It was a Wednesday.
I was just four days off a plane from Virginia for a wedding shower with my fiancé’s family. My church was three days removed from having changed our communion practice so that elders served the people bread only, and the pastors blessed those returning to their seats. I presided at the table, but was not able to touch the elements. It was the first pang of coronavirus-related loss for this Minister of Word and Sacrament. Little did I know, it would hardly be the last.
Two days prior, I had emailed those involved in leading our four-week Lenten Wednesday night pilot program to request they bring their underage charges by the bathroom before dinner to ensure adequate hand washing took place. This felt like the safest way to preserve our family-style dinner.
Just the day before, I had called a deacon in the congregation who used to serve as the public health commissioner for the Commonwealth of Kentucky to double-check a new plan for taking the offering in worship. He said: “That plan sounds fine. And, for whatever it’s worth, I think it’s too soon to cancel worship.”
And then, it was Wednesday, March 11. And by 10:00 that morning, the governor of Kentucky had requested that churches not hold worship services that coming Sunday. (We later learned that some number of Kentucky’s first COVID-19 cases were transmitted during a worship service.) By noon, we had canceled all activities at the church involving 25 or more people for a week. This was after consulting with our public health expert deacon, who said, “I take back what I told you yesterday,” reminding me that every day with this novel coronavirus brings new challenges and needs. And then, it was time to figure out how to move ministry to virtual spaces.
Immediately, my head of staff and I agreed that we’d do a Facebook Live worship-type event that Sunday morning. Most in the congregation are connected to the internet, and Facebook felt like the most accessible platform — especially on such short notice. But what exactly would we stream? On the one hand, I did not want to implicitly communicate that worship can only happen in two particular rooms in our particular building. But on the other hand, being forced to adjust our practice felt like an amazing opportunity to try something new. I can’t speak for my head of staff, but something in my gut told me to try a new thing. So, instead of replicating our regular Sunday worship, we opted for a service of prayer and reflection.
Of course, worship was not the only thing that needed to be reworked in light of our inability to meet together. That Lenten Wednesday night program I mentioned? We’d spent months – literally months – reimagining what weeknight ministry could look like at the church. It was a labor of love, but a labor nonetheless. Back in January, we had crafted this Lenten pilot and had since been hard at work identifying leaders, registering participants, procuring curriculum and supplies and preparing lessons. Our first (and ultimately only) meeting on March 4 was a huge success. How were we going to shift Christian formation out of our building and into the home?
We couldn’t replicate our weeknight program online. But we didn’t need to. This too was an opportunity to try something new — to move in a direction that frankly we should have been heading in already. By Friday, I had a new virtual formation strategy: a daily faith practice distributed via email to anyone who wanted to try it. At this point, schools were out until Holy Week, so I committed to sending an email a day at least through April 5.
As I began brainstorming faith practices, I thought about John Roberto’s eight faith forming practices from his book “Reimagining Faith Formation for the 21st Century.” I came across this amazing list of 100 ideas for ministry leaders from Traci Smith. I thought back to a class I took in seminary called “The Christian Life,” where each week we learned about and practiced a different spiritual practice so that one day we’d be an informed resource for spiritual development in a congregation. I ran through a “normal” week in the life of my church and considered which parts of our routine we could emphasize as standalone faith practices in the home. I pulled up some of my go-to websites for resources and collected ideas.
After curating a long list, it was time to plan out a few days’ worth of practices. Knowing that every day of late seems to hold a big change, I drafted the first two weeks and kept my other ideas for future days. And each day, I revisit my plan to make sure our daily practices fit the current state of our community.
I created a signup form in our email marketing program and shared it on the church’s Facebook page (and my own; now, about one-third of our email recipients are Christians around the country). The daily emails began on Friday, March 13.
There is much that is terrible in our pandemic-stricken world right now. But my fervent hope is that these daily emails – and our other moves towards virtual ministry – collectively expand the congregation’s (and, to be honest, my own) idea of what faith formation can be. We now have an amazing opportunity to look beyond Sunday school and into our daily lives as places where we grow in faith. How might our lives change by doing one intentional faith practice each day? How might our relationship with God grow?
By the following Monday, the session suspended all in-person face-to-face gatherings. The early shifts we made to be a virtual church are still in place, but now I’m beginning to wonder how else we’ll need to adjust for the long haul. The gift of everyone moving their ministry to virtual spaces is that I now get to witness the amazing things my colleagues in ministry are doing with their churches. It’s inspiring. And it can also be intimidating. Never before have I so constantly measured myself up against someone else’s ministry, wondering if I’m doing enough or the right things.
So my virtual ministry prayer for myself, and for you, is this:
Breathe in God’s love for you.
Breathe out God’s grace.
You are enough.
God is with us.
We’re all going to figure this out,
together,
one step at a time.
May it be so.
LINDA KURTZ is associate pastor for Christian formation at First Presbyterian Church in Lexington, Kentucky. Now that she’s finished seminary, Linda enjoys being outside, reading for fun, and taking photos of anything but people.
