The article describes how the closure of churches during the Easter period due to the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine measures led to the shift of everyday liturgical and communication practices online. The experience of “distance church life” in April-June 2020 has shown that both the mediatization of Orthodoxy and the development of the Orthodox section of the Internet reached a fundamentally new stage. The author examines this stage using the concept of participatory culture introduced by Henry Jenkins and cultural studies approaches based on the categories, interactivity and immersion. The shared experience of online worship over a span of several months and the degree of participants’ co-presence and level of emotional involvement point to a new level of mediatization that entailed the production and consumption of textual, audio, and video content in the course of vertical and horizontal communication. This experience also showed the active development of participatory practices, including the strengthening of the interactivity of worship, the unprecedented intensity of immersion, and the prospects of substantial changes in liturgical life driven by digitalization.