teaching & ministry

Creating connection within physical absence

By Dr. Andrew Zirschky, Director of the MAYM Nashville Extension and Research Professor in Youth Ministry

Amidst our pandemic-induced isolation this past year, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time considering the nature of presence, or what it means to feel as though we are seen and heard and “with” others.

It was exactly a year ago that courses at the Seminary began to move online, and I quickly realized that part of my ministry with and to students during this time would be to discover ways of experiencing and extending social presence amidst physical absence. Of course, at the same time most of the other avenues of social interaction we enjoy in American society were also shutting down or shifting online. Thecasual social contact we experience in restaurants and grocery stores ceased; many workplaces were shuttered in favor of work completed at the dining room table; the raucous cheers at sporting events faded away; and the traditional darkness and silence of our churches during Tennebrae services lingered into Easter Sunday morning and long beyond as not even Christian gatherings could be spared. Our usual ways of “being with” others and feeling their presence were suddenly no longer available. Discovering ways to experience presence amidst absence became a society-wide quest.

I noticed a few years ago that Christians tend to have a bias for showing up, as if being physically present in a place is equivalent to truly “being with” others. We love to count Sunday morning attendees and often measure the health of our congregations by how many people show up in the same place (the sanctuary) at the appointed hour. Most especially when it comes to church, we assume that physical proximity is the same as relational or social presence. Somehow we confuse attendance with being seen, heard, known, cared for, and loved. We know this isn’t the case in other places in life—public transportation being a ready example. While standing packed into a bus or subway car, I’m quite sure you’ve never had an overwhelming sense of being socially present or truly “known by” this mass of others, despite the close proximity. Yet, when I was a pastor, I tended to believe that social presence just naturally manifested itself in my church when people showed up. Likewise, in my first years as a professor I believed it just naturally manifested in my classroom. I was wrong on both accounts.

The real challenge was not transferring classroom content into a digital space, but helping students experience my presence and in turn be present themselves in our interactions.

While it’s a common idea that teaching is an exercise in knowledge transfer, the reality is that teaching and learning are most truly social interactions in which ideas are exchanged and grow within us as we encounter others and they encounter us. Classrooms devoid of the opportunity for students to be known, heard, and seen—or where instructors stand aloof from being personally present— are classrooms that not only feel dead (and boring), but are often deadly to our hearts, souls, and minds.

As the pandemic plodded on and Zoom became the architecture of both our churches and classrooms, I knew that the real challenge ahead was not transferring classroom content into a digital space, but helping students experience my presence and in turn be present themselves in our interactions. How could I bring myself to the Zoom experience and not just my content? How could I ensure that students didn’t just interact with content, but were able to be heard, seen, and known by one another as people? Part of the reason these were important questions for my classroom was because these were also

important questions for the churches where my students serve. Each student in the Master of Arts in Youth Ministry program serves 25+ hours a week in a congregation, usually in the role of youth director. My students were facing the same issues with their youth groups that I was facing in the classroom. While most teenagers are unaffected by COVID-19, by midsummer they had all been infected by the malady of Zoom Fatigue. While the popular perception is that Zoom Fatigue results from too many hours of video conferencing and screen time, the reality is that this fatigue is the result of countless hours spent in front of a camera, but never being seen; too many hours in front of a microphone, but never really being heard. The real cause of Zoom Fatigue, the “other” illness we’ve faced this past year, is the lack of social presence that easily results from the transactional and sterile interactions that Zoom (and other technologies) so easily foster.

In fits and starts I’ve learned how to manifest presence and minister to my students this past year, and they’ve learned along with me for the sake of their own churches and ministries. For example, while we’ve learned there are certainly ways to engage together on Zoom that allow for a sense of presence, these group interactions are no substitute for reaching out to people as individuals. This was the year that “pastoral visitation” and home calls—even if conducted on the front

WebXtra: To watch a video porch at a social distance—made a resurgence about Austin in the ministerial Seminary repertoire of my students’ students, “Beloved just as personal phone calls, Community texts, and one-on-one Covenant,” meetings with go students here: made a resurgence in my weekly rhythm. We’re discovering together that just showing up community in the classroom—or the church—is not the same as truly being present with and for others.