Coronavirus and the Churches: Time to Pivot Again

At the end of March, hundreds of British churches switched overnight to running online Sunday services in response to the national lockdown imposed by the Government. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on churches was sudden and dramatic.

At the end of June, as the lockdown begins to gradually be lifted, has the time come for British churches to pivot again? Not this time back to congregational Sunday services - which remain banned under the terms of the emergency powers granted in the Coronavirus Act 2020 - but to much smaller expressions of church, meeting outdoors. With groups of six in England (or eight in Scotland) now being able to gather outdoors at a social distance, is it now time for churches to put their energies not into Zoom meetings but into multiple face-to-face gatherings in much smaller numbers?

Photo by Nandhu Kumar from Pexels

The case for a rapid pivot to smaller expressions of church could be made on several grounds:

• The people of God desperately need face-to-face fellowship. From the point of view of pastoral care alone, most Christians and church leaders would agree that it is desirable that we see each other in real life in order to enjoy fellowship. Where this has not been possible, we are grateful for tools of technology that can at least provide some measure of human contact. The ideal, however, remains a gathered church in person - the body of Christ in the flesh (so to speak). Where two or three gather in his name, Christ is present in the midst.

• The opportunity is safe and easy to implement. Just as creative minds were quickly able to apply practical solutions to running online Sunday services, we can now quickly move to weekly small gatherings of church members outdoors. These can take place in parks, gardens, on beaches and in the urban environment - anywhere outdoors where people will not be competing with traffic. We can limit the numbers and maintain social distance so that the gatherings are safe and comply with the law. A typical church of 100 members could expect to launch between 10 and 15 such groups next week. 

• Traditional church services may not be possible till 2021. Research is showing that indoor groups of people are high-risk for covid transmission. Activities such as singing and physical contact increase this risk further. Pubs and nightclubs are high-risk environments; church services are not far behind in terms of their capacity to spread the virus between members. The outbreak in Korea was initially centred around a church. In Germany, churches have been able to partly reopen but congregational singing is banned (!) Against this backdrop, are church leaders genuinely committed to running Zoom services for another 12 months or more? And if a vaccine is never found, what then? Do we have a plan for socially-distanced indoor church services that provide the level of fellowship that Christians need or want?

• Small groups at their best can be effective in disciple-making. In his compelling book John Wesley's Class Meeting: A Model for Making Disciples, Michael Henderson demonstrates the genius of the early Methodist movement in its ability to transform the lives of urban working class members who had been largely neglected by the established church. At the heart of this process was not only public preaching but a highly-developed ecosystem of close discipleship centred on the class meeting. It is fashionable in some middle-class churches to downplay the small group. The reality, however, is that there has never been a gospel-centred movement in modern British history that has made disciples of the urban poor as effectively as early Methodism. It is interesting that Wesley's class meetings, gathering weekly for fellowship, personal accountability and mutual instruction, were limited to six members each - the same number currently permitted to gather outdoors in England under current lockdown measures.  

• Small groups would benefit from input from equipping leadership. Just as the Jerusalem apostles taught 'publicly and from house to house', the small expressions of church that could start outdoors tomorrow should be accessible and accountable to those with gifts to teach, equip and serve the members. If there were no longer a need for church leaders to be planning, running and evaluating online services, could their time and energy not be better spent visiting a small group most days to support and give input? Again, in a church of 100 members, a full-time leadership team of two could realistically visit the 10 to 15 small groups almost every week if they wanted. The modern Wesleyian circuit rider already exists and is probably sitting in an office planning the online Sunday service. A pivot to a radical small group model would be possible, if there were a will to do it. 

• Small groups can sustain mission. I would not suggest that these groups of six to eight should try and replicate church services; nor should they be focused on the seeker. But, by nurturing the believers and providing fellowship and accountability, they can help to sustain Christians in their ongoing life as witnesses for Christ in their homes, families, streets and places of work. These opportunities are multiplying during the current pandemic.  There is no reason of course why those with the gifts to do so could not also start small groups for seekers that meet outdoors at a social distance. 

