“Fourteen days to stop the spread” — that was the tagline that we were given around April of last year. Now, multiple weeks into 2021, the COVID-19 cases are hitting all-time highs in some states in the US, and in many countries around the world. Unsurprisingly, this has hit everything from small businesses to multinational corporations hard, but churches have especially been harmed, as the close interaction that churches desire and thrive off of has all but faded away.
The question, however, is whether this is the fault of the pandemic, or the fault of churches.
Churches have a tendency to sit still. Many avoid innovation and rarely work towards creating new ways to engage with their audience (in-person or online) or people they would like to see come to a Sunday service. There are, of course, some exceptions. For example, Andy Stanley of North Point in Georgia. But, many pastors like Andy Stanley are then struck with such terms as being “trendy,” “not preaching hard enough,” or, worst of all, “too modern.”
The stigma against modernization is certainly not a new battle within Christianity, but COVID has brought it back to the forefront of many minds. Churches old and young have suddenly been forced to readapt and innovate for the digital shift, and those churches which maintain a deep disdain for “modern” have sunk into the bog of the church world, forever stuck and with no way to move or grow.
Sadly, though, even some of the churches that have embraced technological and digital innovation over the last year of this pandemic still treat it as though it is a manacle: a chain that they are being forced to wear and that keeps holding them back. Truthfully, modernization ought to be a key to allowing a church to shrug off the things that are really holding it back: unnecessary traditions.
Remember, a change of method is not a change of message. The removal or renovation of traditional methodologies is not a destruction of traditional values. The tagline of “modern” on a church should say nothing of its doctrinal worth — only, perhaps, its style of music, design, or tertiary productions (i.e. small groups, outreach programs, video content, etc).
The style of four decades ago is not going to work today, tomorrow, or the week after that. An old camcorder mounted on a wall with an old mic is not going to fly for an online service, nor is a long-winded sermon after forty-five minutes of singing and announcements. A good sermon does not have to be an hour long, nor is a bad sermon one that is only twenty minutes. The length of time is irrelevant in the face of efficient use of time.
It is, perhaps, time that is so hard for churches to understand about modernization. Half a century and more ago, a sermon could last two hours and nobody would be surprised, but now people expect them to be under an hour. The perception is that shaving off time is shaving off content, when the more astute observation is that “modern” (there is that dangerous word again) preachers know how to be efficient and not turn twenty minutes of content into two hours of rambling.
It may seem odd to talk about time and efficiency in a series on digital church, but it will become more relevant as this series of small essays progress along with the podcast content. The age-old saying of “time is money” is still true today, but for the church it has become “time is souls.”
We hope that you will continue to tune into the podcast and read these posts as we progress into just how your church can more effectively and efficiently use their time within an online format, or perhaps even in the physical.
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To learn more about this topic, check out this episode of ChurchMediaHQ: https://youtu.be/iPZIzf5Wqk
