The Biggest Thing Coronavirus has changed about Preaching.
People simple aren’t here as much. How’s that for getting to the point?
My church, prior to COVID saw around 80% of our active adults in church each week.
Now, we see around 50%. In fact, around 1/3 of our congregation consistently makes up around 70-80% of our attendance. It takes twice as many people to make up the other 20% of Sunday morning attendance.
Preaching has to change. We can’t assume people are listening to the podcast, or watching the service or message later. Sermon series deeply connected to the previous weeks message as a starting point will struggle because how many people in worship haven’t heard or engaged the previous teaching. For many preachers we spent years learning to develop gradually expanding teaching series through books of the Bible, related topics, or life issues that have a Biblical vision.
But with what we are seeing 18 months out from Covid is people might still be part of church, but the larger majority of them are part of it less.
As I sit down after almost a year of being back in physical worship, and with my own local congregations data spread in front of me, I see a few ways that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed preaching. While this list isn’t designed to be a good or bad one, I find myself significantly less anxious when I am able to see and understand the truth in front of me.
My friend JR Forasteros taught me this concept in sermon design called “scaffolding”. It’s an educational concept where each message/lesson has one thing that is taught, and the next begins with the assumption of the previous lessons main point. Think about how mathematics builds off of itself. That’s scaffolding. I know that I typically had a few times a year where I was able to do some serious deep work and design a really well connected message series based off of this concept (my Jonah series from a few years back is a great example). Each week really focused on one thing well, and at the end of the 4 week series, things wrapped up really nicely.
But that really doesn’t work that well anymore. Yes, I know there is live-streaming. Yes, I know people listen to the podcast. But there is something about the physical idea of face to face teaching that is really well crafted, and when it can be done for several weeks in a row, some great things can happen.
But that isn’t the case anymore.
Instead, what I have been working on more and more is making messages more self-contained. Seeing each sermon like a medical drama. It has a great larger picture of the narrative, but you can drop in and out and not be lost. The days of sermon series being as dependent on each other as an episode of Lost, or Stranger Things is long gone for many of us.
I think a few things can help us to get around this phenomenon. I’m especially thinking of this as the pastor of a normal sized church, with normal people. How can we leverage a little bit of strategy towards the current cultural moment?
Truthful Reality
Who your church is now is who your church will be. If you are still trying to find a February of 2020 time machine…good luck.
For me, tough things are a lot easier to get around when I simply know what is true. My own staff has been going through an exercise every couple of months to keep this right in front of us. Asking the question “What do we know to be true” and having focused conversations about these things is really helpful. Try as hard as you can to be neutral and honest as you are doing it. Just having that conversation can provide massive clarity.
In doing this, you might end up finding that the cultural centers of your community have shifted. Remember, in the last 18 months we have had intense conversations about racism, personal rights and freedom, political ideology, and a highly fractured conversation about belonging and community in our wider culture. We are also facing a mental health crisis and certain professions (education and medicine) have had an even higher level of stress and adaptation than most. Because of these things, our culture has shifted and the way we need to lead folks with our teaching might have to adapt. Our cultural centers have shifted significantly over the last 18 months. One of the things I learned from Rodney Starks “The Churching of America” is how quickly America has always changed in reference to the rest of the western world. Our sermons need to come from this current reality, and not any ideas of what life was like before.
And you will probably realize that your church is actually several different populations. Most of us still have people that are worshiping online only. Or we might have the folks that are active during the week, but Sunday morning is still a little scary for them. And I have also discovered that for churches that didn’t livestream before C19, we still haven’t adapted to the fact people are watching us for weeks before they physically show up. If your church is “normal sized” as well, a different type of person is walking in your doors than those walking in the doors of the large church down the street, and probably any other church in your area. Our tribalism runs deeper now, and understanding the “who and how” of the folks your church reaches is important to your preaching.
What are we creating in our teaching?
One of the most valuable books I have read over the last year is “Leadership, God’s Agency, and Disruptions” by Mark Lau Branson and Alan Roxburgh. It made me think about the role of teaching in a different way. We have always known that our preaching has a visionary component to it, but how often do we look at knowing that each message, while needing to be standing alone, is also laying down more road towards the kingdom in our communities? It might be putting another layer on a spot that needs strengthening, or breaking new ground to move forward. We might be having to make some tough decisions towards having tough conversations. It might just be working on making a few cultural shifts in the opposite direction of how our context is discipling people instead of Jesus. Understanding the role of God’s Agency means understanding what it is like to communicate His power and authority over the things that seem to always be changing or no longer providing stability.
What are we inviting people to?
For those of us who pastor normal sized churches, one of our greatest strengths in this season is the belonging and relationships that come from spiritual community. If you have a church of over-scheduled people, many of the prior ways of building these up to strength probably aren’t working. You might be in a similar situation to me, plenty of folks in the church, but not enough to be making things work well.
Church is no longer the relational center for most people. This hasn’t been the case in a long time. If it was yours before COVID19, you were an outlier.
When we try to make spiritual community the same as a “ball family”, folks in the neighborhood, or a circle of good friends…we are going to lose. That reduces spiritual community. Our preaching needs to be building up a different level and type of relationship with those we are in church with. Part of this means new strategy and ministry design. It can also mean a reprioritization of our understanding of responses and invitation at the end of our message.
The last couple of years have accelerated the rise of post-Christian America. And like nearly everything else we do, it happens quicker here than other parts of the western world. But I am a firm believer of not holing up in enclaves, taking the Benedict option, and just trying to wait it out. That could take generations…and we all know how the road warrior ends. Instead, what if we realize that Post-COIVD America is one of the greatest mission fields ever?
Let’s choose to look at it that way and for our adaptations in preaching to not be reactions but missional response.
Do you like to think about the relationship between church, culture, and how we has humans engage as followers of Jesus Christ in this world? Each week I curate an email of my 7 favorite things I have read, listened to, enjoyed or watched. I would love to send it to you. You can subscribe here.