{"id":713001,"date":"2020-06-11T22:06:47","date_gmt":"2020-06-12T02:06:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/?p=713001"},"modified":"2020-06-11T22:08:05","modified_gmt":"2020-06-12T02:08:05","slug":"five-lessons-i-am-learning-during-the-covid-19-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/five-lessons-i-am-learning-during-the-covid-19-pandemic\/","title":{"rendered":"Five Lessons I Am Learning During The Covid-19 Pandemic"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been in full time vocational ministry for over 35 years, the last 15 as Lead Pastor of a multi-campus, multi-ethnic church in Central Florida. I have made developing leadership skills a priority throughout my ministry. I have studied church models, listened to leadership podcasts, read both business and church leadership books, and felt that I had developed into a decent leader and knew what needed to be done to reach people and see them grow in their faith.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

All of that changed in March 2020.<\/span><\/p>\n

As I write this, we are in week 10 of not gathering as a church. Almost overnight most of what I knew about leading a church was no longer possible. And what I came to realize is that most of what I knew about church, dealt with the gathered church. The fact that we could no longer gather meant that I was going to have to learn a lot, really fast, about what a church looks like that is scattered. At age 60, I was back to Church 101 in many ways. <\/span>As hard as it has been to not be able to gather weekly with my church family, God is teaching me several things that I believe will help direct our church in future.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lesson #1<\/b><\/p>\n

We were pretty good with gathered worship services, but our online wasn\u2019t as good as we thought.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Before the shutdown we would spend hours each week preparing 11 gathered worship services in three languages. We thought carefully through every experience a guest and a member might have when they came onto one of our campuses. We were very intentional about the words we used and the experience we were trying to create. We planned the services down to the minute and knew what we wanted to accomplish each week.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As we did that, we would spend a few minutes talking about streaming the service and even had an online pastor to moderate the chat online. We thought we were providing a decent experience, but, the truth is, we weren\u2019t. <\/span>We learned that not everything we did in a service translated well online, and if we were going to keep the online audience we were going to have to make adjustments.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Some of our changes included:<\/span><\/p>\n