Ten Questions For The Post-Covid Church

I’m seeing a lot of internet traffic these days on the subject of the Post-COVID Church: the way evangelical Christianity is going to look, in America, after the pandemic is over.  I appreciate every attempt I’ve seen and heard to make sense of this crazy year and to predict the future.

I don’t have a lot to contribute by way of answers, but I definitely have some burning questions which we American evangelicals need to wrestle with as we look forward to a Post-COVID United States. Let’ start with this one:

1. What does the 40% return rate – the comparison between our current Sunday morning worship service attendance numbers and our pre-COVID attendance numbers – say about our disciple-making strategies? Does this suggest that all these folks are gone for good because their commitment level was so shallow, or is it possible that some will come back after the “coast is clear”? We should be concerned, but we probably shouldn’t panic just yet.

2. Is the pandemic going to turn out to be the final nail in the coffin of the attractional method, which, if you’re not familiar with this term, means, the idea of going all-out to gather a crowd on Sunday morning? The “huge crowd at almost any cost” mentality was already suffering and bleeding because of (1) the millennial disdain for big productions (2) the fall of so many evangelical super-star pastors (3) the decreasing popularity of Christians by an increasingly secular and skeptical American public (4) the association of evangelical Christianity with what is rightly or wrongly perceived to be, intolerant, right-wing political views.

I personally think it’s a great sign that the pendulum seems to be swinging back to emphasizing  incarnational evangelism.  This means that while we still care about doing things well on Sunday mornings and giving our guests a wondrously warm welcome, we put the emphasis where it should be: the personal disciple-making of all of us, all the time, everywhere we are rubbing shoulders with non-Christian people.

Advocates of the “new” (old, actually) disciple-making movement (DMM) are championing the making of disciples, who invariably organize themselves into churches, instead of trying to “start churches” (something Jesus didn’t command) in hopes that the churches will eventually make disciples.  If COVID helps get us back to seeing disciple-making as a vital part of discipleship – which it isn’t in most churches – it will have done us a favor.

3. Did Jesus get excited about big crowds? Jesus commissioned us to make disciples (Matthew 28:18-20) not to get professions of faith.  Cognition is not enough; love-motivated, Spirit-empowered obedience is the only acceptable outcome of our efforts. In America we are impressed by cognition and obsessed with success, as measured by numbers.  Decade after decade, bigger is still better.

In truth, crowds can be useful, for the chief value of the crowd is that it attracts a crowd. The value of Lambeau Field is not your view of the game, it’s the experience of the crowd. There are people who will come to the big church who will not darken the door of the small church, so we thank God that we have some large churches.

But our big churches are not necessarily the best places for actually developing growing disciples. Jesus Himself was kind to the crowds, but he wasn’t impressed with them and He didn’t entrust Himself to them (Matthew 9:36, 14:14, John 2:24,25).  His concentrated disciple-making work was with one, seminal, small group.

4. Are our “services” transferrable to the computer screen – or worse yet, the smart phone screen – or should we be broadcasting something else? A non-Christian stylist who had tried watching a “streamed” church service asked Thom Rainer, “Is church music always that bad?” Maybe we’re asking people to watch something that wasn’t supposed to be I love parades, but not on TV. I love fireworks too, but not on TV.  Some things just don’t work on TV.

5. Were we completely deluded to think that we were succeeding because of the number of “hits” our broadcasts were getting? I hate to be the spoil-sport, but I’ve heard experts explain that the number of “hits” received on a web-based church service broadcast is considered to be a “vanity-metric.” The people who run these platforms know that many of those who log on to a web-based broadcast “tune out” in short order while others start the broadcast and go make lunch.  Still others watch the whole thing once, but never again.

6. Is the “digital church” a new phenomenon? Disaffected church members have been dropping out of the gathered church and listening to radio preachers for almost 100 years.  Their children have been dropping out and watching TV preachers for about half as long.

7. So what has the gathered church said about the electronic church? I know what I’ve said and heard: “You can hear the gospel that way, but you’ll never grow to maturity without the gathered church.  After all, the word translated ‘church’ means an assembly, and the electronic church doesn’t assemble.”

Were we right?  If we were, then let’s slow down and think carefully before we throw ourselves into pursuing the digital church.  Some of our pundits today are suggesting that we’d better start re-shuffling our church staffs (that means, “hire and fire people”) in order to do online ministry well.  But to what degree is it possible to actually make disciples online?

8. Can we slow down a bit and ask ourselves a couple of additional questions, like, “What did first century church gatherings actually look like?” (Paul calls them “meetings” in I Corinthians 11:17, not “services.”) Some of them were large, but most, according to all the history I’ve read, were small enough to meet in homes.  They looked more like I Corinthians 14 than Acts 2.  This means that we should be asking:

9. Is the shift to digital disciple-making an important adaptation to a new reality or an embarrassing case of trend-following? I’m all for adapting to new realities; the Acts of the Apostles is the story of 30 years of dramatic adaptation, something the Apostle Paul explicitly commended in I Corinthians 9.  But I hate to see Christians make fools of themselves by going “all in” for the latest fad…again.

10. Have the COVID pandemic and the resulting lockdowns been an unmitigated disaster for the church or are they serious trials that God has allowed for His own good purposes? Acts 8:3 says that Saul “began to destroy the church” (strong words!) but verse four says that “Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went.” Maybe we needed to be driven back to personal evangelism and home-based discipleship, not to mention serious, desperate prayer.

Like I said, I have more questions than answers.  My plea is simply: let’s keep calm and think hard and pray even harder about these questions. Send me your thoughts and let’s figure this out, together.