Michael Prevett spent his first months in ministry measuring the distance between chairs.
The 33-year-old pastor says that, for many of his peers, going into ministry “seems a little crazy.” But things were even worse in January 2021 when he left his job as a project manager at a construction company and joined the staff at Seven Mile Road Church in Melrose, Massachusetts, just north of Boston.
The pandemic seemed to have put everything important on hold.
“The hardest thing was the feeling of waiting,” he told CT. “It felt like for me, I had more time to work on the boat instead of just working on the boat.”
A new in-depth study on the long-term impact of COVID-19 on the Church since ChurchSalarywhich is the ministry of Christianity today, and Arbor Research found that younger ministers have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic.
Nearly 60 percent of those under 34 have taken on new responsibilities during the pandemic. About half of them also had their titles changed. This had harmful consequences.
According to the study, the younger a pastor was when COVID-19 hit, the more likely he or she was to consider resigning. Only 14 percent of people aged 45 to 54 were seriously considering leaving the ministry. But 22 percent of pastors ages 35 to 44, 29 percent ages 25 to 34, and 37 percent ages 18 to 24 have given it a lot of thought.
Young pastors also worried about the impact the pandemic was having on them personally. More than 60 percent of people under 35 say they are moderately to seriously concerned about their mental health.
Many of them have spent the pandemic wondering how to help their churches adapt to an ever-changing situation and sometimes reinvent the church, week by week. It is the young pastors who have taken on the responsibility of learning new technologies and finding quick and creative (but not too controversial) solutions to the problems of the pandemic.
“That’s why the young pastors were going crazy,” said Leon Stevenson, 45, senior pastor of Mack Avenue Community Church in Detroit, Michigan. “It’s like, okay, how can we do this with fewer people, and it’s more expensive, and the learning curve is a week?”
Figuring out how to stream services was a huge and overwhelming problem for those who had never done it before. At the same time, church staff lost the ability to recruit volunteers to help.
“You now have to create a new department, but you haven’t received a flood of new people,” Stevenson said.
The sudden reliance on technology has meant more hours of online meetings, whether with colleagues or parishioners, and time spent editing video and audio. Yet even though the pastors’ days were filled with screens, they were also eerily silent.
“Ours is a people business,” said Marcus Doe, pastor of Redemption Tucson, part of a multisite church with locations throughout Arizona. “If we cannot come together, what can we do to guide our people?
When the pandemic began, Doe, now 44, was a pastor at Providence Bible Church in Denver, Colorado. He had worked there since 2006. The pandemic seemed to destroy everything.
“There was a feeling of nothingness,” he says. “The days were very slow.”
Doe went to church for a few hours each day to try to work. The silence was enveloping. This sparked a torrent of questions about the future and what it would look like.
“I just felt like there was this cloud that you couldn’t really dispel. Everything was uncertain,” he said.
There are, of course, exceptions. Some ministers remember the pandemic as a time when they grew and their churches thrived.
Chad Granger, pastor of Urban Hope Community Church in Fairfield, Alabama, remembers 2020 as the year that “the face of God really began to smile upon us.”
He admits that’s not how most people have experienced the pandemic.
“I think we’re going through a very unique journey that’s not normal for a lot of my peers,” he said.
Granger went to Urban Hope in 2016, three years after the Presbyterian Church of America congregation was planted, and was really focused on achieving stability. The multiracial congregation had about 25 members, with average weekly attendance around 40 or 50.
Surprisingly, the pandemic seemed to spark a deeper engagement from people. New people have arrived. The Church has made important steps towards stability.
“We were going to die or bloom,” Granger said. “We have flourished by the grace of God.”
The church recently reached the 100 member mark. He now has a well-established alumni group. In the fall of 2021, Urban Hope moved into its own building – a purchase the church raised funds for during the pandemic.
“If anything, we really feel like we’ve started to gain momentum and the wind of God is behind us in the midst of all this,” Granger said.
He knows that many pastors and congregations cannot say that.
And yet, many pastors have reported high levels of job satisfaction now that the worst of the COVID-19 crisis appears to be behind them.
“I can’t think of doing anything else,” said James Williams, 40, associate pastor at First Baptist Church in Atlanta, Texas.
Doing ministry during COVID-19 has been incredibly difficult, he said. Much of his ministry focuses on the elderly. Barred from hospitals and nursing homes, he found himself knocking on windows and waving. The church resumed in-person morning services in May 2020, but did not resume many ministries, including children’s Sunday school classes, until later. Many of the teachers are elderly and the Church did not want to pressure them to return before they felt comfortable.
The church is different than it was in March 2020, Williams said. Some people have moved away, while others have left California and Oregon to settle in this East Texas city of about 5,500 people.
He feels quite optimistic about the future of the Church. We have the feeling that if they get through this, they can overcome anything. And after tough times, every sign of growth seems special, like the first green shoots after a particularly harsh winter.
Prevett feels it too. As his church in Massachusetts navigated the pandemic, he saw the power of regular church life. He witnessed how the Holy Spirit worked through preaching, teaching, communion and baptism, and people’s lives were transformed by going to church.
“It worked,” he said.
The primary task of the disciple-making pastor today is not measuring the distance between chairs. But he can tell you what he has seen from then until today: “People are built through the Church. »
