13 Practical Tips for Churches During COVID-19
This video interview with Dick & Jonathan Hardy addresses 13 practical tips for churches during COVID-19 and the primary areas of concern for churches during this outbreak.
I want to just kind of set the stage with a little bit of what we’re going to be covering today relative to COVID-19. So, a lot of the things that we talk about, you may have already heard, or you may have been thinking about.
There is certainly going to be some things you probably haven’t been thinking about. We recognize that everyone is at different points on the spectrum in terms of their preparedness for dealing with these issues.
Some people have kind of gotten things figured out. Others are still trying to figure it out. Our hope is to be able to provide tools for you. No matter the size of your church, no matter how prepared or unprepared you still feel as of today, that you’ll be able to have the tools you need to be able to move forward with where you are now.
Church resources mentioned in this interview include:
Care Plan
Care Team Calling Script
13 Budget Cut Ideas for Churches
How to Trim the Church Budget without Losing
Cultivating Generosity 4-Part Video Series
Generosity Checklist
Catalyst Giving Platform for Churches
How to Do Kids & Youth Ministry During COVID-19
The 5-Day Leadership Challenge for Pastors
FREE, 14-Day Access to the Leveraging Momentum video Series
How to Post a Church Service Video on Vimeo
How to Post a Church Service Video on YouTube
How to Set Up Church Meetings with Zoom
How to Post a Church Service Video on Facebook
Paycheck Protection Program and Your Church or Nonprofit Resource
ECFA Webinar Outline CARES Act Provisions Relevant for Nonprofits
Knowing that this is not just over here. We have several more weeks of churches not meeting. So, we’re going to be talking about how we still fulfill the mission that we are called to accomplish as pastors, ministry leaders as a church, knowing that we’re all confined to our homes right now.
What do you do with giving? This is one of the things where there are people out there talking about that, but we need to get this out there. What do we do? How do we get this thing going? How do you pay the bills? When expenses are higher than income because of the decrease giving?
What can we do here? We’re going to be talking about that. We’re going to be talking about what happens with the personnel if you happen to have a church that has a staff member or multiple staff members, besides yourself. What are we going to do? How do we approach this?
Of course, a lot of people are talking about the church online thing right now. We’ll cover that a little bit.
Then, what about after this whole thing is over? The reality is that there is going to be a period when Covid-19 is over. So, then we do. What are we doing now to prepare for that? We’re going to be talking about that as well.
So, I’m really excited to go through a lot of this content here today. We’re going to fire away, we’re going to give you ideas, we’re going to make this practical and hopefully, you will find some nuggets of truth that will help you through it.
13 Key Areas of Concern
Let’s go. You know we wanted to know the things pastors saw as key areas of concern for them. So, we sent out an email asking pastors. And if you’re on our email list, you received it. If you’re not on an email list, go to Leaders.Church and you can sign up you can get our email free resources.
Hey, you know, we wanted to get people’s input, we had hundreds of people responding, I don’t even know the total number. We just had hundreds of responses.
Those responses gave us what we’re calling the top 13 key areas of concern. Certainly, there are nuances of these 13. Other subjects would be out there that we aren’t covering today. But these are kind of the big keys that we were finding that are common threads through all of the comments people were sending in.
So, with that being said, let’s go ahead and tackle the first issue. And one of the things I want to jump off with not a numbers issue. I’m a numbers guy and I want you to know, we really took this serious in the sense of we wanted to be able to talk to the needs that you in the pastorate are facing.
We’ve got over 27 pages of notes, typed single space of comments, observations, and that’s where these 13 rose to the top. We’re not saying this is an exhaustive list, but it is an important list. These clearly are the 13 things that we think are front and center for a lot of pastors.
1. Mission
The first one really kind of jumped up at me and had not been on my radar prior to this. And it is a no brainer. It is that is mission. That email from the pastor asked this, “What do I do when I still have this burning desire to reach people for Jesus?”
Here’s the deal. In this discussion we’re going to talk about money. We’re going to talk about care of the flock and so on. But the reality is, this pastor was really addressing keeping your eye on the ball.
That’s a role of leadership. While everything is swirling around you, you’ve got to keep your eye on the ball. And that ball is our mission, to reach spiritually lost people with the gospel.
Before, during and after COVID-19, people still need Jesus.
So, we’re going to talk about a lot of nuts and bolts things here. We’re going to get you some real practical advice. We’re going to get you the links that are going to be helpful to you. But first, we want you to focus while you’re doing this. You have to help the congregation do this now in understanding their need to continue to spread the gospel.
Well, I know even personally that’s hard for a lot of pastors because they feel like right now, all their focus has been on taking care of the family. We’ve got the food, though. We’ve got what we need, especially knowing that we’ve got this lockdown coming.
Obviously, this shut down has started and every person including you watching this has to be doing those things exactly, taking care of your family. Further, the people in your church have to take care of their families. And so, everyone is kind of focused on themselves right now. Which isn’t a bad thing.
That’s not a wrong thing. But don’t forget it. We can’t forget that we also have to be thinking about outside our walls, how can we care for the people in our neighborhood?
How can we are there things we could do to use this time not only not as a crisis time, but as an opportunity time to go spread the love of God. Maybe it’s doing calling, going door to door and putting mailers out.
Maybe this is the opportunity for the church to be the church. This can be the church’s greatest hour in your community. Small church or large, this can be the opportunity to touch people at points, you would never touch them otherwise, because people are responsive. This is going to be a great opportunity.
Now, one of the things that pastors are navigating is this issue of fear and uncertainty. Even as the pastor, you’re human, you may be fearful. All of us have uncertainty about what this is going to be and where’s it going to land?
But our role as a leader as a pastor, is to help pastor people through fear and uncertainty. We do not live with a spirit of fear. God did not create that in us. We have the strength of the Lord and part of what our role is as a leader is to help people in the congregation.
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People may say, “I’m afraid of this. I’m afraid.” That’s okay. Don’t dismiss them like they shouldn’t feel that way. But help bring strength to them. Help them understand that we have a stronger power with the Lord with us.
You know, one of the very practical things that’s going to happen relative to mission is that you’re not going to build baptize people. So, if you’re a church that baptizes on regular basis and we certainly would encourage that, during this time you’re not. And that’s okay.
Just put them on hold. And think ahead to when this is over. You’re going to be able to put together one ripping great baptism while all of this is backed up? It’s just the reality of what we’re dealing with, pointing people to Jesus and know that sooner or later we’ll be able to baptize.
