March 15, 2020 is a date that will have special meaning
for a lot of church leaders. It was the last Sunday of in person meetings at
the rural church where I am serving as transitional Interim pastor. That
morning there were 40 or so bleary eyed kids and a few college students in
attendance who had just returned from a meaningful D-Now weekend. There were
some other key movements of God among congregants. We were dead in the middle
of conducting a congregational assessment of values and systems. I felt like in
some respects we were cooking with grease.
On the Associational level we had a few events in place
that had the capacity to provide transformational assistance to a bunch of
hungry leaders. It felt like God was doing some very meaningful things among
us. Then we all started scrambling to figure out what kind of strange new world
we were living in. You might say we are still in that moment. I’d say that.
A convergence of
events that may slow momentum. From the first week of suspended services we
started having a weekly pastor’s Zoom meeting and we included some of the state
missionaries in our region. Each week is different. We’ve worn out all the clichés,
but it is true that there is no playbook for what we are walking through. Peer
to peer communication has been big, especially in terms of helping gauge each
others’ state of emotional and spiritual strength and lifting each other up.
In the most recent conversations I’ve had with pastors a
few guys are starting to tiptoe into reopening. And they are learning that it’s
not going to be the blockbuster event that perhaps they had previously
envisioned. It feels like the Pandemic fast forwarded whatever trajectory
people were on. Here are a few of the challenges in our small sampling:
·
Nominal attenders may become non-attenders.
·
Pressure to exceed what’s perhaps wise in the
current stage of re-entry.
·
On the other pole, reticence to return to church
and its close quarters.
·
Protecting the elderly and medically fragile.
·
Summer. Plain and simple, people are stir crazy and
it’s Memorial Day weekend, which typically opens the gates for more fluidity
among members anyway.
·
Outsized expectations about the capacity of
crisis events to arrest cultural secularization. I don’t think it works that
way anymore, if it ever did.
The ongoing need
for experimental culture. This interesting question came up at our last
pastor’s Zoom meeting thanks to our regional state missionary, Ray Sullivan. If
the slow re-entry extends into months or a year and a half, what adaptive
changes will your church make to ensure that the task of discipleship is still
occurring? How will you change so that the process of life transformation can
continue for people?
If a church’s posture is “we will not interact with
technology or investigate how to evolve in our approach to ministry at this
time,” welcome to obscurity. As Tom Feltenstein said, “If you don’t like change
you’re going to like irrelevance a lot less.” Of course, this was true before
the Pandemic. And I am very grateful for the ways that this event has pressured
some churches to examine their systems.
What a church has,
what a church is, what a church does. It’s a good time to make this
differentiation. A church has facilities, programs, and resources, but that is
not what a church is. A church is human beings who have the Spirit of God implanted
in them through the new birth. Whew! That’s good news. A pandemic can’t interfere
with that. A church is a missionary movement mandated by God to make disciples
of everyone on earth. Again, good news, a Pandemic can’t derail that.
As we examine our spiritual markers, gathering for worship is a vital one, but a concern that many leaders have right now is that maybe the American church has put far too much weight on this one alone. It’s a great time to go to work on reflecting on how to shift the weight to some of the other vital ways that our faith might be measured and not only when things go sideways.
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