One reason why trying to plan for 2021 is frustrating for many pastors …

We’re already rolling well into November, a time when church leaders would normally be crossing their “t’s” and dotting their “i’s” on programming plans and budgets for the coming year. Instead, many (most?) pastors find it frustrating just attempting to plan for 2021 while still in a pandemic, not knowing how or if the global health scourge will impact the coming year.

One reason for the frustration is related to the fact that for decades many churches have been programming and marketing “machines.” That’s because most churches are addicted to the attractional model for “growing” the local church. If you rely on the attractional model, you have to have an entertaining service and appealing menu of programs to attract people to, and you have to be a machine at marketing those programs.

But how do you plan programming during a pandemic, or for a new year that may include ongoing restrictions from a pandemic that lingers for any length into 2021? What is there to market?

Maybe a good answer would be to stop focusing on programming. Put another way, change your focus!

A towering lesson the church should have learned the hard way from the impact of the pandemic is that we never should have been relying on an attractional model for making disciples. We actually had a volume of data substantiating that fact long before the pandemic was even on the horizon, but instead of learning from it we just continued to feed our addiction to a model that might put people in pews (or chairs), but not make new disciples from among those who are lost (at least, not in any sustained, substantial way).

Maybe it’s time we learn the lesson and change our focus.

For most of my life as a Christian, I’ve heard pastors say, “We have to keep the main thing the main thing” all while not keeping the “main thing” the actual “main thing.”

This is a great opportunity to change that!

Let me suggest three areas we can redirect focus to and away from heavy programming and marketing as we make our way through the pandemic and into an unknown new year:

Making the home the central base to living as a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. Many of us would like to think that’s what we’ve wanted to see from our church members all along, but if we’re honest, we’ve placed an inordinate focus on the corporate gathering of the church with its plethora of programs. We’ve failed to help our church members be serious about making their homes the “home base” for growing and blossoming in their faith and launching out in service from there.

A few weeks ago, while rummaging through research on the impact of the pandemic on the church and living the Christian faith, a sentence in one of the articles jumped out at me. Stated simply was a profound reality:

“A trend developing before our very eyes, though, is the rise of the home as the new center of life.”

This was God’s original plan, but we have since changed it to what happens in a church building. Whether we like it or not, the pandemic is causing “… the rise of the home as the new center of life.”

That could be a good thing!

How can the church and its leaders help make that a good thing?

By teaching people how to make their homes the center from which they follow Christ. That can include several things, such as:

• • How to worship God in your home, whether as an individual, a couple, or family.
  • How parents can pastor and disciple their own children.
  • The home is the natural place for a deep, impactful, and persistent practice of spiritual disciplines.
  • How they can be discipled in their homes or disciple others in their homes.
  • How to make their homes a part of their local church.
  • How using their homes, especially through hospitality and small gatherings, can advance God’s mission and the mission of their local church.

There is nothing for church leaders to fear about the home becoming the new center of life. It should be because that’s where people live! They do not live at the church building. Making the home the center of life doesn’t replace the vital need for the body of Christ to gather together outside of the home, it simply recalibrates the order. Every Christian is called to be an ambassador for Christ (2 Cor. 5:18-20), and the home is their base from which to obey this call.

A focus on fostering and nurturing relationships in and out of the church. Loving God and loving others is what Jesus has taught us are the most important things we can do. That needs to start from within the home and move out from there. What we’re seeing in the pandemic, though, is some trouble with that. While there are numerous positive stories of people caring for and ministering to one another in the pandemic, there are also increased troubles in the home as couples and families find they have to spend more time together. Many have often said they would like more time with family, and have done well with having it; others are experiencing increased conflict and abuse.

This is a great opportunity for the church to help their members learn how to:

• • Create and foster new relationships.
  • Nurture existing relationships.
  • Reconcile and fix broken relationships.
  • Deepen fellowship in the church body, even if you cannot gather the same way you could before the pandemic. Showing up to a service at a building only allows for a certain level of fellowship. Making personal contact beyond those meetings, like we have to do now, can actually foster a deeper level of fellowship by making it more personal. For example, it’s one thing to shake hands and greet each other at an ordinary church service; it’s more personal to make a phone call to check on each other in the midst of a pandemic.
  • Serve one another in love, and go beyond to serving the people of our communities.

Equip the saints. Because most churches had an addiction to the attractional model, most churches did nothing — ZERO! — to equip their members in how to effectively share the Gospel with non-Christians (equipping in relational evangelism). Now that churches can’t gather the same way they used to, they can’t rely on an attractional model … and because they have failed to equip their members in relational evangelism, they have an unequipped church body sitting at home, ill-prepared to keep the mission of the church advancing.

This is a prime time for church leaders to finally get serious about equipping the saints:

“Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ,” Ephesians 4:11-13.

This is a great opportunity for church leaders to repair their neglect of not equipping their members by teaching them about their responsibility to live as ambassadors for Christ (2 Cor. 5:18-20), and equip them to do that effectively.

The pandemic has also revealed how we need more spiritually mature men who are able to teach in the church rather than just facilitate a meeting. Now is a prime opportunity to develop new leaders.

Pastor, if you’re trying to be the old programming and marketing machine you used to be, then it’s no wonder why you might be frustrated with how to plan for 2021 in the circumstances we find ourselves today. But if you’re willing to change your focus, you might find great new opportunities to focus on what would actually be better for your church and for you.

Scotty