WHY ARE SOME CHURCHES THRIVING IN 2020?

Watching church leaders respond to the ministry ground conditions of 2020, I continue to be deeply impressed by some!

Eric Worringer of Holy Family Lutheran Church in Oak Park IL (Chicago suburb) reports that his church invested $3000 in ten tablets (That is $300 each) for poor families who did not have internet access to public school instruction for their children or for worship services.  That is such an amazing and relevant response to the needs of people on both a justice level and a personal spirituality level. Well done!

Currently about two dozen pastors are participating in what I have called Epicenter Covid Cohorts.  They are easy to run - six one hour sessions, six months in a row, with six pastors.  Each week, somebody in the group kick starts the topic and discussion, and the group carries it from there, with me as facilitator.  These pastors are almost universally in the category of "their churches will emerge stronger from this".  

I led Carlisle United Methodist Church in the final leg of their four-month delayed Capital Campaign, and things are looking very promising for the campaign to be as good as they would have had pre-pandemic. Commitment Sunday was yesterday - and energy was off-the-charts.

The point of these anecdotes: ministry is thriving all over the place in the Covid season!  There are a host of reasons why some churches are pivoting so creatively and using this disruption to re-group in a way that sets them up to thrive in the years ahead:

1. They understand that worship is not the end product, but rather that making disciples and serving neighbors is.

 

2. They had pretty strong relationships with their community neighbors pre-Covid - so that they have this as a foundation to build upon as they start new things in this season.

 

3. They had discerned a sense of renewed focus and purpose for what next, pre-Covid - giving them momentum going into the pandemic: so that even with the re-thinking, they are not starting from scratch.

 

4. In this new season, their leaders are asking the right questions - and these vary from place to place.  But they are not survival questions.

 

5. Covid cleared their calendars a bit, allowing more time for prayerful discernment and developing new ministry.

 

6. The money may be tight, but its still coming in - in part because these churches are as relevant and vital in fall 2020 as they were pre-Covid.

 

7. The pastor herself/himself is not the jack-of-all-trades when it comes to online (or technical) ministry - a team emerged to share the heavy lift.  This piece is a major predictor of pastor stress in this season - if online worship is happening smoothly and with a team, the pastor is probably in a good place, and able to think about new initiatives.

 

8. They have not been silent about the national awakening on racial justice, but embraced it into their missional/discipleship agenda.

I have not studied this directly, but I will assume that the higher a church registers on the Readiness 360 measure of ministry readiness, the more hopeful things are feeling moving into the socially-distanced winter ahead. (And I do expect a tough winter ahead in the USA.)  Another conjecture, based on what I have seen: we are about to see some amazing re-thinking, and from that some really creative new bursts of ministry: new paradigms of faith community and lots of new gatherings in late 2021 and beyond!

If you know of a church that ought to be thriving, and it is not, we at Epicenter Group would love to have an evening to explore the possibilities of working with them to discern the right questions, to explore their assets, and discover a better ministry story than the one that is currently unfolding (or in some cases un-raveling).