COVID-19: Three things that have become apparent as we prepare to resume in-person worship gatherings

I have lost track of how many articles, podcasts, videos, Zoom conferences, and other resources I have consumed regarding the resumption of in-person worship services. Among the forest of information that has sprung up, I have found profound insights. I have also found a lot of repetition, and on more than one occasion, I have been left scratching my head. I have shared with our church’s leadership team several articles, and as we have discussed our strategy for re-opening, we have sought to incorporate the best of others’ thinking. In doing so, three things have become apparent.

It is not feasible to return immediately to normal operations.

Our church leadership team has been tracking the daily reports of new infections in our community for two weeks. During that time, we have seen a high mark of 191 and a low mark of 44. Yesterday, there were 104 new cases of COVID-19 in our county. There is a fairly clear declining trend in the data, but this trend has made abundantly clear that any return to normal will take time. Indeed, just as most governmental agencies are recommending a phased approach to re-opening the nation, we must recognize that it is simply not feasible to return immediately to normal operations at church. In fact, there are several things that will continue to be affected for months to come.

First, we should not expect attendance to rebound immediately. It will be some time before it is safe to disregard social distancing, and until that happens, our sanctuary will only seat so many people. It will be longer before those who are especially vulnerable to COVID-19 (e.g., the elderly, those with heart and lung conditions, etc.) are able to return. And it will be even longer before the fear and anxiety subsides for some.

Second, giving will not bounce back immediately. Just today, I was speaking with someone whose job has been secure thus far, but the future is far less secure. Business shutdowns resulted in layoffs for thousands of people, which equates to lowered incomes. Lowered incomes leads to less spending, which results in lower revenues for businesses. Lower revenues for businesses leads to further layoffs, and so on and so forth. In short, we are only just beginning to see the financial effects of COVID-19, and it would be quite unwise to return immediately to previous levels of spending.

Third, the availability of the facility will be affected. Cleaning will take longer and be more expensive. This will mean extra hours or days that it cannot be utilized. If the church relies, as ours does, on volunteers to clean, then it may not be feasible to have the building sanitized more than once per week. This will severely reduce the number of services and activities that can be held!

In short, COVID-19 will have vast, rippling effects which last for months after the shutdown is officially lifted, and our operations will have to be adapted to these new realities.

In our church, then, we have identified numerous normal things that will not immediately resume. That is, they will come back eventually, but not right away. For instance, the nursery will not be open on Sunday mornings. We will not hold in-person midweek activities. Unused areas of the facility will be secured. We will minimize common points of contact, and there will be strict limits of the number of attenders allowed into the facility.

Not everyone will return.

We have already seen that the return of many parishioners will be delayed as a result of increased health concerns, fear, and anxiety. Yet, these will eventually return. There is, however, a group that I am convinced will not return to church. These are the people who were attending out of habit or because it was somehow socially advantageous.

Indeed, these people were already leaving the Church prior to COVID-19. We saw their exodus in perennial news reports about the rise of those claiming no religion and the decline of church attendance and involvement, in studies revealing that 90% of American churches are plateaued or declining, and in our own statistical reports showing that people are attending less frequently or have stopped attending altogether.

Consider, though, that it takes an estimated 40 days to establish a habit, and as I write this, it has been 59 days since our church last gathered in-person to worship.

Expect that a significant number of nominal Christians will not return to the Church even after the most anxious come back.

Not everything will return.

In addition to some people who will not return, there will be things and practices which will not return after COVID-19. In the very early days of our “coronacation,” I began a document on my computer entitled simply “Things That Must Change.” As the name would suggest, I created a list of things that must never return to “business as usual.”

Among these items, I observed that it we must endeavor to establish a rainy day fund. This means that we must operate with a margin, saving the excess so that if something like this should happen again, the church would be able to function effectively even without any income at all. At the very least, the church should have enough funds to operate for a month. However, as we mark two months without meeting at our church, a longer period such as two months should be strongly considered.

A second thing that must not return to normal is our commitment to online ministry. I am not certain I would go so far as to say that the Church should be an online organization with a physical manifestation, as some have suggested, but online is no longer an option. One of the first things our church did during coronacation was to overhaul our website. We then began producing videos of our weekly services, various announcements, materials for kids, and more. All of these have been made available via our YouTube channel, which is shared to our Facebook page and our actual website. And within the first couple weeks of coronacation, we had people joining us who had not been to church in years, who were shaken by COVID-19 and looking for answers, who were related to parishioners and checking us out even from hundreds of miles away! In the 1950s, Sunday School was the front door of the church. In the 90s, the front door was Sunday morning. In the 20s, the front door is now the web.

Finally, we must get much more serious about equipping individual believers for spiritual formation and deploying them for ministry. Relying on the pastor for these things may be passable (barely) when everyone is gathering in one place where the pastor can speak to them. This, however, was already growing dramatically more difficult in the years prior to COVID-19. Now, it will be utterly impossible. The Church can no longer focus exclusively on spiritual growth and ministry when gathered. We can no longer settle for Christians who merely consume spiritual goods and services. Rather, we must build the kind of culture that existed in Acts 8. There, when persecution erupted and scattered the Church, those who were scattered by persecution – read that, running for their lives – had enough spiritual self-sufficiency to keep feeding themselves and enough fervency to pick up the mantel of ministry and continue sharing the gospel effectively.