Church Life

Why Church Can’t Be the Same After the Pandemic

As we gather again, congregants bring the weight of trauma and tensions built up over more than a year spent apart.

Illustration by Chris Gash

Back in March, Iowa pastor Andrew Schmidt could tell from the energy in the sanctuary that it would be Celebrate Church’s most-attended weekend since the pandemic began.

Schmidt welcomed new members, baptized babies, and teared up as he extended his arms to pray blessings over the congregation from the stage. Even with the church split between mask-required and mask-optional services, he said seeing 390 people in the building felt “almost normal.”

It was exciting—and a wake-up call.

“Wait a minute, we didn’t want to just go back to the same things,” he later told fellow leaders at Celebrate, the biggest church in the 7,000-person city of Knoxville. “What is different for us, opportunity-wise?”

With COVID-19 vaccines making way for looser recommendations around distancing and masking, many congregations in the US have been able to get back to normal operations again. But some are not rushing to return to how things were, opting instead to rethink how and why they gather.

Across the country, pastors like Schmidt have ushered weary congregants through virtual worship setups, lonely hospital stays, funerals, job losses, intense political tensions, and relentless debates over pandemic precautions. Churchgoers making their way back through the sanctuary doors in 2021 will carry the weight of trauma and divides built up over more than a year spent apart—if they decide to return to the building at all.

During the first months of the year, fewer than half of regular churchgoers in the US made it to an in-person service, according to the Pew Research Center, though more than three-quarters said their churches had reopened.

Attendance has continued to rise, but some who once filled the rows of gray upholstered chairs in Celebrate Church’s auditorium, and sanctuaries across the country, have gotten used to the convenience of online worship—or have checked out altogether.

“We have to retrain people from the beginning on why you should bother to assemble,” said Collin Hansen, an elder at Redeemer Community Church in Birmingham and coauthor of the upcoming book Rediscover Church: Why the Body of Christ Is Essential. “I think pastors take that for granted and are going to be surprised how many people never had that vision to begin with and never come back when the all-clear is given.”

The immediate challenge is to get people to see the church as a community requiring their involvement rather than as content to consume on their own—a problem that was widespread even before COVID-19 struck.

“The sense of deep-rooted connectedness that most Americans have to a local church is becoming more and more transactional, less and less frequent,” said David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group.

The past year and a half, he said, didn’t just change how Christians met; it changed their hearts and minds toward the church. Barna found that a third of practicing Christians had dropped out of church at some point and 29 percent of senior pastors said they “seriously considered” quitting in the past year.

“Church leaders are going to revert to doing things the ways they’ve always known them, whereas the population in general and millennials are going to find that this disruption altered their habits and perspectives on the role and relevance of the church,” he said. “The gap between the church and society is only going to be larger as we rebuild the church in a postpandemic world.”

During nearly every crisis in US history, through wars and disasters, at least church communities could be together. In 2020, Christians faced the threat of the coronavirus, as well as the country’s compounding political and racial tensions, away from the people and spiritual practices they typically relied on.

“Pastors will have to be transparent about their personal experience in the pandemic,” said Daniel Yang, who coaches church planters across the country as the director of the Send Institute, a think tank for evangelism affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention and Wheaton College. “Modeling that in the congregation gives permission to the congregation and opens them up to doing the same in small groups or one-on-one situations,” he said.

Yang rattles off the kinds of issues that have come up in his community in suburban Chicago: strained marriages, mental health struggles, young adults worried over school and career decisions, racial trauma.

What feels like struggles atop struggles could be an opportunity for the church to live up to its ideals, to care well for each other and look to God in their suffering.

“For us to shy away from these things would be to reject what the Lord has offered,” Yang said.

Ahead of its return to in-person services last month, One Life City Church in Fullerton, California, convened a series of lament panels to bring deeper emotions to the surface. Medical staff cried as they recounted stories from the hardest days treating COVID-19 patients in the ICU, and Asian Americans spoke up about the vulnerability they felt amid the recent surge in hate crimes.

