Don’t Go Back: A Plea for the Church Coming Out of the Pandemic
Photo by Karl Fredrickson on Unsplash
The news is currently headlined by the first batch of vaccines being administered around the globe. The calendar will thankfully soon leave 2020 behind. Given these realities I find myself thinking about what comes next for the church on the other side of this life-shaping season. There seems indeed to be a light at the end of the tunnel, even if the tunnel might still prove to be rather long. I am under no delusions that the current pandemic realities will end as swiftly as they began. There is no quick fix. And yet signs of a previous normal are on the hopeful horizon. So as we look toward the eventual end of church life so utterly dominated by this virus, this is my plea to the church: don’t go back.
2020 has felt like a wilderness moment in the church, but we know that God has always used wildernesses to refine his people. Before being launched into ministry Jesus was driven by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness for 40 days. After his conversion Paul spent three years in the desert preparing for his divine assignment. There were forty years between the time Moses fled Egypt and the burning bush. Elijah heard the still small voice when he felt totally deserted and was alone in a cave.
In politics you hear a phrase often credited to Winston Churchill: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” I would suggest in the Scriptures you see the truth that God never lets a good wilderness go to waste. My hope for the church today is that, rather than trying to clamor for what used to be, we would learn from this wilderness experience and allow God to redeem our life together on the other side. The church has endured challenges during 2020 unlike any I have seen in my lifetime, but perhaps the greater tragedy would be if we emerged unchanged and committed to the same course of consumer-driven decline we were on before. If there were ever a time to work on building the church you have longed to lead, this is it.
When faced with a crisis the most obvious tendency is to grasp at the familiar. There is great allure in the siren song of the familiar and the comfortable. This was the tendency of Israel after leaving Egypt. Even though the past life of slavery was far from ideal, when faced with the compounding weariness of the wilderness, even Egypt sounded good. I fear this will be our response in the church as we navigate coming out of this pandemic wilderness.
By all measures, both anecdotally as I talk with pastors around the country, and by the actual statistics available, church attendance has plummeted during the pandemic. For example, Barna found that by September 2020, one in five people normally defined as churchgoers had not attended a service even once during the pandemic, either in person or digitally. Most churches I know that are open for in-person worship, even with lots of necessary adjustments like distancing and masks, are averaging somewhere between 25-50% of their pre-pandemic attendance. Here is the blunt truth: some of those people are never coming back and almost every church in the U.S. will be statistically smaller whenever things go back to “normal.”
Thus I offer a few proposals as we look forward with the realization that whatever normal was in the past, it may never return:
Don’t go back to obsessing over worship attendance as the primary metric. There will be a sincere temptation as the pandemic draws to a close for ministry leaders to see our job as trying, by any means possible, to woo back those attendees we lost. Many will fire up attractional techniques at a desperate clip in the attempt to get our numbers back to where they once were. I plead with you not to waste your investment on such lifeless fruit. My good friend Tony Milternberger has urged a shift toward disciple-making in this season. He is absolutely right.
Comparing worship statistics with the church down the street is no longer the church’s main Olympic event because all of our statistics are embarrassingly bad. Now is the time to give up our obsession with metrics mainly designed to make ourselves feel good. Measuring average worship attendance and financial giving is necessary, but if left in place as primary drivers these metrics will cause us to return to habits that undermine the Great Commission. Now is the time to make this shift from addition to multiplication. It’s time to move from clamoring for crowds to taking the few that are left and multiplying everyday missionaries.
Don’t go back to a church calendar so full you don’t have time to pray or get to know your unchurched neighbors. In the months ahead I fear church leaders may be tempted to ramp up the church calendar to try to make up for lost time. Instead, we must maintain new margins that are necessary for wise and reflective leadership. Now is the time to create more space for prayer, not less. And our church members also need space to build new friendships with unchurched neighbors and continue new at-home practices that they hopefully have begun. Don’t sabotage that important work by needless busyness.
Don’t go back to programs that weren’t producing fruit in the first place. As a church leader, there may be no greater gift this pandemic has given us than killing off some things that needed to die. Now is the time to leave for dead those time-draining programs that fostered no real transformation, but which we maintained in order to please people. I have not seen a better opportunity than now to make radical shifts in the priorities of a church. In many ways we are starting with a clean slate. Don’t waste that gift.
Don't go back to shallow teaching. If 2020 has taught us anything it is that empty platitudes and self-help tips are not enough to deal with the complexity and weight of human existence. Whether in sermons or studies, Christians need teaching that grows deep roots if we hope to stay firm in the hurricane-force winds of cultural turmoil.
Don’t go back to spending most of your time investing in those who are not sincerely interested in growing as disciples. Pastors spend an inordinate amount of time on people who are not earnestly seeking the way of Christ. Many of those have likely fallen away this year. So now is the time to invest in the few who are hungry and serious about pursuing righteousness. Now is the time to abandon the never-ending job of placating our critics. All churches have those personalities who seem to believe that criticism and complaining are the primary fruits of the spirit. Now is the time to give those voices no more weight in our lives.
Don’t go back to the safe and the tame. (To be abundantly clear, I am not talking here about the needed physical safety measures during the pandemic.) Now is the time to do something bold and courageous. What do we have to lose? “Half the church might leave!” They already did. So do something radical for Jesus.
Don’t go back to thinking you can manufacture outcomes on your own. 2020 has proved you are far less in control than you thought. The church needs more than your best ideas. It needs that which only the Holy Spirit can provide. Your schemes are not good enough. Your plans are not revolutionary. Your strategic planning cannot change a single life by itself. If 2020 has not taught us our desperate need for God, then nothing will. It has humbled us. So let us not return to our prideful ways once more. Seek the Holy Spirit. Pray for revival. Surrender control.
Life in the church will never be the same. Our world is different. We are different. So I plead with you: don’t waste this wilderness experience by trying to go back to Egypt. God wants to redeem this time in the life of his people. I am utterly confident of that. May we not fight against that refining work. Don’t go back. As we look toward the eventual end of this world-shaping pandemic, now is the time for fervent prayer, hard decisions, and courageous leadership by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Matt Reynolds is the Founder and President of Spirit & Truth, a Wesleyan-minded equipping ministry that offers hands-on training, online resources, a ministry leaders network, and opportunities for partnership with the global church. Firebrand is a ministry of Spirit & Truth.