Apr 20, 2021
The 2 Per-Specht-ives Podcast Hosts David and Joshua Specht take you to church.
The father and son ask, “Is church still church if it’s in your living room?”
When churches adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic by hosting virtual services, the congregation shifted to online services over physical ones. Dave and Josh examine whether churches need to change their offerings or find a way to attract their congregation back to campus.
Your generational lesson: Church is meant to reach and teach. Whatever the method is, it’s just an avenue to accomplish the mission and the community is what makes the difference in your congregation.
Your Gen. X Advice: We have an obligation to pass on what we believe and why we believe it. With the current generation receiving more information than ever before, we need a community to counteract the outside world that doesn’t share your beliefs.
Your Gen. Z Advice: Church shouldn’t be a congregation, it should be a community. The congregation keeps the lights on, but it’s the community that grows the people. Once you reach that mindset, that’s when the walls come down and you will embrace the capacity of what the church can do.
Change in the Church is nothing new, David points out how it shifted to focusing on small groups and contemporary services in the early 2000’s. But when the Church went virtual, David said it created a discipline issue for the believer where inconvenience can override the calling to attend in-person.
Josh adds that he doesn’t see it ever going back to how it was. The many different ways to reach a congregation means the Church has to get out of its “always been done this way” rut.
That doesn’t mean propping up a camera to stream the standard service and calling it online ministry. Josh muses that In order for a young believer to grow, they have to be more worried about surrounding themselves with a community of Christians, even if that’s via online, instead of four walls.