We’re tired. Zoom fatigue, confinement, and heightened awareness of death, on top of personal needs, have wearied us.
Christian leaders have faced additional challenges. Lockdown forced an urgent development of new forms of church gatherings and pastoral connections. Emerging from lockdown with social distancing means another rethink, while no one knows yet what the ‘new normal’ for church will be. This is a time of rebuilding.
Rebuilding is tough. In the early noughties, as a diversion from my work as a junior doctor, I spent a week in eastern Europe with a team converting an attic into an office for a mission agency. Having zero building skills, I was the ‘gopher’ – the skilled builders said, ‘Go for a plank’, and I got it (and hand blisters too!), while they planned, cut, laid and planned again. Pastors remodelling their churches face both the spiritual equivalent of my donkey work and the mental labour of those builders. This is nothing new – pastors have always been called to work hard in the Lord – but there are special dangers in times of rapid change.