2. Giving
This next one is huge. It’s the subject of giving. Without giving, churches aren’t going to be able to function the way that they’ve been functioning. I know this for a lot of pastors is a real concern. They’re not even thinking just about their own personal salaries. They are thinking about just paying the bills.
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Online giving
And so, giving is massive. Unfortunately, there are a lot of churches that do not have online giving set up prior to this whole issue. Obviously, now they are more than ever pastors are seeing the need for online giving. If you didn’t see it before, that’s okay. Don’t get down on yourself. But you’ve got to move forward with online giving now because, you’re not going back to church this coming Sunday.
So, we can get online going in a matter of days. You might not have it for this coming Sunday, but certainly you could for the next Sunday. It just depends on how fast everything can move for you. But getting that set up is important.
Now, we’re including the link right here where you can sign up for one of the resources that we recommend for online giving.
There are a number of giving platforms out there. However, Leaders.Church has partnered with Catalyst Giving as a referral partner because we have personal relationship them. Dick Hardy and Catalyst Giving co-founder, Anthony Mason are good friend probably going back some 15-18 years. Certainly, you can use whatever one platform you want.
Here’s the thing. You want to get online giving figured out. But then you also want to get recurring giving, teaching your people how to set up recurring giving. For some, you may say, Well, I don’t even know how. I didn’t know where to begin.
Well, if you go work with Catalyst Giving or any other giving platform, they’re going to help you get set up. They’re going to show you how to do all this. It may feel daunting, but it’s not. You just take your time. If you need help find people that can help you. Certainly, the giving platforms will provide the assistance as well.
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Recurring giving
In short, you want to encourage recurring giving. Now more than ever pastors are seeing the need for recurring giving. It a good way, it just puts giving on autopilot and that’s what you want. People just set it up and then that way they know it’s set it and they can forget it.
And that is helpful, especially for churches right now. You want to make sure you know that giving is coming in. Teaching the importance of recurring giving is critical.
There are other ways you can encourage giving during this time. You can still collect offerings right now, besides online giving, some people don’t like online giving, because there’s merchant fees, and hey, I get that. But in our digital age, I tend to feel that churches actually probably bring in more income Exactly. Through the online giving because they’re making it easier for people.
So, even after you subtract out the merchant fees, you’ll be money ahead than if you did not offer online giving it all. Use Summit Park Church in Kansas City as an example. As of 12-31-19, that church had, on average per month, 55% of the giving was coming in online. Maybe even some months, there was like 60%.
So, if you figure what all 60% of the church are giving in this way, would they all be giving cash and check in offering? Well, no way, the reality is they would not be. So, that little charge of merchant fees is not the end of the world, particularly compared to the volume that comes in.
I just feel confident in that little merchant fee. Don’t let that don’t let that scare you. I guess one of the things I just want to reinforce a little bit and create a clear delineation between some of our terms here.
First of all, the time for you to set up your online giving is at the end of this video. Do it right when the video ends. Click the link and get started. Yes, finish the video and then click the link to get started.
We’ve talked to Anthony and we’ve pressed them on how fast he can get this turned around for you. We asked, “Can you do it 24 hours?” Well, they said, “No, we can’t do it in 24 hours, but you know we can in a matter of a few days.”
In short, pastor, you’ve got to start. Yep. And you can’t just keep talking about it, you have to start getting that set up.
The Difference Between Online and Recurring Giving
Now, let me make sure you understand the difference between someone who gives online and someone who sets up recurring giving. So, I may say, hey, I want to give $200 to my church. So, I go online. And my church has the ability for me to just make a contribution online, either with a credit card, a debit card, or through my bank account, and boom, I make a $200 contribution to my church. That is an online giving, one-time gift.
Now, that’s wonderful. We want that but what you really want is if my wife and I normally would pay, say $400 a month, maybe $200 every other week in tithes. So, I’m going to set up an auto draft from my checking account every two weeks to pull $200.
Could be a credit (if a person likes to get points) or a debit card is what you put down. You just set it and it runs.
Here’s the real world impact of this. If you’re in the north, you know what happens. Boom! You get pounded with a couple of snow days. Guess what? The church’s income tanks.
We’re in this right now with COVID-19. You want to encourage recurring giving. You not only set up online giving, but when you talk to your people just talk to them about recurring giving.
For most of the younger ones, particularly those under 40. They don’t have checkbooks. I know, that’s hard for the 60+ crowd to even fathom. But they don’t. Everything is online for them. Why not church?
I just want to reinforce. I don’t need to belabor it, but there is a difference between an online gift and a recurring gift. You want both but you particularly want the recurring giving to happen all the time.
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I want to sidebar real fast and let those of our Leaders.Church members know that inside the membership, we have a video series called Cultivating Generosity. That’s a great, great series. It’s four videos chock full, I mean, just loaded with ideas and thoughts of how to how to stir it up.
There’s all sorts of stuff on how to get giving going and how to increase your online giving and your recurring giving. It‘s not necessarily talking specifically about giving during a COVID-19 type crisis, but just in general, what you can do and how you can apply right now.
If you’re a Leaders.Church member, make sure to check that out Cultivating Generosity. As an aside, we have another series in there that Rob Ketterling did. It’s five videos of him called Growing Giving. That’s a whole different approach. Both are excellent video series that I’d encourage you to jump in and look at.
As well, there’s resource we’d like to give you called the Generosity Checklist. This accompanies the Cultivating Generosity video series. We’re making that available, even if you’re not a member to get this checklist.
We’re going to have a link here next with the video for the Generosity Checklist. So, you can check that out. If you’re not a Leaders.Church member, you still can get some of these tips and tactics.
There are a total of 37 ideas in the Cultivating Generosity video series. You would work through the Generosity Checklist side-by-side with the video series. By and large, it’s going to track right down together.
By the way, pastor, you won’t do this overnight. You will not do this in a matter of a few days. I mean, I’ll use the word painstaking, not in a bad way. But if you’re going to make this work, it’s going to take diligence, paying attention to everything.
We walk you through what to do if you’re not doing something that’s on the checklist. Well, obviously you need to start doing it.
But if you are doing something on the checklist, don’t just check it off and move one. We want you to quantify that thing you’re doing. Ask yourself, what can you do to improve that quantity?
