norm of fragmentation, about the importance of participation in liturgy. And Huerter did correctly identify that the false distinction between “the real” and “the virtual” is used as a way of dismissing online technologies.
Huerter’s conclusion reaffirms hybrid ministry, which many congregational leaders stumbled into in the first few months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Although Huerter asserts that there is no one right answer for each congregation, he dissuades congregational leaders from indecisiveness and instead encourages them to discern what is most appropriate for their context. Huerter’s final paragraphs, which are labeled as a way of moving forward, offer only the observation that more study needs to be done, which does not serve as a springboard for more conversation but rather as laziness.