by Tim Lubinus, BCI Executive Director

This week I heard that both North Point Community Church with Andy Stanley and The Summit Church with J. D. Greear have decided not to have in-person services for the rest of this year because of the coronavirus pandemic. These two announcements ended any lingering hope I had for a “V-shaped” recovery for the church and a return to normalcy by the time schools start this fall. Just like the cancellation of “March Madness” proved to many that COVID is a serious problem requiring extreme measures to combat the virus, seeing megachurches like North Point and The Summit acknowledge they will forego in-person gatherings for the remainder of the year is a tipping point in the church’s response to COVID. Whether you accept it or not, the church truly is entering into a “new normal.”

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Clarifying the Opportunity and Challenge for the Church in the Midst of the Coronavirus Pandemic

As believers in Jesus Christ we are taught to see God’s providence in the currents of history, even when the days are difficult. The coronavirus pandemic is especially relevant to a people who call themselves the church, “the gathered ones”, when we can’t gather together like we used to just a few months ago.

It is easy to offer an opinion on what the future will be like while in the midst of a crisis, but it is extremely difficult to accurately predict the future! The first way to get a handle on the future is to analyze similar events from the past. There have been pandemics throughout history where the church emerged stronger. Sociologist Rodney Stark taught us that famines and epidemics of the earlier times lead to greater church impact as she cared for the abandoned and took the opportunity to proclaim the message of Jesus to a watching world.

Another tool to inform us about the future is to consider possible outcomes from disruptions caused by changing environment or new technology. When churches like Summit Church and North Point Community Church cancel their in-person services for nearly a year, their church members will likely develop new patterns and expectations. Innovative church leaders will use today’s technology to redesign their worship services for home and small group engagement. In the past few months many churches simply copied their normal Sunday service and streamed it online. Now that some leading churches aren’t even planning on meeting in person, I think we will see rapid innovation in online weekly “programs” for home and in-person small group “attendance”. The music, teaching format, and service elements will likely look very different in just a few months.

Finally, we can try to predict the future by analyzing recent trends in other organizations. For example, let’s consider the big-box retail store transformation in the 1980-90’s. These stores boasted superior products and selection coupled with lower prices driving out local mom and pop shops. Then came Amazon as a competitor of big-box brick and mortar stores. In terms of church organizational trends, the big-box mega churches are likely to get some serious digital competitors. Many people are already in the habit of attending church digitally and their church of attendance is no longer dependent on geography.

How can local churches respond in this new normal? Churches will have challenges, but nothing to fear if they do what churches do best, make disciples. That is to focus on a highly personal, highly contextualized, highly customized interaction for the development of believers as disciples of Jesus Christ. However, churches that insist on putting eighty percent of their resources and identity into fairly impersonal large group meetings on Sunday may be facing tough times ahead. While the mission and identity of the church is unchanging, its structure and methods are in constant flux.

Specifically, because of all of the above, church leaders may want to consider changing the measurement of church health from Sunday meeting attendance to measuring the multiplication of disciples in their midst. Church leaders should:

Go deeper, not broader. Develop ministry plans to be more personal, more relational, and that create a richer community. Consider ways to have more personal interaction in homes, small groups, and online.
Modify the church staff mix by adding staff who are especially skilled in personally developing other people and creating structure to expand discipleship ministry. At the same time reduce meeting coordinators, event planners, and even skilled platform teachers, and musicians. Church staff can be more content curators than content creators. It may be time to admit that many church members get their main Bible teaching digitally apart from Sunday morning’s one-size-fits-all lecture format.
Reconsider or delay church building acquisition or expansion plans that aren’t directly tied to decentralized disciple making.
Find ways to introduce outsiders to Christ and serve practical needs in the community.

Whenever a massive shift occurs, everything feels off balance for a time. Usually, things pretty much settles back to where they were before. But if the shift is large enough, there’s a tipping point where everything will change moving forward. Crisis is often opportunity, and it looks like the coronavirus pandemic will continue to create it for a little longer. Let’s seize the opportunity to even more closely follow the great commission that commands us to make disciples of all nations.