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A Brave New World: Post-Covid Mission
by Captain
Xander Coleman
If your lockdown has been anything like
mine, you may have struggled to stay motivated, engaged and
proactive in most areas of life.
It may have been all you could manage to keep your
heads proverbially above water, and respond to the challenges
as they have arisen.
You may even, like me, have put on a
few ‘pandemic (covid19) pounds’, and now be scrambling to try
and reverse the damage.
I’ve signed up for an online coaching
programme, which is designed to form long-term healthy habits
with exercise and nutrition.
There’s a real life coach, who is accessible via email,
a twice-weekly zoom meeting with the coach and other members
of the programme, an app with daily tasks, habits, disciplines
and teaching on nutrition and movement, and a monthly check-in
with progress like weight, tape measures, etc.
It’s well organised, personal, and aimed at long-term
habit formations that should stick and reap benefits long
after the coaching programme has concluded.
Lockdowns in various places have
accelerated local innovation in ministry – online worship
meetings, Facebook Live, Youtube premieres, video-conferencing
small groups and pastoral care.
I had barely heard of these tools before March 2020,
but now we have seen attendance at Sunday morning meetings,
for example, increase tenfold through streaming on Facebook
live.
Saints and sinners alike have also
taken to consuming ‘church’ via social media.
Though they miss singing together and in-person acts of
worship and community, many believers have expressed a
preference for online worship, which they can do in their
pajamas while eating brunch, watch later in the day if they
wish to, or have on in the background while they do something
else. It’s also
created even more of a ‘buyers market’ for believers to find
the worship style/preacher/music/teaching/aesthetic/etc that
most engages them, rather than committing to a local
congregation, with all of its local strengths and weaknesses.
At the same time, many who don’t have
an active faith have found their feeds flooded with churches
experimenting with online content delivery.
In the UK, an astonishing 24% of adults have watched or
listened to an online worship service during lockdown, rising
to 34% among the elusive 18-34 age bracket.
And 5% of UK adults who say they have
watched or listened to a religious service since lockdown have
never gone to church before.
That’s about 640,500 adults in the UK who experienced
Christian worship for the first time.
Both the challenges and the
opportunities of this chairos moment are huge.
Here are some conclusions we might draw as we move
forward into the future regarding making disciples:
1.
Online has its limitations when trying to reproduce
Christendom-era church, but the digital reformation is upon
us. It seems
doubtful we can ever go back to how things were.
2.
Consumer-based, market-driven online offerings are
here, whether we like it or not.
The challenge is to build authentic community amongst
believers that goes deeper than tribes/ preferences/
theologies/ styles.
3.
The lost are still seeking Christ, and may feel much
more comfortable attending an online meeting than crossing the
threshold of a church building.
I wonder if there is some missional
mileage in a kind of spiritual online coaching;
well-organised, personal, habit-forming and making use of the
whole gamut of online tools available.
Perhaps now is the time to experiment with a joined up
approach to our church online strategy – using social media,
email lists, paid adverts, apps, video conferencing and live
streaming to create and deliver a comprehensive spiritual
discipleship and coaching system that’s scalable, accessible
and that works for both new and established Christians.
It’s a brave new world.
Let’s get involved!
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