AS THE PANDEMIC TURNS…

The spring of 2022 is a busy time for me as I seek to play catch-up with on-site church consultations, many of which were postponed during the last Covid surge.  I’ve been in 18 distinctive places meeting with churches and leaders in the past 30 days!!  As I step into life with various churches for a day or two in each place, two distinctive realities are becoming clear. It is either feast or famine.

Most churches are gathering about 60 percent of their pre-Covid worship attendance, with many of these also struggling financially, now that PPP loans are history.   These churches lost young families to other churches that didn’t close for so long. Many of them dipped below the sustainability line, and will never recover.

And then there’s a smaller group of churches that thrived through the CoVid months. As a group, they have one or more of these characteristics in place:

1. A strong sense of collective vision from before the pandemic that has helped to anchor their ministry through all the shifts and pivots.

2. Effective pastoral leadership appropriately matched to the church energized by both the in-house and the digital venues.

3. Spiritual intensity is on the increase.

4. They worship well, offering a quality experience week after week, often varying substantially in content over time.

5. They are steadily reaching new people online, some of whom are choosing to bond with the church.

6. They have a local reputation for something good (ranging from powerful community service to great music).  This gives a sense of local credibility that offsets the very high degree of cynicism in the public about organized religion.

During the pandemic, Craig Gilbert and I joined with a dozen gifted American church planters to write a book entitled Launching a New Worship Community.  It is an ideal field guide for any church seeking to re-gather after the disruption of the past two years. And yet very few churches are choosing to launch or to relaunch anything. Most are just struggling to survive. I am amazed at how low the energy is in most places. Pastors and laity are just too exhausted to think, let alone innovate something new.  An opportunity for rebirth may soon be lost forever.

Feast and famine. A couple weeks ago in Chicago I worked with two churches that are feasting, both poised for ministry growth, both stronger than they were at the start of 2020. The following weekend it was a very different story.

It’s quite odd. There are surprisingly few churches in-between. At Epicenter Group we work with both kinds of churches. The Readiness 360 inventory often (though not always) helps us to see which reality a church is living in: the feasting or the famine.

Regardless, one thing is true for all churches: business as usual in the style of 2019 is a recipe for dying. Years ago in my book I Refuse to Lead a Dying Church, among the six critical choices which churches must make, one of the choices was “choosing bold over mild.”  That’s one thing that has not changed of late.

Easter blessings to all!