‘I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel’, writes the apostle Paul in Philippians 1:12. In the wonderful and strange providence of God, Paul is writing to encourage the Philippians that what might have appeared to be personally harmful to him, and disastrous for gospel growth and proclamation, has in fact been used to advance the gospel.
So too, in this extraordinary and unprecedented time of lockdown, in the providence of God, there are numerous ways in which the gospel is advancing. To paraphrase Paul: ‘Though we are in lockdown, God’s word is not in lockdown’ (2 Tim. 2:9).
One of our local churches in the North West Gospel Partnership, St John’s Hartford in Cheshire, is experiencing the joys, sorrows and opportunities of gospel life and ministry under lockdown.
Early on, the vicar, the Revd Mike Smith and his staff team made some strategic decisions about their online Sunday morning services:
• Recognising the challenges and opportunities that online preaching presents, they decided to shorten the sermons, aware that people’s Zoom/YouTube powers of concentration are shorter.
• The services would be public, not private, partly a reflection of the nature of being a ‘parish church’ but also seeing the opportunity to speak to a wider ‘congregation’ than usual.
• A well-thought-through and creative children’s slot with teaching and crafts that has also been made available to all the local schools in the parish. (One grandmother informed a head teacher that engaging in this with her grandchild has actually reignited her own faith!).
• A live Q&A session after the sermon. Particularly invaluable with a wider ‘congregation’ than normal because it enables further engagement with God’s word, it gives the explicit message that truth need not fear scrutiny and that it is ‘okay to ask questions’.
• Having spent £60 on posters to advertise the services, it seemed a no-brainer not to spend an additional £5 a month to boost their online presence. This has led to some remarkable outcomes: there has been a regular number of 170 households viewing the services live (which means over 300+ people), for a congregation that normally has 200–250 on a Sunday morning, and a total in recent weeks of over 1,000 views every week. As I write this on a Monday afternoon, the previous day’s service already has over 1,300 views! In addition there are online daily devotions, again something not previously available.
Imagine last Autumn, one local church trying to devise a strategy for reaching over 1,000 people every week with the gospel, including folk from overseas and people of other faiths… ‘Oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God’.
In conjunction with the staff team the church’s pastoral teams have committed to contacting every week every member of the church family, over 200 households (now reducing to every two weeks) which has led to co-ordination of food supplies for those in need, walking with people through times of suffering at a higher level than normal, and sending out DVDs of the services every week to those who do not have an internet connection.
Of course, it is also a time of great anxiety and pressure for many. Mike speaks of the some of the heartaches of lockdown: placing great strain on some marriages and family life; financial hardship; being unable to be at the bedside of a dying church member; and the awful decision of having to make a member of staff redundant due to loss of income through lockdown.
As St John’s looks forward to the eventual return to a more ‘normal’ existence, Mike is thinking through a number of questions and issues. Such as, how can the church continue to appropriate many of the unexpected opportunities lockdown has presented through its online services whilst not encouraging an increased consumerist approach to church life, which lockdown can foster?
Jesus has promised that He will build His church, which is of course as true during lockdown as at any other time, and in this we can rejoice.