• The summer months provide a window of opportunity. Although June is looking a bit sketchy weather-wise in Britain, at least we are not yet facing the pandemic in January. By starting an outdoor small group ecosystem now - this week - churches can refine and learn best practice while it is still dry-ish. We can then also plan creatively for the autumn and beyond. Two principles that may help this process are time flexibility and creativity. As the weather turns, groups should plan to meet between rain showers or on dry-ish days, rather than being restricted to a rigid weekly time slot. This of course is easy to do with only six people. We can also learn from pubs which have responded to the ban on indoor smoking by implementing new ways of defining 'outdoors' through the legal and judicious use of gazebos and awnings.   

I'm ready to pivot. How about you? 

Alan Hirsch on the Forgotten Ways

I love what Alan is saying here about the characteristics of spontaneous mission movements.

My only concern is that, as with so much of this type of material, its starting point is the situation in the United States (despite Alan's Australian background.)

If the mainstream model of church is only capable (culturally) of reaching 40% of the American population (in which 90% of the population claim to believe in God), then those of us called to serve in the UK, with its more entrenched secularism and lower religious worldview are surely in need of thinking especially carefully about Alan's diagnosis as we seek to be the church of God in our cultural context.

Church Planting Statistics

Of 1,000 American Protestant church pastors recently surveyed,

"only 3 percent of their churches served as the primary sponsor of a church plant in the past year"

Commenting on this, Ed Stetzer says:

"In a practical sense this amounts to a neglect of the Apostolic model of multiplication and winds up diminishing the local church's Kingdom impact in the world."

Source.

Is Arsenal FC Like the Local Church?

Watching Arsenal's impressive second half come-back against Barcelona in the quarter final of the UEFA Champions League earlier in the week, I got thinking about the nature of the local church (as you do).

The link was formed in my mind as I thought back to former Arsenal successes, both domestic and European, and considered what we mean when we say things like, "Arsenal won the Premier League in 2003-04". Stay with me, this will all tie up with our understanding of the local church in due course, I promise.

Very few of the players who battled Barcelona this week took part in Arsenal's unbeaten Premiership campaign in 03-04. The stars of that season were such luminaries as Patrick Vieira, Robert Pires and Theirry Henry, now all playing for other clubs. Despite this discontinuity within the team, the club's success that year are widely regarded as forming part of the success of "Arsenal" today, even though few if any of today's players took part in it.

This means that when we talk about Arsenal's footballing record, we are actually talking about the record of the club as an institution, rather than of the specific 27 players who make up the first team squad this season.

When we talk about a local church, especially when we talk about its history, we also tend to be be describing that church as an institution rather than as a current collective or congregation.

When we say "This church has a history of sending out missionaries around the world", for instance, or, "This church has been a centre of strong preaching for generations", we are clearly talking about the institution of that church rather than the 180 adults who make up the current membership. This is despite the fact that missionaries may still be going out from it or that preaching continues to be strong.

My question is, is such a concept valid when thinking about the nature of a local church? Can a local church be conceived of as an institution that transcends the lifetime of its current members? Or, by definition, is a specific church only capable of existing in the present? What do we mean when we say, "This church has been here for 100 years?"

We can answer this question in several contrasting ways:

1. We can assert the historical continuity of a specific local church. Christ Church in the City of Boston, for instance, is a example of a local church that describes itself as having existed continuously since at least 1723.
2. We can assert the continuity of a specific local church if it was founded during the lifetime of any of its current members.
   
3. We can assert the continuity of a local church as long as it has had the same leadership/constitution/building/name or denominational affiliation.
   
4. We can assert the continuity of a congregation for a generation but describe each successive generation as representing essentially a new church (even though it may call itself by the same name).
   
5. More radically, we can conceive of the local church as existing only when it meets; by this definition, each new gathering is essentially a "new church".

I have noted elsewhere on this blog that the late John Wimber offered the opinion that a specific local church should only see itself existing for "about twenty years or "a generation".

Was Wimber correct? And if so, does this "new church" create itself naturally through the passage of time or does it need to be "re-planted"?

The fact that many of the local churches we meet in the New Testament are quite new makes it quite challenging to answer these questions conclusively from the example of these churches.