Jonathan, you just referenced Summit Park Church did 55% in online giving. So, the question going forward for Summit Park is, “What can we do to move from 55% to 60%?”
So, if you’re at zero, you can say, What do I need to go from zero to 10%? If you’re 15%, what do we do to do 15 to 25? You see what I’m talking about.
At every point along the way, you’re going to get stronger. The church is going to gain more money, you’re going to increase the strength of ministry, because you’re cultivating generosity.
I know we’re spending a little more time on this particular area than we will on some of the other ones coming up here. But this is this is one of those things that is true for all churches. If they don’t get this figured out, they’re in big trouble. Therefore, we take a little extra time.
Now, we recognize some people already have this setup. So, this is basic for those folks. If so, hang on, because we’ve got some other things come in here.
What to Do with Pushback?
As an aside on this topic, what do you do with people who are going pushback against the online giving concept? I think this is where you’re going to need to step up with spiritual leadership and talk about the importance of taking advantage of all the tools that are available to us as the church to facilitate the generosity that’s in the hearts of people.
That’s where I’d be talking to people. First of all, as the pastor, here’s the kind of language we would use. “You don’t have to use this. But we’re encouraging you to use this, because this is God’s house. God has put this in place for us. COVID-19 did not catch God by surprise. God did not wake up and say, ‘oh, my goodness, where did that come from?’”
As the spiritual leader, you want to help. Sometimes you’re going to have some of your older folks that are going to have a little trouble with this. They still want to write a check. Bless them. Thank them for the check. But for those who are able to do it, we’re just saying we’re making an alternative available.
That’s going to help people give because they can’t come to the church when they want to give. It‘s going to help the church because we want to sustain the church during this time.
You’re not telling people what they have to do. You’re giving them options. And further, you’re not telling them to give because you need to pay a bill or because we’re in debt.
Say this, “We need you to give because you want to give. You give because God honors when you give.”
Even though we’re in a moment where it maybe feels a little desperate and we need that money right now, don’t be desperate. If you try to talk people into giving, because it’s going to pay the bills, sometimes you’ll win in the short term. But you’ll never win in the long-term. No one likes to give for this reason.
But if you say, “Hey, even in hard times, God honors a faithful generous giver” you will see good things happen. Use scripture about sowing and reaping and all the different concepts that the Bible talks about. That’s the vision that people want to continue to get behind. That’s huge.
Now, one last thing. You’re not going to have online giving setup maybe for a few days or a week. So, what do you do now?
Assuming that your state or community is not allowing you to meet, you can have people mail their giving to the church. You can have people drop it off at your church facility. Having a drop off time could be an option for you. In short, be creative with and thoughts and actions.
3. Income and Expenses
Now, what I’d like to do unless you have anything else on get on to the paying bills side of things, because that’s really kind of the third area of concern that we want to be addressing.
You know, the reality is right now for some churches, expenses are higher than income. What do they do?
You know, we’ve talked at length about this on other videos. In fact, we created a budget cut interview that we did. As well, we have a Budget Cut PDF we’re making available to you.
In the notes below, you’ll be able to access that PDF that articulate 13 budget cut ideas, and you can access the interview. So, if you want to drill in tighter, as to what we would recommend in terms of budget cut ideas, you certainly can do that.
We’re not going to we’re not going to rehash that entire video, but I will tell you, you know, the two big pieces of your budget are your income your expenses. We’ve just talked about how you could increase your income. You need to pay attention to your income.
(NOTE: Do you need to trim back the church budget? Click here)
Yes, I understand it’s probably slipping right now. But you need to pay attention to income. And by the way, in doing so, you need to acknowledge that nothing is going to change overnight. But they will change things very positively as you continue to go out weeks and months down the line.
But when you come over to the expense side of things, Jonathan, that’s always the part that pastors just hate. Dealing with budget cuts. I mean, I should start sounding like the federal government, although they never really cut. They just spend. A little political commentary there.
When you’re in the real world of cutting the budget in your church, that is not so fun. But you need to get started.
One of the things I would do is to get your Treasurer to give you the church’s financial statement for the last month and last quarter. Begin to create big buckets of how you spend your money.
Certainly, compensation for the pastor, utility bills, mortgage on the property and maybe your individual ministries. Look at those and say, “Are there places where we can trim $1 here, trim $1 there?”
One of the greatest ways to trim a budget is to do that – to trim it. Don’t go in and say, “Oh man, we’re going to cut the utility bill in half.” Because unless you’re going to stop heating or cooling the building at the level you’ve been used to it, cutting in half is not reasonable. You can make reasonable adjustments.
But if you’ll pay attention and trim here, trim there, you’ll be amazed at how much you can pull out of it.
We also talked in the budget cut video of doing an across the board reduction. Maybe you say, “Okay, we’re going to take 1% and drop everything line item by 1%.” Some of you right now, when I said that, you’re laughing, because you’re saying, “1% right? You know, I’m dying. You know, we don’t have any money coming in. 1%? Really? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
I understand you’ve got to be more aggressive than that. But trimming, cutting, removing expenses. It’s a step-by-step process.
Here’s a term for you to apply but don’t publicly use this term. It is the term, “non-essential.” “We’re going to cut non–essential expenses.” Nobody thinks their budget is non–essential. Everybody thinks theirs is essential.
What you want to do is you want to create this sense that we’re all in this together with the whole body, all of your leadership, all your board. If you have staff, your staff and key lay leaders need to acknowledge, “We’re all in this together.”
Yes, the pastor needs to lead them through trimming the budget. One of the worst case scenarios after joking about the 1% thing, is that we may have to freeze all spending. Maybe you’ll need no spending except for paying the mortgage or utilities.
During this kind of time, you have to say to people even if this budget item was approved, it’s now frozen? Everything stops? When you do this, most people get it.
Sometimes you just have to explain it and make it ultra–clear. Like when we say no spending that means literally no spending. Maybe even implement where you have to get an approval if you’re going to try to spend something.
So, obviously if you can increase the income through online giving and then use some of these budget cut ideas we talked about, that’s going to help you. When you do both increase income and reduce expenses, that’s going to give you that margin you need to help you.
Again, take a look at that PDF. It’s a free PDF there, there’s a link here along with this video. Hopefully that’s helpful for you.
4. Take Care of Yourself
So, what’s next? You know, we’ve talked about those last couple things. We talked about income and expenses and giving and, you know, that’s the nuts and bolts stuff.
