The other day a pastor was whining at the effect the shutdown of church buildings, in view of the epidemic, would have on churches. "We are going to lose many of our members, by the time this thing is over, we'll have to work at recouping membership."
I wasn't sure how to answer the 'man of God', as I didn't want to offend his sentiment at the moment. However, everything in me was in disagreement with his line of thought.
Such sentiment exposes the faulty notions and practices we have held onto for so long as a church. It also shows we are just gathering people, we are not building them.
We raise funds putting up gigantic edifices as worship centers to announce our prominence and soothe our ego, but we do little or nothing to build the people we are gathering in them. If we had invested in their spiritual growth and maturity, we wouldn't be apprehensive of losing them to the shutdown.
#Covid19 appears to be an opportunity for a reset of the church. After all, the church started in homes. So we are being forced to go back to base and the basics. Husbands and fathers are now taking up responsibilities to lead their family altars. Now there's ample time for the bonding of the family. The devotional atmosphere in homes is intensifying.
Parishioners can genuinely pray in their closets without the 'intimidating' assistance of prayer moderators and merchants. The rituals of laying of hands, anointing service, communion fiesta, feet-washing, prayer vigils, and the likes will suffer 'lockdown' for the moment. Certainly, too, new faith leaders would emerge, shaped out from the crucible of adversity.
When this is all over, there would have been some renewal of minds as the church would have learned wisdom in adversity.
No comments:
Post a Comment