Does anyone remember the black and white films of people making a clay vase? As the clay spins they skilfully guide the clay, allowing it to take shape. What change we see! Then gently the outsides rise up…before crumbling to a mess – well that was me – in Year 8, a long time ago.
Covid-19 Context
We are seeing the ravages of this Covid-19 pandemic continuing, not only directly impacting individuals but indirectly through businesses as well. Companies are sadly no longer trading, others haemorrhaging jobs at an alarming rate. And churches are also being hit – the church isn’t immune to the downturn in the economics? (Maybe, with a different model, it should?)
The income has become very limited with no attendance but still the bills mount up. Nevertheless, the clamour to return ‘to business as usual’ is ever present. Can it be?
I have been delighting in reading ‘The Book of Queer Prophets‘, a collection of essays about different faiths from an LGBTQ+ perspective. One essay really struck me as one that spoke so eloquently about the struggle with inclusivity within church – but it also has parallels for us all.
“The problem with returning to business as usual is just, I’m afraid, anther take on the safe, predictable Jenga tower. …these communities fail to take the life-changing opportunity to completely remodel their expression of Church, faith and relationships.
Hunt, Ruth., curated., A Book of Queer Prophets, (London: William Collins, 2020) : an essay by Lucy, ‘A Jenga-Block faith’, pp.152-153.
Our medium-long term plans for the church may need to be scrapped as the very foundations have been laid bare.
The Baptists News has commented that:
“It is beginning to dawn on us that what was may never fully return and that we may have been overestimating its effectiveness all along.”
Your Church after Covid: Restart, Refresh or Relaunch?
This can be quite discomforting: or does it? They saw that only a quarter to a third of previous attendees returning to worship – the remainder were either not attending physically or finding solace online. What change we see! One person added:
“I now realize we were playing church, not really being church. I’m not interested in resuming that.”
Your Church after Covid: Restart, Refresh or Relaunch?
Moving On
We are currently in the process of moving house. That’s quite stressful, if not the one of the most stressful moments in life. It also offers a fresh perspective. You can clear out a lot of the things that have constrained you. Those items that we all keep but you wonder why? Those objects that have been handed down and we should keep… And then we move into the new house and find we need to do things differently.
Possibly because the house doesn’t ‘fit’ the previous house anymore. Or that the context has changed: the children live much closer or further away, or that our job now means that more people will pop in – it’s no longer just our home but a place of serving others. That’s when we need to change. What change we see!
The Church may be now facing up to that decision. The context has definitely changed, so will we?
How?
Will our ‘house‘ become more community focussed? One person has remarked whether the church should book a room when its needed, ceding the focus of the building to the community. That’s the Guest and the Host dilemma exposed once again.
Will we seek to have more smaller sessions, where ‘church’ are people coming together in our houses – where permissible and safe? The Methodist Church is founded upon its class structure – not hierarchy but people coming together to learn, to understand how to be disciples. Some might call it ‘social holiness’ – it could equally be called ‘becoming more Christ-like’.
One thing is for sure: “We have left Egypt, and we are never coming back.” Just as Moses led the Israelites away, there was never an intention to return to the Egyptian way of life. You might wish to critique that as we look to the ever greater need to work longer hours and produce more each and every day.
So how do you see the future?
What perspective do you see? Perhaps the way forward won’t come from the clergy but through greater participation among us all.
I hope so.