Now, we want to talk a minute about you. You’re leading the charge here. And if you’re like a bunch of pastors I know, you take this pretty seriously.
You take God’s call on your life as a high calling and you’ve given yourself to this church that the Lord has called you to. You believe that this body of believers in your community, is the is the Bride of Christ.
Here’s the deal. If you don’t take care of yourself, you and the church are in for a world of hurt.
I’m going to give you some basic things to think about and to do. In this part of the blog, the 65–year old with some experience will tell you to listen up. If you listen to what Uncle Dick is going to tell you right now, you’ll be good to go. This is going to save your bacon.
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Take a Sabbath
You have to take a Sabbath. Whether you were taking it now or not. You better take your Sabbath. “Oh, but Dick I’ve got people I have to get to. I can’t not keep working.”
I got it. Well, let me tell you some. If you’re shot emotionally, spiritually, physically and in every other way, you’re not going to take care of anybody.
Why is it when you’re in the airplane, and the flight attendant tells you about the air mask dropping? Who do they tell you to put it on first? Yeah, exactly. Put it on yourself. “But I’ve got my little kid.”
Why yourself first? Because you have to be taken care of in order to take care of the little kid.
Pastor, I’m just telling you that you have to take your Sabbath. I understand it’s all hands on deck, during this time, but you’d better find time to rest.
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Responsibility for your church
There’s a uniqueness about your role in the ministry. There’s this emotional spiritual weight that sits on your shoulders and it never leaves. You have the responsibility for your church and it’s there all the time.
I’ve had it happen a few times where board members in churches have said, “Oh, these guys take these two to three week vacations. You know, I’m still out the shop, but I’ve got to keep working.”
I’m not saying that you, as a pastor, are better than your board member who works at the shop or the business downtown. But there’s a uniqueness about the call of God to ministry. And there’s this spiritual weight that sits on your shoulders 24/7/365.
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Take care of yourself emotionally
You need to take care of yourself emotionally. If you don’t, you’re going to find yourself burning out. I’m telling you; we’re going to see stories of pastors that just burned the candle at both ends and all of a sudden, they crashed and burned. I don’t want that to happen to you.
You have to take care of yourself. You know, we‘re even talking about this just in general, how this is a reality for pastors week–to–week. Then you throw COVID-19 in there. All the things that we’ve talked about, and we’re going to be talking about here create exponential pressure.
These points of counsel are just compiling to the point where you’re going to make sure you don’t crack through this COVID-19 pressure. You might not feel it right now. If you don’t, that’s amazing.
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We don’t want you to ever feel it. Even two, three months down the road. That’s why we just spent as much time on this subject as we just did.
If you need to talk to somebody, talk to somebody. Yes, I’ve been around the block long enough to know you have to talk. There have been times in my life I had to talk to somebody. I know it’s not the “man” thing to do you know, because we’re tough guys.
Well, to you “tough” guy, “stupid” guy, you need to talk and do so now. Knock off the macho. If you think that you can do it, the enemy is deluding you. You can’t do it alone.
Find somebody get on the phone with them. Lots of dominant denominations have helped lines. Get on the phone talk to them. You can do it confidentially. If you don’t have that, just Google it. You can find places that will talk to you to take care of emotional health. spiritual health.
On the spiritual side of things that we you know, I recognize even for my own life right now, the kids are home and they’re staying home. Of course, I work here at home as well. This new normal has kind of caused me to have to rethink my schedule. You may have that as well.
To take the time to work your schedule for aspects of your wellbeing is critical. You need to make sure you’re taking that time personally with the Lord where you are regular communing with God. You need to schedule this.
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Take care of yourself physically
You need to take care of you physical wellbeing. Obviously, you know doing what you can to exercise is going to be helpful even if you can’t be super social with people.
(Jonathan) I’ve started the last couple days going for a run in the morning. I used to go to the gym but can’t go the gym now. I’m now going for a run in the morning and bringing the kids with me on the bike. They’re bike riding and that’s actually been great for the family because they’ve been more amicable in the morning.
(Dick) I’ll tell you I love jumping in the pool and we’re part of a rec club here in town. When they canceled, that was the end of me jumping in the pool. You have got to do whatever you have got to do.
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Take care of yourself relationally
I would say even as a pastor, you need to care for yourself relationally, as well. Now we’re going to get caught up in this thought that we can’t relate because we can’t touch. Not true. You can relate.
The other day, my wife talked to a girlfriend of hers who was in our wedding years ago. They just got on the phone. I text a buddy of mine up in Iowa. “Hey, Doug, just thinking about you, man, and was great, you know, just reflecting the great years.”
You can connect with people by text. That’s the great part of technology today. You need to be connecting with people for your health. Be intentional about it.
5. Downsizing Staff
We have had a number of guys/gals asked us about, “Okay, how do I deal with the potential downsizing of staff now?”
You know, a lot of guys don’t have staff, so you don’t have to worry about this issue. And hopefully, you’re not going to fire yourself. But maybe you’ve got a youth pastor or an Admin or something.
You’re seeing the handwriting on the wall, that you’re going to have to do something on that because even small compensation is a big money item.
Let me tell you, that’s the last resort. Yeah, when you’re dealing with budget stuff, we probably should have talked about it just in front of this piece. But this is last resort. I want to encourage you to deep dive into every other part of your budget before you do this.
Do everything you can to find nickels and dimes here and there. During this time, you want to keep somebody who works for you and not terminate.
I’ve never yet found a youth pastor or kids pastor who’s making too much money. So, they’re living on the low end of compensation anyway.
So, now at the end of the day, you may have to do the very difficult thing of either cutting someone back to part time or cutting their hours in different ways or their compensation, but I will say even when you do that, make sure it is last resort.
By the way, cutting back someone’s compensation or cutting them to half time can sometimes be as painful as terminating. None of it is fun.
Pastor, do everything you can to be open with your staff member. That’s a key here. Make sure they know you’re a last resort kind of guy. You’re not the kind of pastor that says, “I’m going to come in and slice and dice.”
Again, if you have to deal with precious human resource, a staff member, it’s the last resort. Do other budget cut things first. Work your income.
Then if you absolutely have to trim, be sure you’re talking to a staff member well in advance of having to do that. Everybody wants that kind of courtesy.
6. Missionary Support
Let me also talk to you about something that jumped at me yesterday, I had a couple of pastors throw this to me, and that is missionary support. I’ve had a couple of missionaries mention it, as well because they’re on the receiving end right of your regular monthly giving.
