Coronavirus and the Churches: Time to Pivot Again

At the end of March, hundreds of British churches switched overnight to running online Sunday services in response to the national lockdown imposed by the Government. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on churches was sudden and dramatic.

At the end of June, as the lockdown begins to gradually be lifted, has the time come for British churches to pivot again? Not this time back to congregational Sunday services - which remain banned under the terms of the emergency powers granted in the Coronavirus Act 2020 - but to much smaller expressions of church, meeting outdoors. With groups of six in England (or eight in Scotland) now being able to gather outdoors at a social distance, is it now time for churches to put their energies not into Zoom meetings but into multiple face-to-face gatherings in much smaller numbers?

Photo by Nandhu Kumar from Pexels

The case for a rapid pivot to smaller expressions of church could be made on several grounds:

• The people of God desperately need face-to-face fellowship. From the point of view of pastoral care alone, most Christians and church leaders would agree that it is desirable that we see each other in real life in order to enjoy fellowship. Where this has not been possible, we are grateful for tools of technology that can at least provide some measure of human contact. The ideal, however, remains a gathered church in person - the body of Christ in the flesh (so to speak). Where two or three gather in his name, Christ is present in the midst.

• The opportunity is safe and easy to implement. Just as creative minds were quickly able to apply practical solutions to running online Sunday services, we can now quickly move to weekly small gatherings of church members outdoors. These can take place in parks, gardens, on beaches and in the urban environment - anywhere outdoors where people will not be competing with traffic. We can limit the numbers and maintain social distance so that the gatherings are safe and comply with the law. A typical church of 100 members could expect to launch between 10 and 15 such groups next week. 

• Traditional church services may not be possible till 2021. Research is showing that indoor groups of people are high-risk for covid transmission. Activities such as singing and physical contact increase this risk further. Pubs and nightclubs are high-risk environments; church services are not far behind in terms of their capacity to spread the virus between members. The outbreak in Korea was initially centred around a church. In Germany, churches have been able to partly reopen but congregational singing is banned (!) Against this backdrop, are church leaders genuinely committed to running Zoom services for another 12 months or more? And if a vaccine is never found, what then? Do we have a plan for socially-distanced indoor church services that provide the level of fellowship that Christians need or want?

• Small groups at their best can be effective in disciple-making. In his compelling book John Wesley's Class Meeting: A Model for Making Disciples, Michael Henderson demonstrates the genius of the early Methodist movement in its ability to transform the lives of urban working class members who had been largely neglected by the established church. At the heart of this process was not only public preaching but a highly-developed ecosystem of close discipleship centred on the class meeting. It is fashionable in some middle-class churches to downplay the small group. The reality, however, is that there has never been a gospel-centred movement in modern British history that has made disciples of the urban poor as effectively as early Methodism. It is interesting that Wesley's class meetings, gathering weekly for fellowship, personal accountability and mutual instruction, were limited to six members each - the same number currently permitted to gather outdoors in England under current lockdown measures.  

• Small groups would benefit from input from equipping leadership. Just as the Jerusalem apostles taught 'publicly and from house to house', the small expressions of church that could start outdoors tomorrow should be accessible and accountable to those with gifts to teach, equip and serve the members. If there were no longer a need for church leaders to be planning, running and evaluating online services, could their time and energy not be better spent visiting a small group most days to support and give input? Again, in a church of 100 members, a full-time leadership team of two could realistically visit the 10 to 15 small groups almost every week if they wanted. The modern Wesleyian circuit rider already exists and is probably sitting in an office planning the online Sunday service. A pivot to a radical small group model would be possible, if there were a will to do it. 

• Small groups can sustain mission. I would not suggest that these groups of six to eight should try and replicate church services; nor should they be focused on the seeker. But, by nurturing the believers and providing fellowship and accountability, they can help to sustain Christians in their ongoing life as witnesses for Christ in their homes, families, streets and places of work. These opportunities are multiplying during the current pandemic.  There is no reason of course why those with the gifts to do so could not also start small groups for seekers that meet outdoors at a social distance. 

• The summer months provide a window of opportunity. Although June is looking a bit sketchy weather-wise in Britain, at least we are not yet facing the pandemic in January. By starting an outdoor small group ecosystem now - this week - churches can refine and learn best practice while it is still dry-ish. We can then also plan creatively for the autumn and beyond. Two principles that may help this process are time flexibility and creativity. As the weather turns, groups should plan to meet between rain showers or on dry-ish days, rather than being restricted to a rigid weekly time slot. This of course is easy to do with only six people. We can also learn from pubs which have responded to the ban on indoor smoking by implementing new ways of defining 'outdoors' through the legal and judicious use of gazebos and awnings.   

I'm ready to pivot. How about you? 

The Priority of Teaching in the Household Style Church

Ask many Christians, especially church leaders, about "house church" and sooner or later you will hear concerns raised that such churches are prone to being weak on bible teaching. Some criticisms will go even further and portray such simple expressions of church as potential hotbeds of heresy.

The reality is however that household-style churches, if they are understood and operating according to principles set out in the New Testament, actually have the potential to be centres of strong bible teaching and learning.

Here's what I mean.

