The Coronavirus Crisis Provided the Church with New Opportunities and Approaches . . . Will We Take Them?
By Trevor DeVage
with Mark A. Taylor
Ask the typical Bible study group, “How are Christians like us persecuted today?” and you usually get blank stares. Some might remember being bullied at school or ignored by the party crowd at college. Maybe one will tell about being disowned by her family when she decided to get baptized. You might even come across someone who got fired because he wouldn’t lie for his boss.
But more often Christians in America apply Bible passages about persecution only to the suffering of martyrs in foreign lands.
Maybe now is the time for us to think again. The COVID-19 pandemic’s threat to local churches is something like the risk of militant Hindus killing village preachers in India or repressive regimes confronting believers on several continents. It is an attack on Christian ministry as sure as the stoning of Stephen by those who wanted to crush his message. Satan, our wily, conniving enemy, will try to undermine the church with this pandemic. In fact, I believe the battle has already started.
The biggest sign of the devil’s influence is talk about “getting back to normal.” When we long for the church to go back to the way it was pre-coronavirus, we may be preparing for retreat. Maybe, like me, you know of local churches that have never left the “normal” of a 1950s approach to ministry that today serves few and reaches even fewer. These complacent churches like what they do, and they want to do it again. They want next year’s church calendar to look pretty much like this year’s. It’s only normal.
Of course, many church leaders would make fun of local churches stuck in ruts like those. But I wonder if some of us have unwittingly created new ruts we’ll rush to revisit when the pandemic threat is lifted. I fear some of us will insist on paradigms of the past instead of embracing new approaches opened to us by the current crisis. Could God be using this pandemic to awaken us to new opportunities that look like anything but normal?
I hope so. I believe Satan’s attack via this pandemic can spark the church to be more effective, just as his attack against the first Christians was the catalyst for spreading the gospel to the whole world.
For that to happen, we need to look afresh at the opportunities and obligations before us now.
What Do People Value?
Without all the busyness, without all the hurry, life for many during the quarantine became simpler. They had no choice but to dispense with most of the extra around the edges. But their relationship with God through the church remained. And for many it deepened.
The church I serve had already been offering a well-produced online worship service for a couple of years when the shutdown was announced. It was part of our ambitious strategy to interact with web surfers every hour, every day of the week. So, we were ahead of the game in some respects, and during the shutdown, the response to our online presence grew.
Most weekends during the quarantine, some 7,000 viewers stayed with our online Sunday services at least 20 minutes each week. (By the way, the 20-minute benchmark is a much more conservative way to count online viewership than some use.) When we added even more new features during the week, viewers came back.
For example, I started a livestream prayer time that aired most weekdays at lunchtime, and I plan to continue these sessions indefinitely. They regularly attract more than 10,000 viewers; some days the total is closer to 15,000. Meanwhile, Zoom counseling sessions replaced face-to-face meetings during the shutdown, and I’ve been able to engage more people one-on-one than ever before.
Cary Nieuwhof wrote in his blog earlier this year, “The collapse of so many people’s worlds has got them asking deeper questions, and, thank God, they’re still looking to the church to help.”
Now is the time for the church to multiply avenues for offering that help. Now is the time for churches to create new models for evangelism as well as fellowship and Bible study. Online ministry will be a key component for reaching the previously unreached, even after we think we no longer need to depend on it.
How Do We Communicate with Today’s Culture?
After the pandemic, content won’t change, but the way we deliver it will change. Even as many gather physically, many will continue to engage online. This will change preaching. Several ways come to mind:
• Platforms and pulpits are not required. Teaching can be effective from an office or living room.
• Big fixes are possible with minimal cost. Camera angle and inexpensive lighting properly placed greatly improve how the speaker appears on a screen.
• We look at the camera and not around at an empty room. The camera is the gateway into the eyes of those watching.
• Content volume will be trimmed as we offer smaller snippets more often with concentrated substance and value.
• Authenticity will grow from a buzzword to a central strategy. Viewers value transparency as never before.
Why Get Together?
What does this mean for getting back together? Once again, the times call for a refreshed strategy.
As editors are preparing this issue of Christian Standard, Christians are divided about how and when to reopen public worship services. If we’re not careful, Satan will use that controversy to divide and damage the church. Regardless of the specifics for different congregations in different situations, it’s sure that all of them will one day resume meeting weekly in their buildings; perhaps most will have reopened by the time this piece is published.
All of us can understand the push to do that. We want to see and hug our friends. We want to experience singing and preaching in one place at one time. Many of us have been in the habit of weekly worship gatherings, and we missed them!
But I’m hoping we won’t settle for the joy of togetherness. I hope we won’t turn our backs on the world around us after we’re free to experience again the good feelings we get inside our church buildings.
In response to the reopening clamor this spring, longtime minister and missions consultant Dick Alexander posted the following open letter to President Trump:
Churches haven’t been closed. Church buildings have been dark on weekends for over two months, but most churches are doing well. When you gave the order that large assemblies were not allowed, churches that didn’t already livestream their worship services set up within days to do so. Home Bible study groups switched from in-person meetings to online platforms. Churches doubled down on their community involvement by doing food drives, blood drives, reaching out to the elderly, and looking after vulnerable children. During the economic shutdown, they gave more to help the needy.
All this is good and it needs to multiply. The church was never meant to define itself by the quality of its meetings but instead to measure ministry by its impact on the community. We gather to scatter. Just as Christians scattered after Stephen was stoned, I’m praying for a new pandemic, a gospel pandemic as contagious as any we’ve ever experienced.
At the height of the coronavirus quarantine, Craig Groeschel reminded his listeners that each of us is a carrier of something. We can be carriers of fear or negativity or selfishness.
But in the pandemic I’m praying for, Christians will be carriers of faith, not fear . . . grace, not grumbling . . . new life, not negativity. What we carry will spread.
When we find a cure or a vaccine for COVID-19, the news will spread like wildfire. That’s the nature of good news: you can’t keep it in! Now is the time to redouble our initiatives to take the gospel out of our church buildings and into our everyday worlds.
I pray this pandemic will restore missional reasons for meeting weekly: inspiring gatherers to leave the building as faith spreaders, love givers, and hope dealers. I pray we’ll always remind Christians at church services to ask themselves, “While I’m here, what will equip me to go back to the world for Christ?”
I grew up knowing a church filled with nice people doing nice things. But that’s not enough. Let’s not go back to that normal. The church today has an opportunity to reset. To spread good news as never before. To tell people what we’re for, not just what we’re against. To snatch people from the fires of Hell (see Jude 23).
We can release a pandemic of good news that will be carried by everyone who catches it. An oft-repeated motto at our church is, “Go and make, don’t sit and take.”
Let’s get started.
Trevor DeVage is senior pastor with Christ’s Church, whose main campus is in Mason, Ohio. Mark A. Taylor, retired editor and publisher of Christian Standard, is a longtime member of Christ’s Church.
(Be sure to read this article’s companion piece, a Bible study of persecution of the New Testament Church by John Whittaker: “Unstoppable.”)
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