About Episode 137:

This crisis now serves as a test of our faith. It gave us challenges to produce solutions that can navigate on the problems each one of us are facing. Despite of these problems, our faith to our Lord remains unwavering. This pandemic is a wake-up call and now seeks an answer for the ultimate question, will our leaders embrace what the future holds or will they innovate and create a new-normal for the church, now and beyond?

Will our leaders embrace the future or innovate, now and beyond? Here are some of our thoughts.

Future Church
[3:57] The church has an advantage of brand citizenship, being responsible socially. It has always been the core part of the church’s mission, that we exist for something bigger for ourselves and not for profit. However, the church has not done a good job leveraging that ultimate end.

[5:10] There has been a failure to have prophetic imagination that defines a vision greater than Sunday. The churches of the future, who will thrive on this crisis, will redefined the role that Sunday plays.

[9:09] Post-pandemic will be the rebuilding of our core audience, and it’s going to have a different reaction.

[11:25] The vaccine will be a rubber-band effect, where many people shows up and comes back, but its going to be short lived. The churches who have poor management will have a hard time navigating through that.

[12:41] The core is going to awaken about how powerful it is to be together post-COVID. The concentric circles will find less reason to show up every week because of how we can implement things on social media platforms.

[14:13] I think the majority of churches in America would agree that doing things digitally counts. Although it is not sufficient, it is still a viable expression of the church. Most digitally-focused church will say our goal is to ultimately move people into a physical ministry context.

[14:43] If you can keep more engagement with people through digital and have more opportunity to disciple more people, we are going to see an increase of discipleship but a decrease in ongoing attendance.

[15:27] If your local church, Facebook community and YouTube community are your neighborhoods, are you doing your due diligence to visit on a semi-regular basis?

[16:24] If every senior pastor has decided to stay on Facebook or Instagram live twice a month, it will be an opportunity to call their digital audience to engage and learn more. If we get this right, we see discipleship and evangelism increase, at a very low cost of resources.

Advices
[18:57] To the church leader, make sure you have clear sense of articulated mission or vision for what a Sunday service is all about, what is the ultimate goal of your church’s existence and how to support that.

[19:21] To the individual who is a follower of Christ, how does God call you to be a part of the bride of Christ? We are still wrestling with what it means for us to be a committed part of the bride of Christ.

[22:40] I encourage you to get in the Word and pray. Talk to your Heavenly Father and find your own rhythm.

[23:14] If you are at this point in time and you are figuring out what to do, do not benchmark the big churches you see online and set is as an excellence of a quality production. Seek something that is attainable to you and get as much advice as you can. Re-evaluate your heart and your relationship with God. Take time to read and envision your vision for what the future has to come when this is all over.

[25:42] It feels isolated when you are called “the” leader instead of “a” leader in your organization. You need to fight that isolation by having someone you can have an honest conversation with. If you do not have someone you can speak to, you need to let transparency fly but oftentimes would with decay your soul out, if you don’t have somebody to pour your feelings out into.