But, as we shall see in a future post, there are at least some hints in the NT of how we are to approach this subject - which is not ultimately about history and semantics but about the essential nature of the church, the body of Christ on the earth.

Transition Culture, Community and the Local Church

This article should be read by everyone concerned with communicating the gospel and planting churches in Britain.

Although written to explain the phenomenon of the Transition Movement (the grass roots environmental network that seeks to explore ways of enabling local communities to adapt to a post-oil environment) , author Jay Griffiths also provides an insightful description of urban life in C21 Britain - the culture many of us are called to minister into.

The article provides insight into one of the crucial "felt needs" (not to mention actual needs!) of modern society: the need for community.

Whatever else we think of the nature and practice of the local church, I'm sure that most of us would feel that fellowship ought to be one of its key components. My own view is that fellowship is also at the heart of how we communicate the good news: the medium becomes the message. We model what we speak - of God's redeeming love and the creation of a new humanity in Christ.

Invaluable reading as a discussion starter for those committed to seeing the local church engage effectively with the un-churched majority around it.

Among the many quotable insights from jay Griffith's article:

• Many people feel that individual action [on climate change] is too trivial to be effective but that they are unable to influence anything at a national, governmental level. They find themselves paralyzed between the apparent futility of the small-scale and impotence in the large-scale.

• At a government level, I find I’ve shrunk, smaller than the X on my ballot paper.

• We speak of economies of scale, and I would suggest that there are also moralities of scale.

• Community morality involves a sense of fellow-feeling, is attuned to the common good, far steadier than individual morality, far kinder than the State.

• The fact that they were trying out an idea without being able to predict the results has a vitality to it, an intellectually energetic quality, a profound liveliness.

• William Morris spoke of the gentle social-ism that he called fellowship: “Fellowship is life, and lack of fellowship is death.”

• Many people today experience a strange hollow in the psyche, a hole the size of a village.

• In this extreme isolation, we don’t interact except with the television and the computer. We’ve lost something, and we don’t know what it is, and we try to fill it with food and alcohol and shopping but it’s never filled—what we’ve lost is our connection to our community, our place, and nature.

• The colonial powers practiced the policy of “divide and rule” ... but in contemporary society there is a more insidious policy of “atomize and rule.” The world of mass media fragments real societies into solitary individuals, passive recipients of information.
  

• Although the French Revolution announced that it stood for three things, only two of these (Liberty and Equality) have survived in political parlance while the third, Fraternity, has been made to sound both quaint and unnecessary.

• We are ineluctably and gloriously social animals. We want fellowship.

• Celebrity culture is an opposite of community, informing us that these few nonsense-heads matter but that the rest of us do not. Insidiously, the television tells me I am no one. If I was Someone, I’d be on telly.

• Celebrity culture is both a cause and a consequence of the low self-esteem that mars so many people’s lives. So, the unacknowledged individual is manipulated into a jealousy of acknowledgment, which is why it is so telling that huge numbers of young people insist that when they grow up they want to be a celebrity.
  

• We all need acknowledgment (but not fame). We all need recognition (but not to be “spotted” out shopping). We all need to be known, we need our selves confirmed by others, fluidly, naturally. A sense of community has always provided these familiar, unshowy acts of ordinary recognition.

Comments, please.

How Long Should a Local Church Last?

I've only heard it stated publicly twice.

The first time was by the late John Wimber when he said (on his church planting tapes, if I remember rightly) that, in his view, a local church should probably see itself lasting about 20 years before it either closes or undergoes such substantial and fundamental change that it, in effect, becomes a new church.

The second time I heard it was today when Steve Timmis, leader of the Porterbook Network and Western Europe director (or something equally impressive) of the Acts 29 Network, made the following statement on his twitter profile:

"Every church is 'designed' for a specific culture & generation. It has a 'sell-by' date which, if ignored, leads into institutionalism."

I must confess, I have not thought a great deal about this issue so I will throw it out to the blogosphere in the hope that someone has done some Biblical thinking on it and can provide some guidance on where to begin in responding to this concept of the alleged time-sensitive nature of a specific local church.

Meanwhile, I'll try and get some further clarification from Steve Timmis about why he believes this.