What if the church wasted the COVID crisis by not prepping for a more hostile shutdown?

Oct 1, 2020 by Andrew Symes

By Stephen McAlpine:

And I’m not simply talking about church preference. Nor am I talking about what the better model for evangelism, mission and pastoral care might be.

I’m talking about whether we wasted an opportunity to prepare ourselves for a far more reaching and hostile disrupter that a virus that swept up everyone, and required strict measures for everyone to adhere to.

What if we had used the COVID disrupter as a dry run to prepare our churches for the rise of increasingly restrictive government measures on what the church can proclaim and practice? Because all the signs are saying that is clearly a direction we could be headed in…

…But what if during that time of disruption we had sat down and asked ourselves question such as these:

What would we do for church if a more hostile disrupter, such as a government clampdown on what was permitted for churches to proclaim publicly, came into force?

Not saying it’s going to happen overnight. But hey, please don’t insist that it could never happen!

The COVID disrupter gave us a great opportunity to test how we might run church life if another great disrupter came our way. And by the sounds of it we either didn’t have the time or the inclination to avail ourselves of some critical, creative thinking during that time. We’re trying to get church back to normal even though I feel that life itself won’t get back to normal for some time – if ever, after this.

What plans do we have in place if the central tenets of our faith and the implications of our ethical stance on matters around sex and marriage were ever placed in the firing line? What strategies have we come up with if we had to go “dark web” with church?

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