I really want to encourage you to be talking to your missionaries right now. Don’t ignore your missionaries. Don’t give them the silent treat. By being honest with them. If your income has dropped 40% say so to your missionaries. Your missionaries aren’t stupid. They get it.
They may be in Bolivia or Kenya, but they know what’s going on. And, of course, they’re having to make adjustments with their budgets. Do everything you can to help missionaries during this time God will honor you. Doing everything you can to fulfill and exceed the commitments you’ve made to missionaries will serve you and the church well.
I get it when you need to trim but talk to them. Don’t avoid them. Be honest with them.
If you’ve got four missionaries that you’re supporting at $50 a month, rather than cut two of them out completely, take all four of them down to $25 a month. Same net effect. You’re asking them to share the pain together and everybody is still keeping something.
7. Church Online
Now the seventh area of concern a lot of pastors talked about relates to the technical components of church online. This is a whole new arena for so many, especially for those who didn’t have live streaming prior to COVID-19 hitting.
Whether you have had live streaming before or not, you know that you need to be online now if you’re going to be if you’re going to be teaching at all. Doing any kind of devotionals or regular preaching at all now has to be online.
(NOTE: Is your church positioned for growth? Take the 3-Minute Church Growth Audit to find out! Click here)
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Live streaming
Here’s where we’re at in our recommendation for you. We don’t recommend at this point you try to figure out the live streaming thing. We don’t think that’s the best move for most churches now.
If you have some tech savvy people or if you’re tech savvy you certainly could get this thing up and running and working smoothly. If you can do that, then have at it.
But the reality is, you can accomplish the same thing by doing what recommend here. You can still be teaching people the Word of God.
If you do sermon series, if you do expositional preaching or whatever study you’re in right now, you can keep that going. It‘s really not that hard. And we’re going to give you actual tools that are going to help you to do it.
Basically, here’s our recommendation. Just get something up online. Don’t try to do the live streaming. Don’t try to get it all figured out. When that time comes for you to get live streaming going that’s great. But for this Sunday trying to live streaming is not the best use of your time.
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Record and post videos
Rather what we would suggest is record a video of yourself preaching. We’re going to put in the notes here a link to another page where you can watch a tutorial of, of how to post things online; YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo.
We recommend you record your message on your computer. We’re shooting this video interview is on the computer. Most people have a computer with a webcam so use that. If you don’t have a webcam, but you have a smartphone, use your smartphone.
If you don’t have a smart phone, then use some other sort of camera. Maybe you know someone who can shoot it for you. Every person has access to a camera. You don’t even have to do it in your sanctuary. You can literally do it in your in your office.
People aren’t as concerned about that background. They are connecting with you as the ministry leader. The importance of getting the gospel, the Word of God our is still communicated. That way it’s speaking to them and their needs of life right now.
What we’re done is created a link here to go check out how to how to get this stuff posted. You could put it on YouTube, you could put it on if you have a Facebook page, you could put it there. You could put it on Vimeo.
Then on any of those platforms, literally, once the video is posted and schedules, just email your people the link to go watch it. Schedule your Sunday sermon for exactly the time you do church. Now, it might not everyone might not watch it at that exact time on Sunday morning but that’s okay.
If you really think about, what is the church? The church is its people. It’s not the building. It’s not the service time. As believers, we’re supposed to be together in community with people, gathering together for the teaching of the word.
That’s a bit tricky to do both right now in our traditional context, but not impossible. It’s just a new venue. The method of communication is now online.
I’m really speaking mostly to those who don’t have the live online streaming, or those types of platforms set up. I guess the encouragement is, just do something. Don’t let it overwhelm you. Don’t feel like don’t add more work to your life right now and more pressure and more stress. You don’t need that. This is easy, right?
Shoot video on your phone, have your spouse or family member or friend record a video of you speaking to the people or preaching. And when you preach, even if it’s a little bit more abbreviated, give people valuable content from the Word of God.
You might even take this opportunity to create discussion guide questions they can discuss with small groups or with their family or with their kids. Use this time to continue what the Lord has on your heart for the church. Capitalize on our ability to use online technology to communicate.
Now, be careful to not get into the comparison mode. “All my other buddies, they’re going live stream, or they’ve been live streaming for a year and a half, and they’ve been telling me I should do it. So, now I want to do it.” Don’t compare.
Relative to live streaming, I (Dick) am part of a very large churches. And I’m in a city of probably 200,000 people. So, I don’t live out in the boonies. But literally when our small group looked at doing a meeting together on Sundays while the pastor was doing online live streaming, you know what one of the biggest concerns was? Whether the video would buffer properly?
Even if from the church end you could do it right now, you’re dependent on Herb and Mabel out in the congregation to even have an internet speed sufficient to watch the live stream. They might be out there just a step faster than dial up.
In Short
Go with the simple way to get the content out. If you’re in a series on Second Corinthians and you did chapters one, two, and three, then start with chapter four on your videos to post. Get that bad boy posted. Again, we have the video instruction tutorial on how to do that.
Then on Sunday morning or Saturday night, emailed out to the congregation. I know you don’t have to schedule your post for the normal Sunday AM church time, but just for people who are used to that happening, boom, there’s the video.
Of course, that means you have to make sure you’ve got people’s contact information, their cell phones and you’ve got their email. That way you can text everyone or you can send out a big broadcast email to everyone.
You don’t need the live stream headache right now. So, shoot video and post.
8. Follow Government Guidelines
The next one up is relative to the personal relationships you have with people in the church. The overwhelming majority pastors I talk with are trying to do everything that local state and federal officials are asking of them. I’m not hearing anybody get into any of the partisan divide, Democrats vs Republicans.
COVID-19 is generating wartime kinds of actions against this disease. Now, when you have someone in the church say, “I don’t think the government should be telling us what to do. That’s just not right.”
As the leader, you know, there’s separation of church and state. You know, your role is going to be to help coach people along to the understanding. Pour yourself into Romans 13, one to seven and just digest it yourself.
Then don’t beat people up over the head with it but just bring them along in understanding the importance of the church working in concert with our community. We want to bring health to our community.
If any organization is going to model cooperation and leadership, this is the time for the Church to model. We don’t need the church running sideways to government leaders.
(NOTE: Do you need to trim back the church budget? Click here)
Honestly, your mayor, City Council, county commissioners, Health Commission officials, guess what? They’re local. They go to your Walmart, your schools, your ball games.
