Something is better than nothing: a roll-with-the-punches guide to home church in a pandemic
We’re all doing the best we can with what we have.
I’m lucky enough to gotten to lead and co-lead small groups and home churches in a couple of different contexts in my lifetime, and this Spring, I got to do that in a whole new one: a global pandemic. Suddenly, this thing so rooted in being in the same place at the same time lost its foundations. Six months in, I think we may actually be a stronger community for it.
Here’s what we did:
Set up digital supports
My background is in digital government, and so I came to this great upset perhaps a bit more prepared than the average bear. Within the first week of knowing we couldn’t meet in person, we’d set up two tools that have served us really well in this season: recurring video conferencing time and a group chat. We used Zoom and WhatsApp, but there are a ton of options out there for you to choose from.
Recurring video chat time meant we had a key piece of infrastructure in place quickly in the midst of the change happening around us. The group chat meant we could connect easily and informally when we lost face-to-face chats after church and in person. (Full disclosure: our WhatsApp group chat is frigging hilarious, and one of my very favourite parts of 2020).
Seek to keep the rhythms you can
While we couldn’t meet in person, we did our best to keep meeting. In April, we shifted from a bi-weekly to a weekly schedule because our Home Church told us it would serve them better. When a lot of the world felt like shifting sand, having a regular touch point for our little scrappy family meant there was at least one stable thing to root us in shared reality and community with each other.
Let go of the ones that don’t work
About a month in, we did a feedback exercise (Pro Tip: Seek Regular Feedback From The People You’re Leading) with our home church, and it turned out 90 minute to two hour digital Bible study was not serving anyone. Zoom fatigue is real, and folks were pretty over squinting at a screen after an eight hour day of squinting at a screen. We listened, and let go of that practice for a season in favour of gathering for sharing, worship, games and prayer.
This rhythm served us pretty well for the spring and the summer, and we’re looking to try out alternating weeks of this and Bible study in the fall. Future Rachel will write a how-to on that soon, I promise.
Grieve how much this sucks
We spent the Saturday before our first zoom home church celebrating Pie Day together, and by Thursday night we were facing each other through computer screens, trying our best to do Bible study in a google doc. The sudden, world-shifting changes we’ve been through this year are not small, and they are not painless. Taking time to be together and grieve how much our worlds have been upended has been absolutely crucial to persevering together.
Thank God for your Wendys
I’m lucky enough to co-lead with a human who is actually, genuinely, from-the-soles-of-her-feet-to-the-top-of-her-head hospitable. She’s also administratively gifted and skilled, and she is a frigging miracle. Her name is Wendy. She’s amazing. She’s like this all the time (I know, how amazing, right?) and in a time high uncertainty, her gifts shone like warm sunshine over the cold chaos of the pandemic. Wendy is an amazing communicator, and communicating is incredibly important in the shift from in-person to digital.
Wendy set up our zoom calls, emailed folks on the regular as we shifted from in-person to online, delivered porch care packages and remembered each of us with active care. I am in awe of her. I wish every community the gift of a human as caring and generous as Wendy.
Ask for help!
All of this was overwhelming. I got super overwhelmed. About three weeks in, I ran out of “We Can Do This!” adrenaline and collapsed into a big ol’ heap. That’s when I messaged Jason. He’s great. He let me have a bunch of feelings about how I wasn’t doing enough or being enough or thinking enough or praying enough or supporting people enough, and then asked me why I was so scared to rest (I know, guy is wildly good at what he does). We talked about maybe how rest and faith and fear and idols get tangled up in each other, and about giving oneself permission to rest. I rested. It was great. The world didn’t end.
Also great were conversations with my roommate, Allison. She reminded me that there are people that dive in right away when there’s a crisis, and people that take a hot second to react when there’s a crisis. One gift of that is that the “think for a hot second before you act” people are ready to go right when the “dive headfirst into everything!” people run out of steam.
When our leadership team ran out of steam this summer, We (Denese, Wendy, Gerry and I) asked for help running HC in the summer. Turns out, our Home Church was full of folks looking to flex their leadership muscles, and they stepped in to lead a bunch of our gatherings over the summer. They brought imagination, creativity and new life to our gatherings, and weeks they led are some of my favourite memories of Home Church in this season.
Teams are a gift y’all. Ask for help.
Remember: Something is better than nothing
We didn’t stick the landing on many of the secondary things this spring. The tech was often clunky, the communications were sometimes last-minute, and more often than not we went over time.
We did stick the landing on the core thing though: life together, no matter what it looks like. When all the ways we knew to do life together came undone in a hot minute, we did our very best to find new ways to be each other’s people. Video chats are an imperfect substitute for hugs, but they are incredibly better than silence.
If I can exhort or encourage anyone reading this on one thing, it’s this: something is better than nothing. Trying something with your team, even if it doesn’t work, will lead to better and deeper community than any waiting for someone to show you the way could ever do. You can adapt and evolve and grow a thing that exists, but it’s really difficult to grow a thing that doesn’t. You can start really small: one text, one reply-all email, one zoom chat, one socially distant croquet game. Figure out one small way to hold your lives in common with each other, and see what grows from there.
