“All this calamity has come upon us; yet we have not entreated the favor of the LORD our God” (Daniel 9:13).
The greatest calamity God’s people face in the twenty-first century is not COVID 19. The greatest calamity the church faces today is not seeking God’s face amidst COVID 19. In Daniel’s great prayer of repentance for the sins of his people (Daniel 9), he confesses that the Israelites had been spiritually unresponsive in the face of calamity i.e., the Babylonian invasion/captivity in 596 BC. The same kind of spiritual unresponsiveness looms over churches today.
Since COVID 19, some churches have become expert in online worship services, giving via text, contact tracing and onsite hand sanitizing. Others have successfully defended their right to continue gathering for worship. But sadly, many congregations that do meet squabble over whether to get vaccinated or whether to wear masks, turning the calamity into a travesty. With little insight or interest into God’s purpose for the pestilence, the church copes with COVID without considering what He might be saying to us through it.
Signs that churches needs a Covid reset
Hearing what Jesus is saying through COVID 19 means looking beyond the challenges it presents. Beyond the challenges of maintaining online worship services, widespread pastoral discouragement, or divergent opinions about protective measures, lies COVID’s ability to exacerbate a church’s latent ill health. Dormant illnesses in your church body, long overlooked, can become crippling under COVID’s duress.
Often such calamities pull God’s people together, aware of their dependence on God and their need for each other. Not this one. Christians are often at each other’s throats, judging one another, rejecting one another, dismissing or devaluing one another. This is a calamity greater than COVID. God is using it like He used the wilderness wanderings for Israel, to “test them and show them what was in their hearts” (Deut. 8:2), and what was there was not good.
If your church struggled with mission and vision fulfillment prior to the pandemic, it is likely that it has struggled even more since it began. If trust for your church’s leaders waned pre-pandemic, decisions your leaders make now will bear greater scrutiny because of COVID’s omnipresence. If the spirit of your church was depressed ahead of 2020, your church’s spiritual heartbeat may be close to flat lining now. Churches that previously struggled to talk about painful issues now will use COVID as an excuse to avoid them, and it will become the “reason” for unhappiness with leadership.
What does a COVID reset look like?
COVID 19 has impacted the whole world and the church is not exempt. The church suffers the same trial that the world does because we are a part of the world and perhaps because the world in a bad way has become a part of us. No one is talking about the hand of God in this pandemic, a marker of almost every national or global tragedy before this. God has allowed this pandemic to unfold, but God’s people and His churches have become an amplifier of national division rather than healers, reconcilers, or intercessors. It is time for church leaders to ask some penetrating questions:
- What is a more appropriate spiritual response to national calamity? (See 2 Chronicles 7:13-14).
- Is our church more focused on coping with COVID than being salt and light in a decaying culture?
- What sins in our lives and in our church need to be confessed and repented of?
- Where have we fallen short historically as a church and how has COVID and politics amplified it?
- What signs of congregational ill health might we remedy now so that we can come out stronger on the other side of COVID?
- If Jesus is speaking to our church through COVID 19, what might He be saying?
COVID 19 presents a unique opportunity for churches to reset their relationship with their Lord, but that requires leadership stepping up. We hear talk about COVID testing every day, but rarely speak of how churches are being tested by it. I don’t mean whether the church will survive the pandemic, but rather will she hear the voice of Jesus in the calamity, see His loving discipline in it for our wrong-headedness, and respond to Him in sorrow and brokenness. Let’s cover our faces in repentance and not just masks, seeking a desperately needed spiritual reset in churches everywhere.
Rev. Mark Barnard serves with Blessing Point Ministries which works to help ministries experience healing from painful internal crises. Mark is the author of Diagnosing the Heart of Your Church: How Church Leaders Can Assess Systemic Corporate Dysfunction.
