Accelerated Change

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that a number of the habits we picked up during the Pandemic appear to have become habitual—online ordering, food deliveries, remote work, and virtual meetings, for example. The big picture, however, is that the Pandemic accelerated the adoption of new tech by five or ten years and many of the changes appear to be lasting.

This is certainly true in our churches. Congregations that were considering upgrading the broadcast or livestreaming of their services were suddenly forced into doing it. Most have continued the practice and invested additional resources into equipment, internet access, and personnel to make it happen.

Most of us have readily accepted the convenience of virtual committee meetings. Rather than dressing up, driving twenty minutes or more to the church campus for a meeting, we now connect online for an hour or so and get back to home activities.

To assure sustainability, giving processes also moved online. More churches provide online portals for stewardship purposes.

Accelerated change can be seen in other ways as well—many of them negative. Many people discovered that church attendance was no longer something they chose. They have switched to online participation or opted out completely. When members did not have the opportunity to volunteer, they got out of the habit, thus churches have less volunteers for programs and ministries than in the past. If a church’s momentum was slowing, its momentum slowed even more as the result of the Pandemic.

What good has come out of all these changes? We have been challenged to be more flexible in how we do church, finding new ways to continue what is vital to our mission. We have been given the opportunity to rethink those things we have given up for a while and may not have been effective anyway. We have been given permission to try more creative approaches to ministry.

The big takeaway from this accelerated change is that we are not going back to the “way we were” but forward into a new reality. We have just arrived earlier than we expected.

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