And when things are not in lockdown, these folks eat at the same restaurants and their kids go to the same schools as yours. So, talk to them as a pastor to see what you can do?
You know what? In most communities, believe it or not, you can pick up your phone and can talk to your mayor. You may say, “Well, you don’t know our mayor.” That’s right, I don’t. But I am giving you good advice when I tell you to offer to help them AND at the same time, communicate to the people in your church what you’re doing.
You may have some folks in the church that are just not buying this. However, your role as the leader is to call on those same folks to help the community, as well. Here is a great opportunity to partner with the community and be a blessing and be the love of Jesus be the tree the witness that we should be.
It would be way different than if the government were asking us to not share the gospel anymore. That’s a different story. But that’s not what’s happening. We’re fighting a virus. We’re trying to protect people protect the community.
We saw there was some church that still met on the first Sunday when the government officials had asked them not to. What kind of a witness is that? It’s like going against the government officials and the mayor. What does all that say about the church? Negative, negative, negative. It looks bad. It just doesn’t help Christians in our witness, our ability to share Jesus.
Believe me, most organizations are not able to do what the church can do. We have a ready built volunteer corps that can step up for the community, like virtually no other organization in your community. So, use this shutdown time while you’re connecting to be the church and touch people.
For the naysayers in your church, it’s all about people’s mindset. As their pastor, if you can help them frame that mindset the right way, that’s going to be huge.
9. Kids and Youth
The next consideration is genuinely dealing with the needs of kids and youth. This has been one of the hot topics people have asked about and talked about because this is about reality for families.
I (Jonathan) had this Sunday morning and we’re all in the living room. We tried to put on some worship songs and we just pulled up YouTube. We watched a little bit of our church’s online service they had put together.
Then our kids team actually put a little mini kids service time for them. We watched that as a family. The church did a great job with it and our kids enjoyed it.
The point is, you got to figure it out. What can you do to provide something for your kids? You can’t just leave the parents out there hanging to dry. At the same time, we can’t be everything we need to be because we’re not present.
Here are some things we can do. We have a link here to go to another page on the website, where Caleb and Kim Rankin, who are two of our Leaders.Church partners and did kids ministry as a pastor for years. They created for pastors an excellent tutorial training on things for you to do to ministry to your children and youth. It’s not very long at all, but it’s excellent material.
You can implement some of Caleb’s and Kim’s ideas that you can do immediately for this Sunday. You’ll be able to put into practice things that speak to the needs of the kids and youth in your church, as well as to their families.
Caleb and Kim have done a great job with the tutorial. Whether you’re a small, medium or large church, you’re going to be able to do exactly what Caleb suggests on there.
And we’re thrilled we’re going to be doing some further partnering with the Rankins in the future. We’ve got a great resource for kids ministry coming down the pike. You’re going to be hearing about the weeks and months to come from Church University. Stay tuned!
I’m just telling you; this guy knows what he’s talking about in the tutorial. It’s clean, simple, you’ll say, “Oh, I could do that.”
10. Communication with People
All right, here we on number ten. We spoke earlier of touch points. It’s a bit of the relational stuff. Having communication with people, your leaders and the church as a whole, is a critically important at this time. We have to stay in contact with people.
You don’t want people slipping through the cracks. You don’t want people being left untouched. You want to make sure that you have these points of communication. So, you’ve got to figure out how can we communicate with people? How can we keep in touch with people?
First of all, there are leaders you have to be taking care of and communicating with. Then there are leaders of the different ministries. You want to really mobilize them to be helping you as the pastor, take care of the Body. One person can’t care for everyone and we’re going to talk a little bit more about caring for people here in a moment.
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Zoom
There are different ways you can do this one of which is through video conferencing. We want to introduce you to one of those tools called Zoom. I know a lot of churches are using zoom right now. Zoom is a video chat, where you can have multiple people on the video chat together.
It’s like having a video meeting room, just like we are here where two or more people can meet. Sounds kind of Biblical! 🙂 It’s a great way to connect with people. Connect with your leaders, just to keep everyone up to speed.
This is a very important time for you as the ministry leader to be communicating to them. You want to keep them in the loop of what’s going on.
What are you thinking? When is the church going to start meeting in person again? All sorts of questions people are going to be having can be addressed by video conferencing like Zoom.
And so, we’ve actually got a link here with a tutorial from one of our Leaders.Church team members, Ryan Sparks. He’s going to show you just the basics.
If you aren’t familiar with Zoom, if this is out of your league, if you’re not a technology person, we’ve got a very basic training tutorial on what you need to do. How do you get this set up?
So, click that link, make sure that you check out that tutorial. You’re going to want to be touching base with the board members. If you have staff, it’s the staff or the key volunteers.
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With all these people, your leaders and volunteers, you need to be sharing what’s going on in the church. What are you thinking? What’s coming down the pipeline here? Pastor, you need to get the board members and staff members together, communicate with them even if they’re not tech savvy. Using video conferencing is an easy way to do so.
Further, you want to encourage your small group leaders or Sunday classes to meet by video conferencing. Those folks to be able to touch base with the people that are part of their groups in this way. This is critical communication.
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Make phone calls
Now, technology is one of the tools, but it’s not the only tool you’re going to use. You can still go the traditional route of picking up the phone and making the calls. You need to make sure you’ve got your full list of your of your people that are either in your group or in the church as a whole or whatever.
Here’s what I’d encourage you to do is to mobilize people. Our job as ministry leaders, is to equip the saints, for doing the ministry. It’s not to do the ministry ourselves, although we are doing ministry, but it’s to equip people to do ministry.
We talk about that in the 5-day Leadership Challenge for Pastors. Actually, it’s one of the key focuses and we really break down some unconventional thoughts in regard to that. We’ve even included a link here to the Challenge. This is another free resource for you.
You’ll want your leaders to take the Challenge, as well. Another non-techy idea you could consider is to do a phone Blitz. You might get 10 of your key people to each make 10 phone calls. Well, right there, you just covered 100 people. If you have a church with 100 adults you’ve called them all.
You’re communicating, letting them know you’re available. So, communication is the key; phone, text, email, video chats like Zoom or other resources are all important tools that you should be looking at.
Now, I remember one of the emails I got yesterday, the pastor was saying, “Well, I have to be able to talk to my people.” Here’s my response. If the church has any size at all, he can’t talk to everyone. He needs to build a team to join him in doing so.
