Coronavirus is one of the biggest challenges of our lifetime. It attacks our immunity, our securities, and our way of life. Churches have closed their doors for the foreseeable future and immediate attention has been on working out what the church looks like in social isolation. It goes without saying that this present situation has a detrimental impact on the most vulnerable people that the church ministers to and on isolated people with the lack of fellowship.
This is a terrible and life-threatening season that the world is going through, but this season will eventually come to an end. The church doors will reopen but the questions we should ask is what kind of church will we return to and crucially what kind of church do we want to return to?
As some countries begin to reopen and others continue to look forward, we should look ahead now and reflect on the profound opportunities and consequences for the church, church members, and their neighborhoods in a post-COVID-19 world. Here are a few thoughts we should focus on.
Mission
The sudden and drastic lockdown measure has challenged long-held notions of what it means to gather, worship, teach, fellowship, and disciple. Leadership is decentralized; services are held online; small groups are prioritized; connection and commitment are intentionally maintained; and sermons suddenly become shorter, sharper, deeper, and more applicable overnight. What was seen as impossible before is now possible.
More crucially, mission, or “loving our neighbors,” is now seen as the ordinary thing to do. I believe gathered worship will still be important after coronavirus, but we will rethink why we gather more than ever before. The church will need to focus less on gathering for Sunday services and focus more on scattering for the sake of the good of our neighbors.
Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, believes this season gives the church the best opportunity for a paradigm change in our lifetime. He wrote this in an op-ed for Religion News Service:
“Christians can no longer sit back and relax passively as we enjoy our worship services and small groups. For 20 years, something called the missional conversation has called on the church to leave the building, move away from a customer-service mindset and not focus on consumers of religious goods and services. In two weeks, this virus did what two decades of books, blogs and podcasts could not. The church has left the building, and God is at work.”
The Invisible Made Visible
The crisis has put a spotlight on the needs and vulnerability of the elderly, people with disabilities, immune-deficient, the singles, widowers and widows, isolated and overstretched families, and the homeless. The crisis has once and for all provided concrete proof of who would be cared for, where people will go to in their times of desperation and loneliness, and revealed the strengths and failings of a church’s care system.
After the coronavirus, the invisible will be made more visible. The presence and needs of the elderly, vulnerable, marginalized and neglected will be more visible.
Likewise, the inevitable increase in mental health issues and trauma, homelessness, housing insecurity, hunger, poverty, and unemployment inside and outside the church will be hard to miss. The needs and pain of the most vulnerable and least reached people at our doorsteps can no longer be ignored. The litmus test of any pronouncement of missional living or neighborly love will not be just words but the deeds towards the local community.
Asset-Based Community Development
After the pandemic, many churches and their members will find themselves struggling financially and we may see a detrimental impact on the churches’ willingness to provide for the needs of the desperate and vulnerable. Paradoxically, churches may recognize their unconscious superiority towards the poor and be more ready to embrace our mutual poverty and brokenness with the poor. There will undoubtedly be a greater call to irrational generosity but we may see a move from a “needs-based” approach to an “asset-based community development” (ABCD) approach to helping the poor instead.
A “needs-based” approach is paternalistic in nature and it unintentionally and unconsciously communicates that we are superior, the poor are inferior and they require fixing. In the post COVID-19 world, churches will find this approach not only unsustainable but also intensifies the feelings of hopelessness and inferiority of the community.
In contrast, “asset-based” approach moves beyond meeting perceived immediate needs and focuses on “what the materially poor already have and asks them to consider from the outset, “What is right with you? What gifts has God given you that you can use to improve your life and that of your neighbors? How can the individuals and organizations in your community work together to improve your community?”
A shift towards ABCD will enable churches to affirm people’s dignity, see the poor as God sees them, and foster reconciliation of people’s relationship with God, self, others and the world around them. Undoubtedly, it may become apparent that some people and communities do not have sufficient assets to address all of their own needs. In these situations, churches will need to collaborate with other agencies, para-church organizations and local church networks to bring in outside resources to supplement local assets. Churches will need a great amount of discernment in order to not compromise and disempower the poor to be stewards of their God-given gifts and resources.
Analyze Church Relationships
After coronavirus, the relationships between people in the church will become more communal and less individual. My friend Pastor Dick Lee reminded his church in Houston, Texas that social distancing has allowed us to see that we have not only been socially distant all along but also spiritually distant from one another.
This extended distancing with the lack of go-to patterns of faith is separating the wheat from the chaff. If Jesus’ parable of the four soils is anything to go by, we will expect many Christians mature as disciples and we should not be surprised to see many Christians fall away as well. For better or worse, the genuineness of our relationships has been exposed and the authentic mutual love for one another will be one of the driving narratives in the church when the church gathers again.
Furthermore, the measures put in place to protect the vulnerable has, in particular in Western culture, challenged individualism, increased kindness to our neighbors and strengthened the appreciation and concerns of the collective. After coronavirus, churches may intensify in making decisions not only for the sake of others but for social harmony and wellbeing.
