'We are going to survive': 5 ways the Church is innovating amid COVID-19
Unconventional meeting venues
With houses of worship shuttered across the U.S. and limits placed on the number of worshipers, congregations were forced to find new and innovative ways to meet.
Brian Howard, executive director of the Acts 29 church planting network, told CP that one of the greatest challenges facing church plants this year was the issue of location.
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“So many church plants meet in schools, so they've had to be really creative at finding different locations to meet,” he said. “Now, we have churches that are planting in the parking lots of other churches because they can't get into their own facility right now.”
In addition to parking lots, churches are both planting and meeting in homes, outside on lawns, public parks, banks, and other unconventional venues.
Howard noted that while COVID-19 posed unprecedented challenges for the church at large, church plants are ideally situated to reinvent and innovate.
“They're not usually burdened by a lot of structures,” he said, adding that coming out of the pandemic, churches “may be a little bit more decentralized.”
“I don’t think we’ll rely as much on facilities,” he said. “We've learned that our job is not to get people to our building, but our job is to take Jesus to people. When they can come to our building, great, but if they can't, we still have to take Jesus to people.”