This is going to be a time for you to make the turn to leading bigger. If you want your church to grow, guess what? There’s going to be life after COVID-19 for the church. The Lord is giving you a wonderful opportunity to do exactly what has just been referenced, to mobilize key volunteers.
By the way, here’s a push back you’ll get on making phone calls. If you make 10 phone calls, guess how many people you’re going to talk to? Maybe one or two. In most cases your callers are going to be leaving voicemail. AND voicemail is a touch point from the caller who represents you, the pastor.
The point is to touch people. I (Dick) go to a church of probably 15,000 people. Last week I received two phone calls from staff members. That’s right, they were checking in on me.
Well, that just reinforced what I’m saying.
11. Growing your Small Groups and Community
The next thing up is growing your small groups and community. I’ll have a pastor say to me, “Man, I‘ve got to figure out a way to either two things, either start our small groups, and how do I get the existing groups to connect?”
You know, at first, we had this groups issue of groups needing to be 10 or less. Our (Dick) life group is 14 so, I thought, okay, we can do seven of us on the north side, seven of us on the south side, and then eventually, of course as everything changed, that all went by.
But the point is, you either have small groups or you don’t. If you don’t have small groups, then you have no mechanism in place for people to meet in small groups. I would encourage you this is an all–hands-on–deck time now.
Your board members, staff members, all key leaders need to pull them together on a common conference call. But that’s another thing, that we probably ought to mention that free conference call where they can get everybody on a call together.
With Free Conference Call you can get a telephone conference call of five, six people together. Ask the leaders to call those 6 – 10 people from church. Before you know it, we’re going to divvy up the whole church and we’re going to create opportunity for people to connect in groups.
Maybe we could call them COVID small groups. Maybe not!
But please note, you’ll need to train these new small groups leaders. Whenever you have groups you have to have well-trained leaders. You’re doing this leader training all remote.
Maybe you make a video that you send out to all the leaders. In any event, it’s important to know that training them on how they’re going to lead their small group during this time is critical.
Now, if your church has small groups you want them to be a couple things. I would be doing this. If you’re in a church where you do live stream, then you want your encourage your life groups to meet when you’re live streaming.
Our life group did that last Wednesday and this past Sunday. It was absolutely wonderful, and you know what we’re doing? We’re texting during the whole message. “Oh, my goodness did you catch that point number two pastor just mentioned?”
In our small group text interaction, somebody sheds a light on something presented. Somebody in the group will send a text about a loved one and how what the pastor just said really spoke to their heart.
We have a new single mom in our group. She was new to everyone and everything. This is what she said to us by text while we were all watching the Sunday service by video in our own homes. “Thank you so much! You have no idea how much it means to me to have people praying with and for you! Believing for great things and praying for you as well!! ????????”
Because our group is very mature and been believers for a long time, we are able to step up in our prayer life like never before.
Lots of churches are doing prayer and fasting, ours included. You probably are, as well. So, anytime you’re live streaming or posting videos, encourage your small groups to just join in with you.
If you do what we referenced earlier, create content video, then as a small group, you’d encourage your small group leaders to say to their group members, “Hey, listen, everybody watch the video that we’re going to send out for this Sunday and everybody, watch it. Bye.”
For example, maybe you say to your group, “Let’s plan to meet Sunday night at five and then just spend maybe 15 to 20 minutes talking about what we saw in the video.”
You’ll be amazed where people will begin to comment. What are you doing? You’re building community? You’re building your community by text.
Now, it may feel foreign, if you haven’t done much of that. But believe me, once you get into it, you’ll be amazed to see what will happen.
You also can have your small groups do Zoom. If you’ve got 5 to 6 people, 8 to 10 people in a small group, everybody gets on Zoom. You could talk about the video that you as the pastor created.
Anyway, those are all ways that you can create a great sense of community within your small groups. And believe me, friend, this is a time where the team needs to pull together and make it happen.
(NOTE: Is your church positioned for growth? Take the 3-Minute Church Growth Audit to find out! Click here)
12. Caring for People
Now, let’s talk about the caring for people. For people, especially single moms, elderly or people with unique needs there is real need for the church to be there for them.
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Those who have lost their jobs
Here’s the reality. People in your church are losing jobs.
Hopefully you’re going to be fine and continue to be paid by the church but some in the church are losing jobs. We have to be sensitive to that whether in COVID or pre or post Covid-19.
Losing a job is an unbelievably painful thing for a family in your church. You need to be sensitive to that and care for them.
If you’re able to be with a person in a time of loss like that you want to get to their house or be with them face-to-face. You want to touch base by text, touch base by voicemail. Call them. This is a chance to mobilize people to touch other people in the church at their points of need.
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Single moms
As well, it‘s our role to help the Body minister to single moms. As males, we are not doing ministry to single moms. We have a couple single gals in our life group, and they will do ministry to single moms. It‘s just smart for the church to mobilize the Body to do that.
I (Dick) am part of a community health center here in town and our organization had to layoff 100 people. In that group of 100 people, you have to know there were some single moms in there. Now, it’s unbelievably painful to have done that.
Well, guess what? Those single moms are in churches across our area. So, it‘s a critical role of the church to come alongside them, take food to them, care for them.
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The elderly
Do what you need to do to help the elderly, of course, during this time as many are really shut in. In doing so, you want to be very careful with that. You don’t want to put anybody at risk. But pay attention to the elderly folks, people with unique needs. All churches have them.
Let’s talk a little bit about hospital visitation. All hospitals all across the country are in varying modes. Depending on when you’re watching this, I can’t predict to you what your hospital is doing.
As a pastor, you are a member of the clergy. You certainly have a right to talk to your hospital about what they’re going to allow in terms of you visiting with people and ministering to people because that’s part of your role, even during times of crisis.
I (Dick) had a buddy of mine had a very sad situation where his elderly Mom who was literally a matriarch of the church, passed away a week ago, Sunday. As you could imagine, this was agonizing for my friend. Because you can’t do a funeral.
Yet, this gathering to celebrate this matriarch would probably be one of the biggest events of this church’s year. But they have to wait. And as the pastor, you have to guide people through this waiting.
Be there for people, even when you can’t complete what you normally would complete. You know earlier on we talked about leading someone to Jesus. And then scripture says, “Repent and be baptized.” Oops, you can’t baptize. That’s okay. You will.
