According to McCrindle’s latest Wilberforce Foundation research project (COVID19 NZ Values Study) conducted during the fourth week of Level 4 lockdown, the top emotions New Zealanders were feeling in response to the COVID-19 situation were hopeful (45%), anxious (39%), frustrated (27%), reflective (26%) and relaxed (25%). The research doesn’t dig down to what exactly New Zealanders were hopeful/anxious/frustrated/reflective/relaxed about, but I want to make a big deal about ‘hope’ as the top emotion. This hope could simply be because New Zealand has done so well at being kind, staying home, and saving lives.
With this backdrop of hope – which I too am filled with, I think the church is positioned for what could be its most significant change in living history.
Over the last few weeks the local church my household is part of has encouraged us to ponder questions such as:
- What is God asking of us in preparation for the future?
- What is the vision God is laying on our hearts that God is called us to outwork?
- Have we reached that point where we have become so dissatisfied with what has been that we’re willing to embrace a different way ahead?
Wow!!
My household have loved pondering these questions, and below I share some of the things that have come out of our thinking, as well as some of the responses to our thoughts from our local faith community.
COVID-19 lockdown closed our church buildings
Christian faith communities (local churches) have been out of our buildings for nearly 2 months now. The changes implemented by pastors and churches during lockdown to sustain both spirituality and motivation for mission, have been amazing. My local church has continued to gather on Sunday mornings but online, with new online versions of the usual components of Sunday church services. The online medium has given rise to a creativity that I haven’t seen before – our pastor’s sermon on the parable of yeast permeating the loaf of bread, whilst making a loaf of bread, was incredibly memorable and has stayed with me in a way that him preaching it live in a building may not have.
There’s a toddler in my household and I’m an introvert – there are aspects to this new online way of gathering that have been much less stressful for me than “going to church”. I do however believe in the importance and significance of gathering face-to-face within a local church community.
Post-lockdown brings a whole new world of possibilities
I’ve written before about problems with Sunday church services as our primary expression of Christian faith – they can be inauthentic and lacking actual service, leading many Christians to become disengaged from the faith community. COVID-19 has forced us to do something different with our gatherings, and I hope there is no going back to what was.
Affirming the importance of regular Christian gathering, below are the thoughts that came out of my household when thinking about our local church and what post-lockdown gathering as a church together could look like:
Keep the traditional time-slot of Sunday mornings
It came to mind that practising Christians generally block out a few hours of their time on Sunday morning in order to ‘do’ church together – we can expect this, so let’s make the most of this time. The ‘normal’ Sunday morning church services of the past probably haven’t been making the most of this time together.
Often events outside of the Sunday morning time-slot are sporadically or badly attended, as people’s lives all look different – some work full time so day times don’t work, others have kids so evenings don’t work, others visit families on Sunday evenings who aren’t Christian, others play sport on Saturday, so meeting collectively to be the church can be hard at other times of the week. Let’s use the Sunday morning commitment time that we have corporately made and see what we can do with it….
People do what they see
Typically, being a practising Christian is seen as going to church services in church buildings on Sunday mornings. ‘Worship’ is often just seen as group singing of Christian songs during those same services.
Let’s expand our appreciation and experience of being Christian together by expanding what gets done/seen when we are together, alongside the appreciation that currently, practicing Christians generally, at least, give Sunday mornings to do/be ‘church’.
A new Sunday rhythm
Let’s keep the weekly rhythm of meeting together each Sunday morning, but let’s change what that looks like. Some examples that we imagined are:
Pray together en masse
Have you ever turned up to a pre-service or mid-week church prayer meeting to be one in a group of 7 or 8 people? (I know, 7 or 8 people praying together is an excellent thing!)
We (the collective ‘we’) want people to pray together:
One Sunday morning, during the church “slot” (so, from 10 am to 11.30 am) each month, let’s gather and pray together – as one, in smaller groups, intergenerational, intercession, for healing, confession, for mission… No sermon, no singing, just praying.
Imagine everyone in your church community praying together for 90 minutes 12 times during the year! I have never experienced that before in any local church I’ve been part of.
Love our neighbours together
We want people to love their neighbours:
One Sunday morning each month let’s gather to serve the neighbourhood. For example:
- a team cooks meals for a communal freezer to give away when needed;
- a group go and do working-bees at people’s places who are shut in;
- a group visit a rest home;
- a group wander around picking up litter;
- a group do jobs for the schools or local community groups.
The ideas are endless, and need to be hooked into meeting the identified needs of the local community.
Once a month on a Sunday morning everyone gathers to serve the community together.
In my local church, last year on Labour Weekend Sunday, rather than a normal church service we all gathered for a morning working-bee around the church property: cleaning, gardening, maintenance, tidying, etc. While this was generally self-serving for our own church community, it showed something of how working together in service is worship. It also showed that the Sunday morning time-slot was when we could work together as a collective on this sort of project.
