Return to Journal of Christian Teaching Practice (in Communication Studies), Vol. 13, 2026
Book Reviewed: Michael Huerter, The Hybrid Congregation: A Practical Theology of Worship for an Online Era (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2025).
Reviewed By: Adam Graber
Reviewer Affiliation: Global Media Outreach
Total Pages: 171
ISBN-13: 978-1-5140-1142-3
The Hybrid Congregation: What Formation Does It Afford?
In The Hybrid Congregation, Michael Huerter is aiming to answer this question:
“What does the church need to understand about digitally mediated interactions … in order for individual communities and ministers to make well-informed, effective, and contextually appropriate decisions for their ministry?” (p. 2).
Written in the shadow of COVID-19, the book seeks to move churches beyond simplistic opposition to online church for being passive, disembodied, mediated, and virtual. Rather than choosing sides, Huerter proposes hybridity as the most faithful path forward. Churches, especially worship leaders and music pastors, should stop thinking in binaries and instead learn to negotiate the space between them.
I am not entirely persuaded that hybridity is the best way forward. But Huerter does persuade me that he has given serious and careful thought to digital worship, and The Hybrid Congregation is the result of his good work. Even where I disagree, Huerter’s arguments are consistently strong, thoughtful, and worth a close reading.
If the book has a central weakness, it lies not in its commitment to hybridity, but in its regular use of the language of potential. Huerter successfully defends and demonstrates what digital church can do, but he does not sufficiently acknowledge what digital systems are likely to do. This difference is a matter of “affordances.”
Technologies are not neutral containers of possibility. They have affordances—built-in tendencies that channel behavior in particular directions (something Huerter readily acknowledges). This matter of affordances is crucial to broader questions about formation, and many readers will, like Huerter, fail to account for their full impact.
Complicating the Dichotomies
The heart of the book is structured around four dichotomies that shape debates about digital church: Activity, Embodiment, Mediation, and Virtuality.
Quoting novelist John Green, Huerter argues that we should embrace hybridity because “almost everything we think of as dichotomous is in fact spectral” (p. 46). Drawing on media theory and theology, he patiently dismantles rigid either/or thinking and proposes hybrid positions that avoid both naïve techno-optimism and reactionary resistance.
His treatment of mediation is especially strong. Drawing on concepts such as “vanishing mediators,” “transparent immediacy,” and Richard Grusin’s “radical mediation,” Huerter argues that all encounters—digital or physical—are mediated. “There is no unmediated experience of God” (p. 92) since Christ himself is our mediator. The Internet did not introduce mediation; it simply, for the moment, makes it more visible.
This theological framing is one of the book’s helpful contributions for pastors and worship leaders. Since mediation is fundamental to human existence, digitally mediated church cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Huerter’s treatment of embodiment is similarly nuanced. He capably dismantles the key diagnoses that pastors are susceptible to make: that the Internet is inherently “disembodied” and physical church is the only legitimate form of church. Instead, Huerter offers a welcome dose of clarity: he convincingly shows that “digital being is just another mode of embodiment” (p. 73). Physical-onlyists will find Huerter troubling their easy dichotomy.
I found these sections particularly compelling. Huerter demonstrates deep familiarity with media ecology, technological affordances, and theological anthropology. Skeptics of digital church will find their arguments complicated—sometimes productively destabilized.
Vicarious Participation?
Perhaps the book’s most interesting conceptual tool, presented in response to the activity-passivity dichotomy, is “interpassivity.”
Interpassivity refers to delegated enjoyment—watching someone else perform an activity on your behalf. Think of children watching “Ryan’s Toy Review” videos or adults watching streamers play video games. In church contexts, interpassivity reframes online worship not as pure passivity but as a familiar dynamic already present in our everyday life. Christians might call such experiences “vicarious,” which itself has a rich theological heritage.
Huerter argues that church has always contained interpassive elements. Not every congregant sings. Not everyone actively participates in every moment. Online worship, therefore, is not introducing something wholly foreign, so we cannot dismiss it on grounds of lacking participation.
This is a helpful corrective to simplistic critiques. But here is where I think Huerter falls a bit short. He fails to fully account for the realities created by digital affordances.
Interpassivity, in physical church contexts, is an option. Online, it becomes a requirement. Digital architecture—buffering delays, platform design, audio limits—has made collective, real-time music-making functionally impossible on systems like Zoom (as Pete Phillips notes on p. 143). Unlike physical church, interpassivity is no longer one mode among many; online, it becomes the default. And those defaults matter.
When Huerter argues that online worship can foster meaningful participation, he is correct. But potential is not the same as proclivity. The question he does not pursue far enough is whether digital systems, at scale, tend to entrench interpassivity as the dominant mode of engagement. For my part, digital church has plenty of potential, but its affordances will ultimately leave its congregants wanting.