Think about caring for an elderly person as they approach death and ultimately die. Oh, we’re going to care for the person, the family. Yeah, and you can’t do a funeral.
Now you’re going to have to help people and help the church understand the uniqueness of this time that my buddy is going to be able to do a memorial service.
But he just told me if the pain and the awkwardness, yeah, mom’s died, but all the people can get together and celebrate as a pastor, you’re going to have to help carry people through that. Yeah. And to me, it can sound like Debbie-Downer. It’s a wonderful privilege as a pastor to get your arms
People during this time and help them believe we’re going to make it. Right. We’re going to make it. And it’s exciting time for me.
13. How to Build Momentum
Let’s finish this last one up here. Now this one I’m actually really excited about because this is one that is future thinking. The concept is basically on how to build momentum. Because right now a lot of churches feel like they’ve lost momentum. And they’re kind of trying to figure it out. That’s why you’re watching this video.
We’ve obviously rattled off a lot of the areas of concern for people. But one of the things we cannot forget about is what happens when this virus is over. How prepared will we be when the lockdowns are eliminated and when the church doors are opening again, and people are coming back. Because they’re going to come back in droves and we have to be ready.
If we’re not ready, we are missing a massive, huge opportunity to capitalize on the natural momentum that’s going to come as a result of this whole thing. Because people are going to, they’re going to long for that community, they’re going to be coming back and desiring to see each other face-to-face, hugging and hand shaking.
So, we’ve got to make sure that we’re ready. One of the ways to do that is to think through now how can you begin to build momentum for that? And how can you leverage that moment to build momentum for the church?
What you don’t want to do is you don’t want to go into that first Sunday back together without a plan. That would be disaster, a big mistake. So, right now, you need to be thinking about what can we do? What does that look like?
There are probably a million ideas you could come up with. Get some of your board members or your key leaders or if you have staff, get the staff together and take some time to talk, even while we’re just trying to figure this whole thing out. Well, I get that, and you need to do that. But you can’t neglect what’s coming to the future.
It’s just like, it’s just kind of like the concept of Easter, you know, so many churches work, work, work to get ready for Easter. Soon as Easter is done and it’s like gas off the pedal. When really, that’s when the gas on the pedal should be full blown, because that is when we need to get people to come back the following week. That’s when the momentum is strongest.
Does your church need a boost of momentum? Click here to get free, 14-day access to the Leveraging Momentum video series.
The same idea is here. When people come back, there’s a there’s a natural wave of momentum. And the question is, are you going to hop on the wave that is about to hit your church? Or are you going to miss the wave? We want to encourage you to hop on the wave now.
If you’re a member of Leaders.Church it’s kind of ironically, before we this whole coronavirus thing happened, we put together a 9-part video series entitled, Leveraging Momentum. If you are an official member of Leaders.Church, it is now available inside your members area.
However, if you’re not a member, due to the coronavirus and due to this subject of momentum, we were just talking, we want to be a blessing to you, and to help you. And so, even if you’re not a member, we’re going to give you limited access to where you can go in and watch all nine of these videos.
Our Gift to You
We’re going to give you a 14–day window where you can hop in. You’ve got 14 days to plow through all nine of the videos. Each one really won’t take you much time at all, maybe 7-10 minutes each. I mean, you could do all of them in a day if you wanted.
But the idea is we want to give you this resource because you’ve got to be thinking about this right here – Momentum! What can we do to get people to build the momentum during this season to get people coming back?
Even the unchurched, you know, there are going to be people who are just unsure through this time. They’ve lost a loved one, they had something tragic happen, lost a job, whatever. And obviously, you know, as a pastor or ministry leader that in moments of crisis like this, people are more open to the Gospel than in almost any other time in their life. And so, as the church, we’ve got to be ready.
You know, when you think when you get ready, when you think back to remember 9/11, there was a huge surge back to the church then. After 9/11 the church had massive influence and momentum. But then it was just a couple of months later, and people would look back and say, well, where are those people go?
Now, there is always going to be natural attrition. But there was also the sense that many churches really weren’t watching to capitalize on the crowds coming in. I’m saying “capitalizing” in a positive way, not a bad way. It is vital to capitalize on the gift The Lord is bringing to the church, in the waves of people.
I’m just telling you; you’re going to have people coming into your door that wouldn’t darken the door of your church before, but they’re going to come in when this thing is over because they realize there’s something bigger out there than just this world. There’s something bigger than just all the yinging and yanging on cable network.
This is the opportunity for us to go all the way back to point number one, our mission, because we’re keeping our eye on the ball. And then when everybody on the field is watching this or watching that, we realize we’re seeing the whole field, God sees the whole field. And we’re playing the long game. And I’m more excited about this 13th point than virtually any of them. Momentum is coming your way and we want to give you the 14-day access to this series.
They’re all important, but I’m telling you, it’s going to happen. You’re going to watch it. We really hope this leveraging momentum video series will be helpful to you. Again, that was what the members in the membership already have. For them, just go in and access the Momentum series immediately and you have all this with it.
But for those not in the Leaders.Church membership, we’re glad to give you this 14-day access to the series as a blessing to you. That’s what we want. So, the link is going to be there for you.
Now, Some May Say…
Well, momentum, that’s not very spiritual. Well, we talked about that in the video series. So, just watch the videos inside there. You’ll get it. We’re going to break all that down for you. Because it’s so important for you to make sure you tap into it.
We hope this is helpful for you. And if you’ve got questions, obviously just email us [email protected]. We want to get you answers. So, if you’ve got specific needs, questions, nuances, whatever it might be, let us know.
We’re here for you. We want to help in any way we can, obviously putting into practice some of the things we’ve just talked about with all the links and the resources. We want to help you figure out how can you take such a negative, unfortunate thing like COVID-19 and spin it for the good so that you’re reaching more and more people with the Gospel than you ever imagined.
You’re building momentum. You’re helping people rethink church and realize that the church isn’t the building. The church is the people and all the different things that we’ve taught. God is going to help you do it. We want to be an asset for you in any way we can.
Again, we thank you so much for being with us today. We look forward to talking to you next time.
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Discover what pastors of growing churches do to see massive growth and how you can position your church for the greatest days ahead.
Click here to get immediate access to this free masterclass.
Discover what pastors of growing churches do to see massive growth and how you can position your church for the greatest days ahead.
Click here to get immediate access to this free masterclass.
