What's Church for Anyway?

Our church has recently chartered a "5-Year Vision" task force to look at what we need to be doing over the next five years and where the church should be focusing it's efforts. It's got me thinking about the reason for the existence of the church, and what a church needs to be in this rapid-paced, partly-virtual, totally-connected world of ours.

It seems to me that the traditional answers of fellowship, worship, and instruction are lacking something in the time of the Internet. People used to find community by physical association with other people...going to the same place and interacting face-to-face. Even the telephone was considered somewhat impersonal. In my experience, that is becoming less and less common. More people interact by email, chat, or IM. The telephone has become an intimate communication medium. We still write letters, but only for "social formula" reasons like thank you notes and wedding invitations. Everyone is too busy to actually spend the time to travel to a common physical location and interact. It seems so wasteful and inefficient.

So, what does the church look like in this society? If we persist in seeing the church as a place we all meet to do spiritual things, then I fear the institution is doomed to decline. How do we take the gospel message and Paul's admonition in Hebrews 10:25 -

Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

We clearly must continue to "meet," but how and why and where? Is this the church?