In any midsize or large local church there will often be a number of gifted bible teachers and preachers. Some of these will be elders or leaders in the church - indeed, one of the apostolic requirements of an elder is that they must be "able to teach". In practice, however, many of those with this ability will not exercise it very often - at least not outside of individual pastoral situations. A typical church will have a weekly Sunday morning service, with bible teaching and maybe an evening service as well. There may be a midweek bible study group - though in many churches these have been replaced by home groups lead by church members - and there may be occasional courses, conferences or one-off events at which the bible is taught. Some churches, following a pattern established in north American churches, may also have a Sunday School - meaning an adult biblical education programme supplementary to the main weekend service.

In such a church setting, the total public/group teaching work of the church may amount to no more than a few hours each week. 

This reality raises a number of issues. One of them is a practical question: if a pastor or church leader is only preaching once a week (at the most), what are they meant to be doing the rest of the time? The answer varies from church to church, but in my own experience of being in full-time church leadership for twenty years, non-preaching time often consists of some or all of the following: 

• preparation and study; prayer; 


• meeting individuals; 


• attending planning meetings; 


• strategic thinking; travelling; 


• troubleshooting; 


• interfacing with the wider community; 


• practical acts of service; 


• emails and other administration. 

The question is, are the church's teachers and pastors meant to be doing these tasks? Or are these activities the result of a church system that unwittingly minimises bible teaching and elevates organisational management? 

When the early apostles were arrested and brought before the Sanhedrin, they were accused of having filled Jerusalem with their teaching. How had they managed to leave themselves open to such a charge? 

The Book of Acts tells us that the pattern of the Jerusalem church was to meet in the temple courts (the large setting) and in homes for more intimate fellowship, meals and breaking of bread. What is often missed, however, is that the early apostles taught in both settings - the large and the small. 

Day after day, in the temple courts and from house to house, they never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Messiah.      (Acts 5:42)

Let's try a maths exercise. Luke (assuming he wrote Acts) records that the number of men in Jerusalem who believed in Jesus at this time was around five thousand. The text makes it fairly clear that this figure did not include women and children. Let's speculate that this number of men represents a total church population of at least 15,000 people. Let's then speculate that an average Jerusalem home could accommodate about thirty people at one time.  If the total number of believers (including children) were equally divided between such homes when they met, we would discover about 500 "house churches" in Jerusalem in the middle of the first century. None of this is provable through historical means of course. It is a thought exercise resting on a number of suppositions. 

The twelve Jerusalem apostles are portrayed in Acts as spending their days teaching about Jesus in the temple courts and from house to house. In a typical week, therefore, if each apostle visited a house church every day, they might have taught publicly about Jesus at least seven times a week - in addition to any preaching they may have done in the larger temple court setting. This amounts to a total of at least 84 teaching sessions a week in Jerusalem by eye-witnesses of Christ and his resurrection - over 4,000 interactive sermons a year. If we compare this figure with a possible number of home churches of 500, we could envisage a scenario in which each house fellowship received a teaching apostle approximately every three to four weeks. 

This level of apostolic teaching (if it bears any relation to what actually took place) may help shed some light on the claim that the apostles had filled Jerusalem with their teaching. I wonder how many contemporary home groups or house churches are fortunate enough to receive that level of apostolic input in a typical year. I suspect very few. 

The thought exercise outlined above does not prove anything historically. It merely illustrates the fact that, if those with the gifting and calling to teach the word of God were released to do so as the primary activity of their working week, there is no inherent reason why such teachers, apostles, pastors or prophets could not be actively and fruitfully deployed in small household style churches if they moved around between them on a regular basis. Such a model actually allows for more bible teaching from those able to teach rather than less. By contrast, the current system of larger Sunday services, with all their inefficiencies of size, resource and administration, leads inevitably to less bible teaching, as those primarily gifted and called to do it find themselves spending time on maintaining an organisation rather than equipping believers in their homes and places of work.  



Church history actually gives us a working model of such a system of widespread decentralised itinerant bible teaching. Early Methodism, under the leadership of John Wesley, had a very well-worked-out system of such teaching with ministers assigned to several local "societies", "classes" (groups of about 6) and "bands" within a geographical area or territory.  



Many of these itinerant preachers and bible teachers were commissioned by Wesley not by the official Church of England to which they nominally adhered in the movement's early years. The effective use of such itinerant ministers went hand-in-hand with the growth of the Methodist movement - from around 15,000 people in the 1780s to 130,000 a decade later and around one million within 50 years of its founding. 



One writer of Methodist history notes that:

“Moving to and fro, the itinerant was a bond of union between the societies in the circuit, and his appointment in several circuits with the passing years knit them together in the connexion of which he was the representative. The system helped also to secure uniformity in teaching and administration......His doctrine and discipline and those of his predecessor and successor had been derived from Wesley and the Conference. To these he and they were all amenable. Different times and conditions may necessitate modifications; but for securing the unity. homogeneity, and happy co-operation of a new, scattered, varied, and rapidly-growing community, perhaps nothing better than the itinerancy within the circuits and from circuit to circuit could have been devised. Wesley's preachers had the mobility of Wyclif's itinerating poor priests and laymen, or recalled the Friars of the Middle Ages without their hampering vows.”

Decentralised models of church (call them "house church" if you want) both require and facilitate the emergence of bible teachers who focus on that activity as a priority, without the encumbrances of a settled organisational model of church congregations and Sunday services.