All of what I am about to say stands in light of the fact that nowhere does the Bible prescribe meeting in a building with other Christians at a regular time of the same day every week. The closest it comes to this is in Hebrews 10:25, where it says Christians should not avoid meeting together. There are many ways to obey this command that have nothing to do with the arbitrary traditions of Sunday church. For the Christians who are actually intelligent, sincere, and concerned with truth for its own sake, many churches have nothing to offer but amusement at their stupidity and regret or anger over their failures.
This is not what The Gospel Coalition is willing to admit. For starters, the author of the attached article writes as if having one foot outside the door of a local church is equivalent to being aimless in one's exploration of Christianity. If someone's commitment to Christianity depends on their attendance of any church, they are already an insincere, ideologically unstable person who directly allows those around them to influence their worldview instead of looking to reason and working up from the absolute certainty of logical axioms. They are hardly the kind of person self-equipped to assess ideas on their own, which is a necessity in philosophical and theological thought.
The author also claims you do not think about fellow attendees of a church during a virtual service: ". . . you think less about your fellow members. They don't come to mind." This is outright false. It is absolutely possible for people to think of fellow congregants during or in spite of virtual church services. The extent to which a person thinks about the other people watching the livestream or recorded sermon has everything to do with their personality, circumstances, and relationship with the other people in question. Some would struggle with this, which is not a sign of poor commitment to Christianity by any means if it is just about random people not being thought of, and some would not.
Not only are many of the churches implementing virtual sermons probably just doing so temporarily, not that church is a Biblical necessity or a sign of spiritual clarity by any means, but there is also no reason to criticize virtual sermons themselves except for reasons that reduce down to subjective dislike and personal preferences. Only a fool literally cannot think or remain consistent in their worldview at all without others to physically see them and encourage them. Only an insincere friend would never think at all about anyone they have truly bonded with at a church, even when they are not meeting in person. None of these objections are more than fallacious attempts to disguise false ideas and subjective preferences as Biblically valid.
No one would pretend like the Bible requires or encourages Sunday church (no, the article never specifies church must be on Sunday, but that is the random tradition) anyway unless they were irrationally looking to tradition and the approval of those who identify as Christians instead of a basic analysis of the Bible where no assumptions are made. All of these excuses to avoid virtual church made by The Gospel Coalition are objectively false on their own, but without the assumption (it is contrary to the Bible and thus can be nothing but an assumption) that church, and in-person Sunday church in particular, is a moral necessity for Christians, many of these excuses would likely not be raised in the first place. The erroneous, assumption-based tenets of evangelicalism keep their adherents from true rationality and comprehension of the Bible.
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