4 Practices for a Post-Covid Church
Navigating the complexities of a new normal
I recognize that catchy titles don’t always give the full picture. To that end, I don’t think there’s any such thing as a “post-COVID” anything—at least not any time soon. COVID continues to adapt and new strains emerge and people have to deal with the complexities of it, despite the fact that the pandemic is “officially” over. It is this official nature of the pandemic that I refer to when I refer to a “post-COVID” church.
What I mean by a post-COVID church is the emerging present of which I have made frequent mention. Following the tumult of 2020-2022, change accelerated among cultures all around the world. For the purposes of this piece, however, I am only focusing on my own culture context of North America. I believe there are at least four practices (and, with them, some necessary adaptations) churches should consider in order to adapt to this cultural moment.
These four I mention here are practices that just so happen to be things that we should’ve been doing all along. But as with a near-death experience or a family tragedy, seismic shifts in our normal causes us to examine our priorities. These are four priorities I think we should adopt.
Practice #1: Change Your Relationship with Content
We live in an era of absolute content saturation—drinking through a proverbial firehose of information on a near-incessant basis. Many pastors felt a need to produce content as a way of ministering to people during the stay-at-home orders of 2020, carrying through until today. This is an admirable instinct, though it is perhaps more misguided than we care to admit. What we ended up doing in many situations is unnecessarily obligating people to absorb all of that information in a traumatic season in which reflection, silence and solitude, personal dialogue, and contemplative prayer would have been far healthier forms of ministering to people from afar.
Our penchant for being content obsessed has a lot to do with our view of discipleship (which is also content obsessed). We tend to think of discipleship as getting people the right information to absorb so that they can doctrinally align with the right things to be considered a Christian and thereby reorient their lives accordingly.
But this pedagogical approach to discipleship—getting people in the right classrooms, with the right resources, to learn the right things is not only an incomplete approach to discipleship, it would have also been quite foreign to the cultures of the Bible—which were far more prone to relationally transmitting wisdom and insight and much more concerned with the cultivation of Christ-anchored virtues and ethics than particular doctrinal commitments.
Content doesn’t save people. Jesus does. And Jesus lives within his people not the information they disseminate. Pastor, hear me: you’re never going to out-content the content producers. It’s never going to be as good, as bountiful, as thorough, or as high quality as the next big thing. But, you can out- “presence” the content producers. You can abide with people. You can model the way of the kingdom. You can be steady presence in people’s lives that points them toward Jesus. Sometimes that might involve a podcast, but most often it just involves the slow, patient nature of sitting at tables and over cups of coffee.
Practice #2: Develop an Environmental Aptitude
Similar to the first practice, churches must be more environmentally focused than they are content focused. By this I don’t intend to refer to creation care (though, that’s definitely a needed topic, too) insomuch as I’m referring to the rhythms of different environments we create—the spaces where people encounter God and develop relationship with one another as they journey together as his people.
I’m not talking about creating high production services. I’m referring to creating transformational environments that can be a powerful time at the altar inasmuch as it can be a discipleship gathering, an event honoring leaders, and any other time the people in your church come together. I talk a bit more about making this shift as a pastor here.
An environmental aptitude understands that healthy relationships progress through a repeated rhythm of time spent together. In fact, here is an equation you need to remember:
Time + Attentiveness = Relationship
In other words, relational growth requires time actually spent together. Not in a one-off setting, but a consistent rhythm of time. It also requires a level of attentiveness. People must be fairly attuned to one another in order for relational depth to deepen (this is part of the reason why phone use is a barrier to relational intimacy).
If you want the people in your congregation to grow more closely together you need to assess what environment rhythms are you creating for that to happen. Many, many churches will point to their small group ministry as the place where relationships grow, but there are two issues with that logic, as well intentioned as it may be.
First, many churches hold small groups in semester or trimester formats of 6-10 weeks. That means that at maximum people are developing relationships less than 60% of the year. If that is what we hang our relationship-building hat on, that’s a recipe for fragmentation and isolation.
Second, when we put all of our relationship eggs in the small group basket, we ignore the value of larger church gatherings that aren’t Sunday morning worship. There are many people for whom showing up to a small group without a fair amount of prior established relationship with some of the people in the small group is a leap that they simply cannot make (and it is actually a bit improper for us to expect them to make it). In some cultures it is even considered rude to come to a person’s house without a personal invitation from the host. For them, a signup sheet simply will not due.
What I call “second-level environments,” things such as church-wide cookouts, block parties, team-powered community service work, even Sunday night and Wednesday church, even Sunday School!…these are all the sorts of environments that serve as relationship building bridges between disconnected people who might sit in the back on a Sunday morning and folks deeply engaged in relationship in small groups. It is the random, seemingly unnecessary conversation in line to get Sister Gertrude’s famous bean dip at a potluck where the genesis of relationship takes place. But in an effort to be relevant and contemporary, many churches have gutted these crucial rhythms of church-wide gatherings from their calendar.