The discussions were meant to bypass the slow awkwardness of surface-level catch-ups and get people talking about how they’re actually doing and what they went through over the past year.

“If you come to church, it almost feels like that’s the place where you hide and pretend everything’s okay. There’s a sad irony to it because our faith is built upon a trauma: Christ died on the cross,” said David Wang, One Life City’s pastor of spiritual formation. Wang is also a clinical psychologist and professor at Biola University. “If anything, our faith has so much to say to people who have survived things, which is most of us. COVID is a mass trauma on a global scale.”

Throughout the pandemic, churches still adapted to extend care in the short term, boosted by an influx of volunteers and donations from people desperate to help. But so much outreach was done from a literal arm’s length, without the ongoing conversation, prayer, and physical togetherness that grounds Christian community.

At Celebrate Church in Iowa, members rose to the challenges of the pandemic, running a drive-thru food bank that expanded from serving 27 families to 170 families a week. Church leaders started the pandemic by calling every member to check in and following up months later.

Larissa Van Donselaar, a member and elder at the Reformed Church in America congregation, happened to cold-call a woman she had never met just after the woman had lost her job, and they prayed together over the phone.

The pandemic forced churches to prioritize people over programs, and Van Donselaar believes that’s where their focus needs to remain. “God doesn’t call us to go back,” she said. “We only go forward and look forward.”

At Celebrate Church, “people are hungry now to be in person with each other and to have real relationships,” said Schmidt, so the church is trying to offer more points of connection. Members who have never done Bible study are now signing up, and leaders are exploring ideas for “micro communities” to open up new settings for prayer, worship, and teaching on a smaller scale.

The “micro gathering” trend, where Christians from the same church worship in homes and backyards, took off during the pandemic, especially in places where restrictions on worship extended for much of 2020. It’s expected to carry on even now that it’s safe to return to full services.

“There are a significant number of pastors asking the question, ‘How do we do church in a more decentralized fashion coming out of the pandemic?’ ” said Yang. “There’s going to be a partial reimagination of how to be the body [of Christ].”

Without big church gatherings during lockdown, Christians didn’t have the chance to sit side by side in pews or come to the Communion table alongside fellow churchgoers with whom they disagree. Instead, debates over major issues like the 2020 election and pandemic responses played out over social media, and it became easier for people to segregate with those who shared their beliefs or even to switch churches.

Experts say many pastors will find themselves reopening to deeper divisions or having lost members who opted to find more like-minded congregations. “You’re going to have to ask, ‘Okay, now that everybody’s vaccinated, where are we? Are we united? Are we on the same page?’ ” said Yang. “That conversation is going to happen for certain kinds of churches.”

Hansen mentioned a retreat center pitching itself as a place for churches to get away and hash everything out when they’re back together. “This isn’t going to be solved through some one-way sermons,” he said. “We need to talk about why this is going to be so difficult for us.”

The conversations won’t be easy, especially if churches are quick to celebrate a “happy ending” rather than address challenges. There’s no trajectory for how a community recovers from a trauma they experienced at once but separately. “If we were to try to skip all the stages of grief and go straight to meaning-making and celebration, we’d just be encouraging avoidance and denial,” said Wang at Biola. “We’d be setting people up for failure in a way that I don’t believe is sound theology either.”

Predominantly Black churches, whose communities suffered a disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths and were hit hardest financially during the pandemic, have a slower trajectory.

“We’re going to have to be ready when people come back together for those who it’ll feel like a dam breaks when they walk into the doors. It’ll feel like they’ve been holding in all this longing to be together, to worship,” said Nicole Massie Martin, executive director of trauma healing at the American Bible Society and a minister at Kingdom Fellowship AME Church in Maryland.

“When they get a chance to do that, I hope and pray the church will be prepared to bring healing and usher people into a new season.”

