Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, some denialist pastors bucked public health orders and insisted on continuing in-person church services. Soon though, the majority of U.S. churches transitioned gatherings, historically housed in sanctuaries and pews, to a virtual scape. Certainly, many large churches had already mastered video feeds and multisite worship, but now smaller and mainline Protestant churches also adopted video tech and streamed to their congregations. I’ve spoken to church leaders who rue having been late to move online when instead their flocks took to consuming conspiracy theories and YouTube prophets.

In our current phase of the pandemic, many churches have returned to in-person gatherings but retain a virtual option. By all measures, the pandemic has been a long, hard slog, and it’s natural for some to begin wondering when each of us can return to “normal.” Perhaps it was with that exuberant hope for the before-times that Tish Harrison Warren penned her recent opinion piece for the New York Times. Warren argues “it’s time to drop the virtual option,” for reasons similar to why she says she believed churches should move online in March 2020: “This is the way to love God and our neighbors.”

Warren sees virtual services as diminishing worship and a person’s ability to worship wholly. “Embodiment is an irreducible part of that wholeness,” she writes.

The cost-benefit calculation of in-person versus virtual meeting is indeed shifting across many institutions. The World Health Organization has announced that Europe may be entering an endgame period for the pandemic — with increased vaccine-sharing across borders, the end of winter, and the less severe omicron variant. Nearly all school districts in the U.S. have prioritized keeping children in schools and behind desks.

While it’s fair to grant that at times we each find greater joy, learning, realness, and intimacy with others together in-person, one of the important lessons that can be taken from the pandemic is that elevating face-to-face interaction to a deal-breaker status also excludes segments of the population who cannot engage with space in the same way, with the same ease, or physical safety as more able-bodied people. The shift to remote work options in the early pandemic made it easier for people with disabilities to complete their work in spaces already adapted to their needs (their homes). The disability rights community had been advocating for such flexibility for years — as had many working parents — and the shift showed how reimaging workplace requirements can benefit more than one group of workers, and benefit employers with more productive, valued workers.

Unfortunately, religious spaces are likewise often far behind in contemplating accessibility. Religious organizations are exempt from the American Disabilities Act, so it can be hit-or-miss finding a church or synagogue with basic accommodations. Imagine listening to a sermon about the sanctity of life but discovering the space does not offer the essential dignity of a handicapped accessible bathroom.

Much in the same way that employers should hold onto lessons garnered from more flexible modes of interaction and place during the pandemic, so, too, should religious institutions. It is worth reflecting that in spring 2020, by the time the majority of churches offered a virtual option, according to a Pew Research Center study, a quarter of U.S. adults also said their faith had grown stronger during the pandemic.

I can understand clergy — a group that has faced its own overwhelming stresses and burnout over these years — craving deeper relationships, desiring the exchange of bread and wine, eye contact, togetherness. I can understand getting sidetracked by such an impulse, but it is far too narrow.

Moving to in-person only services, rather than allowing for an additional virtual option swiftly forgets those who have been congregating, perhaps less seen, but in meaningful ways, online. Snapping off virtual services takes the whole of congregational communities, which clergy have been working so hard to maintain over the pandemic, and effectively excludes those who cannot enjoy “embodiment” in the same rich way Warren describes.

Warren rejects the hybrid model of in-person and online services, writing that doing so “presents in-person gatherings as something we can opt in or out of with little consequence. It assumes that embodiment is more of a consumer preference.”

Of course, there are plenty of people for whom such embodiment — so defined as within a physical church — is not an easy option, or an option at all. People with underlying medical conditions have good reason to be wary, particularly if a church does not require masks. Of course, Covid-19-risk mitigation is not the only factor that limits people’s ability to meet in large groups.

Caitlyn Darnell, a priest from St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in South Carolina shared a story. She’d gone to give last rites to a woman, Ms. Pat, who had been instrumental in their church — the sort who had led children’s religious education in the decades before women typically served in that role. Long before the start of the pandemic, Ms. Pat contended with Alzheimer’s disease and her name was added to the church’s prayer list, read at Sunday services.

When Darnell visited to give Ms. Pat her last communion, the woman’s daughter shared that even as her mother was becoming nonverbal, one day she said, “I want to see church.” Set up, as she was in a hospital bed in the living room, her daughter clicked on her church’s livestream which St. Martin’s had instituted at the start of the pandemic. During the streamed prayer, Ms. Pat heard her own name.

“They remember me,” she told her daughter. It was one of her last sentences.

“To have that moment where the person has not just a vague notion of being prayed for, but truly knows they have been prayed for and have been prayed for, for a long time,” Darnell says, was really special. Hearing about that moment from Ms. Pat’s daughter, “it’s like a thin space of, you know, suddenly you realize the Holy Spirit has been working all along, and you finally catch a glimpse of it.”

Over the past year, I’ve talked with family and friends who don’t belong to a church but who started attending one — or more than one — miles away from home, because they found comfort in the sort of messages they didn’t hear in the churches available physically nearby.

During an overwhelming fall season myself, in which I become primary caretaker for both my parents, stacked atop pandemic parenting, and work, I found myself online, making time to watch a minister-friend’s morning prayer service. It was an utterly strange impulse for me — I left the church myself two decades ago. For years, I felt a fluttering panic in my chest if I reentered what, for others, is such a sacred space. I’d loved church too much before, so after, it hurt to be there. But nevertheless, and maybe for the same reason I also started checking my horoscope throughout the pandemic, I found myself drawn in. Someone I know and trust read a few verses, offered prayers. It meant something new to me. I got to know some of the names of others in the group who typically showed up to listen too. I knew some of their worries, their prayers. I would not have connected to any of them in this way in-person under normal circumstances.

Solace, however it comes, can be its own home, create a sort of psychic or spiritual space. That, too, is a space worth preserving, hallowing.

I know legions of people — have written about more — who were hurt by the church, through abuse or judgment, homophobia or restrictive purity culture, who cannot trust putting their body back in a space that caused such harm. That too is an element of “embodiment.”

A virtual option keeps a door open. After years of quarantine and restriction, isn’t now precisely the time to reimagine how to include people in communities? If there is a God, wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that God can transcend beyond a few hours on a Sunday in a specific place? And if community is being forged virtually too, why break it apart?

Whatever (inadequate) idealism prompts it, the call to go back to in-person-only church services can be read as another return to what many also perceive as the old normal: practices that don’t look far enough to ask who is being excluded. Inclusion would be a clearer expression of neighborly love.