Discerning the “Potential” of Our Digital Systems
Nowhere is this more evident than in Huerter’s treatment of virtuality.
He repeatedly argues that “virtual reality has the potential to shape real virtue” (p. 98, emphasis mine), that digital technologies contain “redemptive potentialities” (p. 101, emphasis mine) that could facilitate meaningful connection (p. 102), and that we should explore how these tools “might allow for transformative moral commitment” (p. 102, emphasis mine).
Huerter’s language is appropriately careful. He avoids overstatement. It fairly keeps the door open to redemptive possibility. But his precise language cuts the other way as well. It evades the harder question: What are these systems most likely to produce?
The built-in tendencies of affordances open certain paths and foreclose others. When Huerter acknowledges that virtual concerts “limit some aspects of interaction” while opening others (p. 105), he is naming this reality. But he does not linger long enough on its implications.
The real discernment question for churches is not whether digital worship is possible. It is whether digital systems, in their design and economic structure, will tend to form individuals and congregations in the ways that finally imitate Christ.
When it comes to traffic systems, one might say that a speed limit has the potential to slow down traffic, but a speed bump makes it likely. The difference between potential and tendency is decisive. We need a similar degree of discernment as we assess digital systems.
Huerter sufficiently demonstrates that digital systems can produce meaningful worship experiences. He does not fully wrestle with whether their affordances—whether by design or by default—make those experiences typical or exceptional. He does, in his concluding chapter, recognize there’s more to learn still. “What are the characteristics of religious communities that meet only online?” (p. 154, emphasis mine). So perhaps Huerter sees this gap. But his readers—whether digital church enthusiasts or skeptics—likely will not.
This flaw is not fatal to the book, but it is one place where Huerter could have gone further. Without it, the question of adopting digital church practices remains inconclusive.
Church Music and Hybridity
In terms of concrete application, the book’s stated focus is musical worship, and here Huerter’s proposal becomes most prescriptive. In a later chapter, he outlines eleven “potential purposes of church music” and distills them into four criteria for effective online communal practice (p. 121). His goal is not to defend “online-only” church, but to encourage churches to explore where adapting hybrid models might offer true benefits.
Hybridity, he argues in conclusion, is the necessary path forward (p. 153).There’s no avoiding it.
Here again, I remain unconvinced that hybridity is the right organizing principle. Not because hybridity is wrong, but because it may be too easy.
Moderation between extremes often feels intellectually responsible. But sometimes the harder task is maintaining distinctions so that we can discern tendencies clearly. Instead of asking how to blend extremes, churches might ask: which forms of church make discipleship more likely? Which forms will “afford” us the best formation? And which forms of church weaken community over time?
Hybridity does not preclude such analysis. But the book’s emphasis on middle ground occasionally blurs the structural differences of online versus IRL churches, just when they most need scrutiny.
It is also worth noting that despite its musical focus, the book offers relatively few detailed musical case studies. The three ethnographic examples appear clustered near the end, and only two meaningfully address music. They are interesting and suggestive, but they might have strengthened the book if distributed earlier as concrete anchors for the theoretical framework.
A Book for Skeptics
Pastors wrestling with digitally mediated church will find this book particularly helpful. Scholars will find many of the terms familiar. On the whole, The Hybrid Congregation is best suited for worship leaders, ministry practitioners, and thoughtful skeptics.
In fact, skeptics and techno-pessimists may benefit most. Huerter will not strengthen their suspicions. He will complicate them. He will expose simplistic dismissals and demonstrate that online church cannot be rejected for being passive, disembodied, mediated, or virtual. On this, I agree with him.
Does Huerter prove that churches should embrace hybrid digital worship? I was not convinced. If churches are to embrace hybridity wisely, they must evaluate not only what is redemptively possible but what is systemically likely.
Pairing this book with Jay Kim’s Analog Church[1] and Jonathan Armstrong and Darrell Bock’s Virtual Reality Church[2] would create a fruitful juxtaposition. Kim’s book, published at the onset of COVID, argued strongly for in-person embodiment. Armstrong and Bock present a robust theological case for virtual church but with less media-theoretical depth than found in this book. Huerter, perhaps fittingly, occupies the middle terrain, offering more sociological and technological nuance than either.
Even where I disagree, I found wrestling with Huerter’s ideas fruitful rather than confusing. He anticipates objections. He engages them fairly. And he makes a strong case that hybrid church deserves more careful consideration than most church leaders will give it.
Notes
[1] Kim, Jay Y. 2020. Analog Church: Why We Need Real People, Places, and Things in the Digital Age. InterVarsity Press.
[2] Bock, Darrell, and Jonathan Armstrong. 2021. Virtual Reality Church: Pitfalls and Possibilities (Or How to Think Biblically about Church in Your Pajamas, VR Baptisms, Jesus Avatars, and Whatever Else Is Coming Next). Moody Publishers.