Worship in the Time of COVID-19

Photo by Derek Story on Unsplash

Psalm 37:5 Commit everything you do to the Lord. Trust him, and he will help you.

It's a crazy, weird time we're in.  To slow the spread of the virus, we're staying home, staying away from groups of people, staying away from situations that spread germs.  In the sermon I will deliver from my kitchen table on Sunday over Facebook Live, I'm going to ask people to consider what they are doing without during this time that they previously thought they couldn't do without.  In considering my own answer to that question, my first thought was this: worship.  Not worship in the general-attitude-toward-God way, but in the way that we normally do on Sunday mornings in the sanctuary.

One of the biggest changes for churches during this time is that we are not meeting together on Sunday mornings in that church building.  This change has pointed out to me even more than I already knew that we put so much of our time and effort into that one hour every week.  Maybe as much of half of our office hours are dedicated to creating the bulletin we will hand out on Sunday, and setting up the media we will project on screens to guide us through the worship service.  One of our main metrics for success as a church is the number of people who attend that one hour every week.

I put a lot of time each week into preparing a sermon, and I'm still doing that for the Facebook Live gathering, but it's less formal than it was, and there is no time spent creating the media that usually accompanies that delivery. 

I miss the music, and in with that thought comes the memory of the song that Matt Redman wrote back in 1999, during a time when the church he was leading went without music because they realized that they had made their music into an idol.  The song says:

I'm coming back to the heart of worship and it's all about you, it's all about you, Jesus.
I'm sorry Lord for the thing I've made it, when it's all about you, it's all about you, Jesus.

The heart of worship is giving our hearts to Jesus.

I don't know how we will be different when this is over and we go back to being around other people again.  I don't know how the church will be different, but I do think we will be forever changed, and isn't that what Jesus is all about?  I pray that we will truly be transformed and trusting God enough to walk with Jesus in new ways in the days ahead, so that more and more we will be the people that God is calling us to be.