Essential and Non-Essential Ministry
During our current pandemic, governments were forced to make decisions about what were essential and non-essential services. We may or may not have agreed with their decisions.
Churches have had to make the same decisions, although not always as explicitly. Our buildings were shut down and everything had to be reinvented in terms of how it was done. Not much was business as usual.
Our leadership did not sit down (or go online) and make formal distinctions about what was essential and what was nonessential.
It was much more organic. We had limited time and resources and so had to choose carefully what we would seek to do.
This is what our church decided was essential ministry:
- Worship. The Church exists to worship. It was a no-brainer that we would have to prioritize online worship services.
- Congregational care. I purposely say congregational care rather than pastoral care. It is everyone’s job. Some may say this is too inward focused. Yet when I read the New Testament, there is much more emphasis about how the church takes care of its own than it does for others.
- Community care. Having looked at the previous point, we do care about our wider community. We say that there was a greater need for the food bank at a time when donations were dropping drastically. We ramped our already existing support for our local food bank.
- Prayer. This crisis has reminded us of our need for prayer. Getting our weekly prayer meeting going again, now online, was a priority.
- Fellowship. This has been one of the harder ministries to get going. We would rather be visiting with each other in the same room. Since we can’t do that, we do a group chat online Sunday mornings after watching our online service.
You might be asking, where is evangelism in all this? Good question. It is there but it looks a lot different.
This pandemic has forced us to do everything outside our nice church building. In some ways, all that we do is on more display than it has ever been before. People who would never consider showing up on a Sunday morning are checking out our services online. Jesus is being shared with a wider audience.
None of this is meant to say that other ministries and programs are not useful. We will return to some of that activity at some point. But for now, these five areas are what we have seen as essential ministry.
What has your experience been?
