Iron Works Church outside Philadelphia was drawing 75 to 100 worshipers on a given Sunday. Then, in the spring, the 4-year-old church closed its doors to comply with COVID-19 restrictions.
On July 19, it resumed in-person worship services, albeit with the standard restrictions. Twenty-six people showed up. “We are not reopening the church, we are replanting it,” says Iron Works pastor Robbie Schmidtberger.
Iron Works is not alone. Across the denomination — in this time that’s unlike anything any church planter has ever seen — new churches have faced unique challenges. Many have found ways to reinvent themselves. They are also wondering if they will survive.
Catalyzing Ambiguity
During the past few months, Iron Works members and friends have found new ways to connect as a community: virtual game nights, meal trains for new parents, grocery runs, flowers left on front doorsteps, snail mail, babysitting, helping people move, and drive-by “honkings” to help each other celebrate or grieve.
“Church planters need a high ambiguity tolerance and, finances aside, are comfortable with the unknown,” Schmidtberger says. In other words, church planters are flexible.
In many ways, Resurrection Church, a newly particularized urban congregation in Ottawa, Ontario, found freedom and opportunity for generosity during the shutdown. “Because our services were canceled and we meet at a local school, we immediately had $500 a week freed up to do other things,” says Ben Jolliffe, Resurrection’s planter and teaching elder. “We simply gave a lot of that money away to people who were out of work or needed help.”
They also ran a coloring contest for neighborhood kids, started a biweekly trivia night on Zoom, and set up a billboard outside the church (and online) with the title “Ottawa Mourns” for people to jot down their griefs about the pandemic.
Young and Fragile
Still, Jolliffe thinks the 5-year-old congregation likely struggled more during social distancing than more established churches.
“The next two months will be the true test of community … Did the shutdown crisis create a deeper hunger for community, or did people become complacent and comfortable with their isolation?”
“One of the downsides of being a church plant is that you don’t have the long-established relationships of a mature church,” he says. “A lot of people are burned out on video calls, and attendance at small groups and after-church hangouts has been dropping off.”
Schmidtberger says that church plants are also losing volunteers. “After 19 weeks of not having services, there is a real cost,” he says. “People love to serve. I find that it’s prayer and service that builds community. [But] given the CDC and state guidelines, we could only have 10 people in a room at any given time. Some people are now accustomed to not serving.”
Or, in a given family, one parent will show up to church to serve, while the other stays home with the children, cutting the volunteer potential in half. In Schmidtberger’s opinion, more established churches don’t tend to lose as many volunteers.
He also notes that the “burden of ministry” often rests entirely upon the pastor’s shoulders in a church plant. With an established church, staff members, the session, and diaconate all shoulder the burden together.
Hansoo Jin, the planting pastor of Harris Creek Community Church in Baltimore, says that another challenge church plants often face is the reality of not owning their own building. While for Resurrection Church, the lack of building ownership created increased financial flexibility, for Harris Creek, a racially diverse congregation of about 30 regular attendees, it has meant being displaced from their regular worship location in a school.
Because of the coronavirus, their district’s schools have been closed to outside groups. Harris Creek had to relocate to another church’s building when they resumed services, which means they must now worship in the late afternoon. Jin says the number of folks he describes as “MIA” can be attributed to the time change.
Harris Creek continues to conduct services via livestream, and that has been both positive and negative, Jin says. “We usually have a few new visitors each week who probably wouldn’t have visited otherwise. But many people in our church don’t have access to reliable internet because they are poor or elderly. So they haven’t been able to fully participate in the life of the church.”
Time Will Tell
According to Schmidtberger, the next couple of months are critical. “The next two months will be the true test of community — is it superficial or deep? Did the shutdown crisis create a deeper hunger for community, or did people become complacent and comfortable with their isolation? It’s going to be hard.”
Still, he is hopeful.
“It’s important to remember that exclusive Sunday attendance is not an accurate gauge of discipleship, but who participates in midweek Bible studies or helped relaunch worship. We have 30 people in our midweek summer studies. Worship is known as a super-spreader event, so more people are cautious.”