I preached at church on the weekend for our ‘Launch Sunday’, which we have in February each year after Auckland Anniversary and Waitangi Day holidays to really kick the church off for a new year. One of the things I mentioned was that this year I felt as a church with the spectre of Covid-19 still hanging over the country, we needed to be ‘less like a ship and more like a submarine’. Little did I know that by the end of the day, Auckland would again find itself in another lockdown due to community cases of Covid.

Lockdowns are a real pain for everyone, and certainly for churches that are in the business of bringing people together to connect with God and one another, the prospect of having to move to online platforms for connection is less than exciting to say the least.

But as I was praying this morning, I really felt like God was reminding me to see the opportunities in what looks like a difficulty. Because of the lockdowns we had last year (2020), our church for the first time started live-streaming. Although I’m sure we would have eventually started doing this at some point in the future, it became immediately necessary for connection and we found ourselves wrangling this new technology and figuring out how to make it work for us. Coming out of lockdown, we just continued on with it and now it’s a regular part of what we do as a church and has not only enabled those who can’t easily make it to church to feel a part of what’s going on, but it has also provided a discreet window into our services for those who would likely never darken the doors of a church.

We’ve been praying for years for the church to break out beyond it’s four walls and connect with the community – perhaps our prayer was answered in a way that we didn’t expect.

Coming back to the analogy of the submarine, I’ve been reading in Acts recently for my daily readings, and struck by just how underground (or ‘underwater’ if you will) the early church was. There was certainly visible stuff going on in the marketplace and synagogues, but the vast majority of church connection was taking place in homes, in small groups, one-on-one. Could it be the Lord is using these lockdowns to help rekindle an aspect of church life that is easily lost in our ‘normal’ culture?

So while I’d certainly rather be on Plan A for this year – meeting together with no restrictions, I’m praying that God will help me and all of us see the opportunities in the Plan B. That although our methods will constantly need re-evaluating, that our mission will remain constant!