However, for those from an Eastern or more traditional culture will know that social harmony can often be a euphemism for social hierarchy and conformity. Conformity and power hierarchy often makes it difficult for individuals to break out of the mould and be different. As a result, individual voices may unconsciously be dismissed or silenced and voices of shame may increase as an unfortunate consequence. People with power and influence in churches will need to be self-aware and mindful as “harmony” can easily be abused for nefarious purposes and put in place not necessary for the needs of the least and most vulnerable in a community, even though it may appear to be so.
Leadership
After coronavirus, there will be a reshuffling of credibility in the church. Doctors, nurses, teachers, carers, charity workers and the like — those who have taken personal risks and sacrificed themselves for the common good on the frontlines may find themselves with a new kind of credibility, power and influence within the faith community. Their sacrificial love, compassion and concern for the vulnerable will reshape and redefine any dominant narrative in a community.
It will require vision, discernment and courageous leadership to work out how to actively support and involve these highly influential leaders. One possible way to mobilize them is to involve them in discipling and mentoring relationships with others that caters for their availability and outside of the traditional leadership capacities and model.
One thing that businesses have painfully discovered in the pandemic about the dependence on a global supply chain is that it is not capable of withstanding and responding to major disruptions. Similarly, in a church leadership and discipleship environment, you would want to be less dependent and reliant on external “supply chains” and provide “end users” with more ownership and control.
After coronavirus, centralized and hierarchical leadership structures may give way and be replaced by a more resilient, responsive, and efficient decentralized micro-church structure to meet essential needs. Change may be slow but it will be faster than what leaders are comfortable with, especially for fairly large churches that have a long history and multiple campuses.
With the availability of good teaching material online and the prioritization of small group connections for faith development, a centralized leadership and its associated Sunday church emphasis may experience an existential crisis in the foreseeable future. Members may have even less dependence or appetite for gathered teaching that is information/head heavy. Those who have not invested in discipleship, development, and prioritizing the younger generation for succession may not survive. This may seem like a dire situation and an indictment, but it is no
t. It will be in the leadership’s hands to leverage the inevitable and seize the opportunity for paradigm change in our lifetime.
Discipleship
The prevailing model of church discipleship is the age-fragmented model of ministry. This model generally focuses on one age group’s preferences over another, not purely to promote spiritual growth, but to fulfill or meet the unique needs of individual age groups at the expense of others. Furthermore, in generational fragmentation, the emphasis is on the differences between generations and not the similarities between generations. The foundational assumption is that “more is better” and our churches can be more appealing to individuals and families seeking a home church if we can offer ministries to multiple age-groups.
Under the lockdown measures, multiple generations in one household being confined under one roof for an extended period of time is forcing the prevailing model to prioritize a shared space between different age groups and foster relationships so that spiritual formation takes place intergenerationally and each person learns from one another. This abnormal and extended time spent together as a family has not only stretched everyone’s patience but also put a toll on mental health well-being and relationships. Refuge, the UKs largest domestic abuse charity, sees calls and contacts to its National Domestic Abuse Helpline rise by 120% overnight.
“Each person has to learn to listen, communicate and foster a sense of belonging for the sake of one another.”
Therefore, support for broken families and domestic abuse victims will be greatly needed in the present and the future. However, this unexpected situation has also enables families to intentionally cultivate meaningful interactions between generations that crosses generational boundaries for mutual spiritual formation. Daily routines such as chores, mealtimes, activities and exercises have to take into account each person’s preference, abilities and limitations more than ever before. Parents now become more present and engaged with their children’s cognitive, emotional and spiritual development. With most families not having many places to retreat to, each person has to learn to listen, communicate and foster a sense of belonging for the sake of one another. Each person observes and learns from other members of the family and from the wider community which has an impact on faith maturity and resilience.
In a post-coronavirus world, family worship, family discipleship and priorities will emerge stronger. There will be a shift in how the church perceives and values intergenerational discipleship. The young and progressives will find themselves with a profound level of appreciation, recognition and voice among the older leadership who have been reverse-mentored by the agile and innovative generation throughout the pandemic. The elderly will be valued for their resilience and wisdom, their vulnerability and isolation will be at the forefront of people’s minds and they may become a priority mission field for churches. Age-fragmented ministries will not cease to exist but there will be a growing frustration of its limitations and a greater desire to see how each generation needs and nurtures one another. There will be a resurgence of the importance of the household, not only of the nuclear family but those who live under the same roof (flatmates and tenants) and in the wider family network as well.
The promise of Jesus is that the gates of Hades will not overcome his church (Matthew 16:18) and the future of his church is firmly in his hands. After coronavirus, a gospel-centered vision and unity will be paramount but conflict will be inevitable. The legacy of COVID-19 will ultimately challenge how the church perceives the hope in the gospel, what is truly essential and what future she is willing to step into.