Reentry plans: Strategy is a great start, but strategy alone is not enough

I have spent untold hours over the last couple of weeks reading through numerous reentry plans and guidelines offered up by church strategy consultants, a wide-variety of denominational bodies and churches who are further along in their bell curve than my local community. As a pastor who is now beginning to work with my teams on planning our own attempts at returning to public gatherings, I’m thankful for those who are a few steps ahead of me and have not only spent time thinking through an endless list of issues and considerations to arrive where they have, but also have made their work available for others to learn from. I believe that each of these offerings has been fruitful to me and worth my time. I have also learned three very clear things:

1. Every church will pursue a different strategy — and that’s okay.

There is no owner’s manual for this. Yes, we can and should point to times in the past like the Spanish flu. We can look closely at what they chose to do coming out of what was at that time a great disruption in normal activity. But the church has another century of history and change under its belt since that moment. The name of the country is still the same, but we are not ministering in the same place. We speak the Gospel into a different culture with different sensibilities, and and we have different tools in our belt to go about doing so. There is no practical blueprint for this stuff. This means that Jesus-loving leaders seeking wisdom from God will faithfully land on different answers moving forward. There will be pastors that I call friends who approach this entirely differently than I do. There will be churches in my community who open faster than we do and churches who open slower. The details of the steps they take might even be completely upside-down from our approach. That’s okay. It’s okay because God is faithful to lead them. He’s good that way. But it’s also okay because…

2. I have blind spots — and I need help.

Like every other church leader, I’ve been gaming out our strategy since even before we actually stopped meeting. These issue have taken up large amounts of head space over the last month plus. I’ve worked and reworked several things over in the life and ministry of our church, continually changing variables as I go. I’ve dreamed up new methods and old methods with new style. I’ve asked myself the question: “What does my church look like if __________ never comes back?” There are also times I’ve come to the conclusion that I was spending too much time and energy dwelling on these questions. Especially in light of how quickly things have changed over and over again. I think that those were wise observations in the moment but upon reading other people’s work, I’ve also discovered that there were a thousand other questions I had no idea I needed to be asking.

Document after document, I’ve come to learn that they will each introduce a wrinkle I’ve haven’t considered yet. It’s not for lack of effort on my part— just insufficiency. I need a community of church leaders to help me think through these weighty issues because I’m not big enough to see all the angles. I’m not smart enough to account for everything. Even collectively, we will all still fall short. We need our God to show Himself wise. We need Him to give us understanding beyond our ability. One of the ways He does that is by giving us contemporaries. I’m thankful for the opportunity to learn from others who are wading into these issues before me. If anyone looks on our church down the line as the right way to return, it will likely be because we stole that idea from someone else. I don’t want the credit for it. In this season or any other, I don’t want our church to be known as “the creative church" or even “the model church.” I want our church to be known as “the faithful church.” I want God to be pleased with how we pursued Him in this season. Which is why…

3. We will aim at what is God-glorifying rather than what is simply new.

Don’t mishear me, those two things are not mutually exclusive. They are not always at odds with each other. I believe that God delights in our creative and previously untried attempts to honor Him in our structures and strategies. As a pastor of an established church, I’ve seen my share of dead tradition, and I don’t want to go back. I agree with those who look on this time as a moment to shift the paradigms, and I believe that God has given us an opportunity in this season to bring needed changes. We’ve already slaughtered a couple of our own sacred cows. That being said, I’ve noticed a persistent theme in much of my reentry reading: Pragmatism over Ideal.

Buried at the core of some people’s strategies for return seems to be the assumption that most of our past practices were only ever around because they were merely functional for some other goal. And now that society has had a new normal thrust upon it in the last six weeks, we need to change all of those functional practices moving forward. I’ve been advised by some to throw out literally everything and start from scratch. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read the words “The world will never be the same.” But is that actually true? Are the prognosticators right about that? And if so, at what magnitude? Yes, major events definitely shift the way that the world operates. We can point to pivotal moments that still affect the way we live today. But we also have things God called His people to do and be that haven’t changed for 2000 years regardless of cultural shifts.

I’ve spent a decade and a half now in various ministries across the country. God has graciously allowed me to lead different types of people, across different cultures, in different ministry forms. And no matter who was in front of me, or what the culture I was living in at the time looked like, the call was never anything different than gathering God’s people together to worship as the church, discipling them towards Christian maturity and sending them out to make disciples of their neighbors and the nations. Yes, the culture is changing. There are new methods and practices to consider. Many of them are carefully thought out and God-glorifying. But if you were doing your job correctly before COVID-19 hit the scene, so were your old methods. New is not bad. But neither is old.

Good pastors, like good missionaries, wisely and lovingly exegete their people and cultures and then tweak their methods accordingly. You will need to do some tweaking in this season as well. It always has been true, and it always will be true. But at the very same time, good pastors also call their people to look beyond the lenses and assumptions that their cultures naturally gave them and instead pursue an otherworldly Kingdom. Sometimes the culture shifts your practice. And sometimes your practice needs to stand in contrast to your culture. “New” and “faithful” are not at odds with each other by default. But occasionally they are. And pursuing faithfulness over everything else is what gives you the ability to actually navigate that path. We will all land in different places with different answers. That’s okay. But our ultimate win will be for each of us to hear, "well done…”

Pray for me to walk as a faithful servant before the Lord. I’ll be praying for you too. Let’s hang out and celebrate Jesus together when all of this is over.

Stephen Woodard is the senior pastor at Nashua Baptist Church in Nashua, NH.