Category: Church (Page 2 of 58)

I was recently asked by the editor of a Christian journal to share with him my experiences with COVID and the Church, specifically the challenges of leading a church during the early stages of the pandemic, the shutdowns, and the re-opening of churches during the Spring of 2020. I posted my answer to his first question in this space yesterday. I am posting my responses to the other two questions today and then will elaborate a little more and process a little further tomorrow and Thursday. As a reminder, I was the Senior Minister at Central Church of Christ in Amarillo during that time. So my answers reflect the experiences in that setting.

What was the greatest success or unexpected blessing for your congregation that came out of COVID?

The most immediate blessing was that we were forced to think outside the box. The situation demanded creativity and allowed a flexibility to experiment with almost anything. We held an Ash Wednesday drive-thru service, we organized prayer parades that blessed our local missions partners, we did online talent shows and hosted livestreamed ten-minute “Word and Prayer” sessions four days a week. I began hosting a weekly podcast that highlighted our local missions partners and favorite “Passages and Prayers” from our elders. Some of the ideas were brand new and some were things we had talked about before but never had the space to try them out. Some of the things we tried failed terribly and others turned into meaningful events that will continue to bless that church for years to come.

With two-thirds of our church family participating from their homes on Sunday mornings and most all Bible classes and midweek activities canceled for a full year, we were given a wonderful opportunity to reimagine what we were doing as a congregation, and why. We had the space to rethink our priorities and the freedom to refocus our church programming and events. As shepherds and ministers, we developed criteria for using our time and resources on only those things that synced up with our congregation’s vision. We surveyed the church and put together a few focus groups to identify those things that truly transformed our members and brought them closer to God and to one another. We radically changed our Wednesday night programming, made significant adjustments to our Bible class and small groups structures, and refused to restart any program or event just because we had been doing it for twenty years – it had to match the criteria. We made the decisions to pour our church resources and our volunteer hours into fewer things that yield the most Kingdom and Holy Spirit fruit. We made things simpler and more streamlined to match our church’s twin values of transformation and mission.

What biblical passages or principles have taken on more importance for you – or have you seen in a new light – during and after the lockdowns?

The incarnation of our Lord and that same flesh-and-blood nature of his Church took a hit during COVID. As a society, we were already well down the path of increasing individuality and isolation. But the pandemic sped us along so that, somehow, church online has become a viable substitute for the physical presence of and in the Body of Christ. Our salvation is not a one-time event. Yes, we are connected to the life, death, and resurrection of our Savior when we are baptized. But our salvation continues – in fits and starts, with ups and downs, slowly but surely – in church. With people.

God’s Spirit transforms us in community. Our Lord changes us and shapes us into his image with other people. When we give and receive forgiveness. When we sing each other’s songs. When we bear one another’s burdens. In the hugs and during the meals. No matter what we’ve been told or what we’ve been doing for the past year-and-a-half, you can’t experience communion at a drive-thru or do church over the internet. We must work overtime, now more than ever, to reclaim the sacramental view of the Christian assembly. We are required now to teach and re-teach, to reassert and reaffirm the transformational purpose and effect in regularly meeting together in person. And we must work just as hard to make sure our Sunday assemblies cultivate the kind of life-changing transformative environments our God intends.

Peace,

Allan

I was recently asked by the editor of a theological / ecclesiological journal to answer a couple of questions related to the ways our church responded to the COVID  pandemic. He is in the process of dedicating the upcoming issue of his journal to reflections regarding COVID and he’s gathering input from a variety of church leaders. His questions to me dealt specifically with the problems encountered and the lessons learned during the  lockdowns of the Spring of 2020 and the re-opening of churches in the early Summer 2020. I was the Senior Minister at Central Church of Christ during that time, so my answers to him were about what we were doing in Amarillo.

I’m going to post my answer to his questions in this space today and tomorrow and then expound on them a bit more near the end of the week. Once his article and journal are published, I’ll link you to it from this blog and we can further discuss this important topic.

What were the greatest challenges for your congregation to navigate during COVID lockdowns?

We experienced what a lot of church leaders encountered in the polarization of our congregation over the wearing of masks and other mitigation techniques. We, like most elders and ministers, found ourselves in a lose-lose situation: some of our members refused to come to church unless we mandated masks and others vowed not to come if we did. We told our church we were making our decisions based on the science and the medical recommendations but, in reality, we were making our calls based on our own gut feelings and the current mood of the church and our community. The longer the pandemic conditions continued, the more our shepherds relied on the culture instead of the science, and the church became a place that mirrored the inconsistencies and fostered the same mistrust as people were suffering in society.

A challenge I wrestled with personally – this is still a challenge for us to navigate faithfully as church leaders – is the dilemma between telling people to stay home for the sake of their health and asking them to worship with their church family in person for the sake of their souls. We made it really convenient for Christians to “attend church” from the privacy of their own homes, so much so that church became the last place some people would go. We worked hard to purchase additional cameras, add more lights and microphones, and pre-record communion thoughts and announcements so the livestreamed version of church rivaled most any other option. We did it so well, a lot of our folks felt no need to leave their homes. I had one older gentleman, a former elder, tell me he and his wife would probably never come back into the building. “We can turn up the volume to exactly the right level,” he told me. “We can rewind the video when we miss something, we can start it from the beginning if we accidentally sleep in; it’s too easy and nice to just do church from the house!”

I began seeing people out at restaurants and grocery stores who had told me they weren’t coming to church because of COVID. My wife and I attended a Saturday night July 4th dinner and fireworks show with about twenty people from our church. We were all eating at the same tables, sharing the same food, talking loudly and laughing with each other in tight quarters. But at least half of those people told me they would be doing church from home the next morning because of COVID.

Had we turned church into something you could do just as well watching a screen from home as participating in a pew in a sanctuary? It must go further back, to our teachings and our experiences together at church. Why do our people not view the Sunday assembly as uniquely transformative for their lives? Why do they not crave the physical presence of God’s people together in God’s presence around his table? Why do they not miss the inspiration and the transformation, the sheer glory of worshiping God and responding to his movement among his people? Have they not heard anything I’ve said in here for the past ten years?

It’s one of three things. Either the culture of individuality, personal preference, and convenience in our society is too strong and overpowers anything I say about the sacramental importance of the worship assembly. Or I haven’t communicated it very well. Or our people have not experienced much transformation in church.

Probably all three.

Peace,

Allan