Kate Shellnutt is senior news editor of Christianity Today. Follow her on Twitter @KateShellnutt.

Also in this issue

When a band of Boko Haram terrorists kidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls from a remote Nigerian town in 2014, it felt like the whole world was joining together to voice its outrage, thanks to a wildly successful social media campaign anchored in the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. In this month’s cover story, two Wall Street Journal reporters with extensive experience in West Africa uncover the defiant Christian faith that sustained the girls throughout their captivity, detailing the strength they drew from stealthily shared prayers, songs, and Bible passages.

Cover Story

Whispered Prayers, Hidden Bibles, Secretly Scribbled Verses: Inside the Resilient Faith of the #BringBackOurGirls Hostages

Promise Keepers Tried to End Racism 25 Years Ago. It Almost Worked.

Testimony

Having Polio Was a Privilege, Not a Punishment

Why Do Some People Think Jesus Was a Racist?

News

Gleanings: June 2021

Editorial

Christian College Boards: Stay Strong on Sexual Ethics

Reply All

News

How Christians Are Rebuilding a Relationship with Colorado Springs

How to Have Patriotism Without Nationalism

The River of Justice Flows Downhill

Brokenness to Beauty

Our July/August Issue: The Cynic’s Life Raft

5 Books to Awaken Interest in Christian History

‘How Could All the Prophets Be Wrong About Trump?’

Patrons’ Saints: Christians Turn to Patreon, Substack, and Kickstarter

Is Jemar Tisby’s Bestselling Book About Racism a Fluke?

News

‘Pray Away the Gay’ Has Gone Away. Why Are Governments Trying to Stop It?

News

After Angela Merkel, German Evangelicals Weigh Political Values

Church History Is a Beautiful Melody Imperfectly Performed

Review

The Bible Doesn’t Come with Instructions. But We Still Need Guidance to Handle It Well.

Review

Even When Money Is Tight, Churches Have More Resources Than They Realize

New & Noteworthy Fiction

News

As Denominations Decline, Faith Looks Different in Nashville

View issue

Our Latest

News

Charlie Kirk Aims to Expand Turning Point USA to Evangelical Campuses

But not all Christian campuses have embraced the conservative group.

News

Sarah Jakes Roberts Evolves T. D. Jakes’s Women’s Conference

At a record-setting event this fall, 40,000 followers listened to her preach about spiritual breakthrough and surrender.

Being Human

Walking the Camino de Santiago with Barrett Harkins

The missionary to pilgrims shares wisdom from the trail.

News

The Evangelical Voters Who Changed Their Minds

Amid a hyperpartisan electorate, a minority plan to vote differently than they did in 2016 and 2020.

News

Meet the Evangelical Expats Staying in Lebanon

Shout to the Lord in a Foreign Language

Worshiping God with words we don’t understand may seem strange. But I consider it a spiritual practice.

Jesus Is Still Right About Persecution

Nine truths believers need to understand to pray well for the suffering body of Christ.

The Bulletin

Electioneering

The Bulletin discusses the final presidential campaign push, churches in the age of screens, and the UN’s work in Gaza.

Apple PodcastsDown ArrowDown ArrowDown Arrowarrow_left_altLeft ArrowLeft ArrowRight ArrowRight ArrowRight Arrowarrow_up_altUp ArrowUp ArrowAvailable at Amazoncaret-downCloseCloseEmailEmailExpandExpandExternalExternalFacebookfacebook-squareGiftGiftGooglegoogleGoogle KeephamburgerInstagraminstagram-squareLinkLinklinkedin-squareListenListenListenChristianity TodayCT Creative Studio Logologo_orgMegaphoneMenuMenupausePinterestPlayPlayPocketPodcastRSSRSSSaveSaveSaveSearchSearchsearchSpotifyStitcherTelegramTable of ContentsTable of Contentstwitter-squareWhatsAppXYouTubeYouTube