Diversify our communal worship of God
We want people to worship God together:
One Sunday morning each month we gather for curated worship, drawing on church tradition: singing, formal liturgy, contemplation, engagement with Scripture, ministry of the Spirit. We demonstrate/teach and practise the expansiveness of Christian communal worship, ancient and future. Skills in leading this aren’t always present in local churches – there are people and excellent resources that can help.
Learn together
We want people to learn:
One Sunday morning each month we gather to learn. For example:
- teach the bible (unpack Scripture);
- enliven Christian thought and history (train us in theology);
- inspire our action (resource us for mission).
What pedagogy would you use to do this well in your particular faith community? Once a month everyone gathers to learn.
The sermon evolved
We could also continue our learning via weekly input – rather than a weekly sermon in Sunday church services, let’s continue to have weekly sermon-like content (earthed and coming out of the local context), but shared each week for individuals and groups to consume in their own time (video/audio/text) and then reflect on and interact with together (in home-groups, life-groups, households, on social media, etc).
Most of us probably already listen to other content during the week (podcasts or news while walking to work, for example) – I would gladly add local content from my church community. Before COVID-19 I missed every alternate Sunday sermon as I would be in another part of the church building with our toddler – I often listened to the sermon online later in the week.
Foster a culture of generosity
We want to be intergenerational and have a culture of generosity:
One Sunday morning each month we gather in a way that embraces and affirms all of our age groups together. There’s no reason why other examples given in this blog post wouldn’t also have this as a concern, but why not emphasise this monthly. Once a month everyone gathers to intentionally appreciate and affirm the differences within. Once the culture becomes generous this need not be an actual focus.
Come on and celebrate!
We want to gather for massive celebrations, around food and in hospitable spaces, for events such as Easter Sunday, Pentecost, the start of Advent, Christmas, baptisms etc. These are times where a large indoor space would probably be required – which could be rented within the neighbourhood in order to earth them into the local community. Some of these could include other local church communities in the area, or in the case of NZ Baptists: other churches that associate together in the region.
Blue Moon Sundays could be another reason to gather for these celebrations.
I’m thinking ‘party’ here. Imagine an Easter Sunday where 50,000 followers of Jesus living in Auckland filled up Mount Smart Stadium to celebrate together the risen Christ! (Bono and band might even come to lead a bracket of their worship songs.)
Different resources for a different rhythm
In time, this new rhythm to our gatherings may require different spaces or building designs. We might find we no longer need an auditorium arrangement (rows of seats and stages), but something more flexible. We may not even need our own space for large gatherings, but could meet in other spaces in our neighbourhood (e.g., school halls, performance spaces, town hall, community centres), thus releasing the current building/footprint/land/resource for some other purpose.
Church buildings are not the hub of community life – do you know what is the hub in your neighbourhood? The shops and the schools are the hub of my local community – what spaces might our church partner with here?
Is there an appetite for this?
Cardinal John Dew (Catholic Archbishop of Wellington) said this week, when talking about lockdown rules for church gatherings: “…Catholics have an obligation to attend mass on Sunday” and this adds to the difficulty of their lockdown experience in a way that wasn’t reflected in my experience. I wonder how much of our (in my case NZ Baptist) pre-COVID way of Sunday church services was an obligation to tradition that we’ve been socialised into, and while we have tried to make the most of it – maybe the way we’ve been gathering has limited our expression of being a Christian faith community together.
My household floated these ideas on our church Facebook group, with some encouraging interaction so far:
How might this happen?
We’ve seen massive disruption since the COVID-19 lockdown began. Working differently has been a tiring experience for many. But with research indicating that hopefulness abounds, and the small but positive indicator from the Facebook comments above (from my local church at least), I wonder if the urge to return to business as usual need not influence our imaginations and decisions as we embrace the future.
This blog post describes one possible future scenario: change what happens in the 90 minutes when a local church gathers on Sunday mornings in order to expand our appreciation and experience of being ‘Christian’ together by expanding what gets done/seen when we are together.
Pastors, elders, team leaders, deacons… start floating a few scenarios of the things you’d like to see change as a result of the COVID-19 experience. Paint pictures of these scenarios – like I’ve done here in 1500 words – you’ll no doubt have your own scenarios in mind. Call for people to pray and share – like my pastor did 2 weeks ago through his online preaching. Socialise what emerges.
If you don’t have an official ‘church leadership’ role – you are part of the majority in which any change relies upon your willingness to be open to and engage with. What can you imagine? What is the vision God is laying on your heart? Many of the church leaders I know long for this kind of engagement from the people they serve – so start sharing!
No turning back?
It feels like we in the church are positioned for what could be the most significant change in living history. All it has taken is a global pandemic to rattle this global movement.