We need to develop an aptitude for understanding how relationships form and how to create rhythms of environments to support that formation. What’s more, we need similar sorts of environments where people can corporately. encounter the presence of God in low-programmatic environments. Can the Holy Spirit move in a 75 minute service? Absolutely. But is there a place for, as they used to say growing up, tarrying at the altar and letting him set the time? Absolutely. I resisted this reality as a young pastor in my 20s, thinking it was unnecessarily burdening people’s calendar. What I now recognize in my 30s is that those moments represented some of the most significant in my early Christian development.
Principle #3: Refocus Intentionally on Mission
“Mission” is one of those words that we throw around at literally everything. And because modern organizational leadership thought also uses the word “mission” to describe the intent of an organization, churches often get confused the mission of their local church (often written on the website or in paraphernalia around the church building) with the mission of God (written throughout the pages of Scripture).
Mission is also one of those things that is so foundational to what it means to be a Christian that it often gets overlooked. But we neglect the fundamentals to our peril.
So what is the mission of God? The mission of God is God’s posture and heart to reconcile his creation unto himself and establish his shalom through the reign of Jesus the Messiah.
Dutch missiologist Johannes Hoekendijk described our participation in God’s mission as having three components:
Our participation is declarative. In other words, evangelism. Evangelism has precious little to do with warring against culture, standing on a milk crate downtown and haranguing passersby to the glory of God. Instead, it refers to our capacity to talk openly about Christ, to be explicit about in whose name we serve our community, to whose kingdom we pledge our allegiance, and after whose character we pattern our lives.
Our participation is demonstrative. In other words, justice and mercy. Part of our participation in God’s mission is our work in partnership and guidance from the Spirit to cultivate a world that looks more like the new heavens and new earth. It is the diligent work while the master is away as described in the parable of the talents.
Our participation is incarnational. In other words, we have to live as foretastes of new creation. Like our spiritual mothers and fathers who have gone before us, living on mission with God necessitates that the orientation of our lives demonstrates his reign and his love to those around us.
The thing is, mission often takes a back seat, either because we assume it happens naturally or we’re busy doing many other things for God (or, perhaps worse yet, simply calling whatever we do missional).
Instead, we need to consider how to bring God’s mission (not our church or organization’s, mission) to the forefront of what we do, how we orient our lives (individually and corporately) and realign our organizational missions and purposes around God’s mission.
Some of the data emerging on church health and growth are showing that those churches who have retained a focus on things like community engagement (i.e. Hoekendijk’s “demonstrative” characteristic) are those that are retaining and growing in this season, instead of those that have simply reverted back to business as usual.
What’s more, churches will increasingly need to focus on the incarnational characteristic of God’s mission—living as foretastes of new creation as a “light to the nations” (Isa. 42:6; 49:6; 52:10; 60:3). This necessarily involves doing the hard work of repenting of systems of abuse and toxicity, tearing down man made hierarchies and promoting human flourishing that resists marginalization and oppression. We must be beacons of health and wholeness in this emerging normal, as we have always been called to be.
What’s more, churches will need to redefine our understanding of evangelism to be more patient and less sales-pitchy and more relational and less confrontational. We need to return to more ancient forms of evangelism that looks like pulling up a chair at your table to share a meal rather than leaving a gospel tract for your server after a meal.
In particular as it pertains to evangelism, many American pastors and congregations need to detangle notions of evangelism with engaging in the culture wars. These are not the same—and, in fact, are likely contradictory practices.
Principle #4: Learning to Be All About Jesus
Finally, churches need to be increasingly about Jesus. This sounds obvious—so obvious that when I often talk about it, I get looks back at me like, “why are you bringing this up? Of course!”
The problem is that we’re often about everything but Jesus. We often get so consumed with doing things in the name of Jesus, for Jesus, that we lose sight of beholding Jesus himself—of adoring Jesus—or of even actually talking about Jesus.
It is not uncommon to spend a significant amount of time in a worship service wherein we’ve sang far more about ourselves than Jesus. We’ve given countless sermons that never seem to actually make their way toward being anchored in Jesus—but only make a cursory mention of him, like a TED talk with a thin Christian veneer.
This has, increasingly over the last several decades, cultivated a discipleship crisis in American churches where Christians may affirm the “correct” doctrines, observe a frequent church-going habit, but largely remain in a state where, Jesus looks more like them than they look like him.
I’m convinced—utterly and completely so—that in this post-pandemic world, people are hungry…
…not for the “3 Steps to a Better You” version of Christianity…
…not the “35 Greek words to enhance your biblical knowledge” version of Christianity…
…not the “we’re taking back our nation because God wills it!” version of Christianity.
I’m convinced that people are increasingly hungry for a Christianity that looks like Christ—a Christianity obsessive about talking about, adoring, behaving like, living together in worship of Christ.
However ironically simple it may sound, considering the complexities of this cultural moment, I’m convinced that the most surefire way for a church to flourish amidst the uncertainties of the times is to do what it was created to do: to be radically knitted together by the ethics and character of Jesus, as his people, living as ambassadors of reconciliation to the world. To prioritize presence over production, transformation over information, wholeness and holiness as a community, and Jesus above all else.
Could it be that the answer is really that simple? I believe it is.