If your church is like mine, conversations are taking place about how quickly full services can resume. This includes live worship, singing in the congregation, new roles for people, and putting back in place some of the structures and teams that have been fallow for over a year.
There will be pressure amongst church leaders to want to demonstrate just how quickly their train “the congregation” can get back up to speed – “it only took us 2 weeks to get 4 services a week restarted, plus all the new digital streaming, launch a new building project and giving soared.” I don’t think so…
The reality is that 50% of the people you had serving before February 2020 will probably not return to those roles. On top of that 50% of people are just not ready to pick up involvement after a year of not being connected or in the midst of real community. Let’s not even mention the structures that have dropped away and only exist as a memory in people’s heads. Even getting staff teams back into a building and comfortable with mixing with others and having conversations to real people is not proving straight-forward. The groups and social interactions that enabled people to feel connected to others have rusted up, disappeared entirely, or in the best case, just lengthened and become more distant.
Now is the hardest time of the pandemic. Your church is like a train with multiple carriages connected together. Those at the front can see the open track ahead and are raring to go and start pulling off, cranking up the throttle and releasing the brakes.
Those at the back haven’t moved for such a long time, they’ve forgotten that there is even a velocity that isn’t stationary. There are a few carriages in between of encouragers through to critics, enthusiasts through to anxious worriers.
When the front carriage moves off, the coupling takes the strain and then pulls the next carriage along, and then the next couple takes the strain and pulls the next and so on. During the length of our time in isolation and restrictions, the length of the couplings has got longer. Some couplings at the back have dropped away and a carriage might not even be connected at present. Don’t allow the front engine to ramp up to full throttle. The couplings will snap, and carriages will be left sitting in the station while your leaders whizz off and then wonder where half the rolling stock has gone.
Remember that now is the season where people will be trying to take breaks and take some time for a holiday, and not be keen to suddenly pick up church responsibilities or expectations.
Then Esau said, "Let us be on our way; I'll accompany you."
But Jacob said to him, "My lord knows that the children are tender and that I must care for the ewes and cows that are nursing their young. If they are driven hard just one day, all the animals will die. So let my lord go on ahead of his servant, while I move along slowly at the pace of the flocks and herds before me and the pace of the children, until I come to my lord.
Genesis 33:12-14
This is the only place in the Bible where the concept of “moving along slowly” appears. An exhortation by Jacob to take care of all the community and bring everyone along together.
To return to our analogy of a locomotive and train - you and your church leaders need to ask this new question? How fast is it safe for the engine to go, to slowly bring all the carriages up to the same speed, before increasing pace? What maintenance work may be needed to get the couplings checked, ready the train for departure, and how long is going to be needed? Use the 50% of 50% rule to recognize that your church capacity for structure and organisation is probably at a quarter of what it once was, and you need to be starting small and carefully and competently. The alternative is strain, snapped couplings and a church that does not stay together.
Julian Mander
Executive Director, UCAN.