The day the world stopped, mY schedule was slammed. It began with workouts that morning about 5 a.m., rush to get the kids moving, meetings to attend, a 30-minute interstate commute that could easily triple in a split second, Dad’s sports shuttle and dinner in the car as we traveled to baseball practice and games, homework tutoring before showers and bed, and emails to return before rinsing and repeating.
Then, in the blink of an eye, everything shifted.
Workers were sent home, school was closed, baseball was canceled, church services were put on hold, and the calendar was cleared. One of the hidden blessings of the pandemic was pushing pause on our frenetic pace.
In the quietness of the days to follow, our time was recalibrated. One of the greatest shifts of the pandemic for the church will be from BUSY to BIBLICAL.
Sometimes when I visit a church, I open up their newsletter and find every night of the week consumed with a church program. Programs in and of themselves are not unbiblical, but church leaders must ask themselves the question, “Are our busy programs producing disciples?”
Church calendars were cleared for months during the pandemic and have slowly been rebooting. The temptation will be to just return to doing business as usual. The churches that will thrive out of the pandemic will be those who do an honest assessment of how they are spending their time and then design a plan that genuinely produces disciples biblically.
A shift from BUSY to BIBLICAL simply means that the life of the church shifts from activity-based to disciple-making-driven. If programs are not actually producing disciples, then they should be redesigned or canceled. Sometimes our calendars are so full it keeps church members from being engaged with lostness in the world. They could find themselves so consumed with leading programs that they never find time to build relationships with lost people and move them in to intentional disciple-making relationships.
The key factor in disciple making is time. If we are too busy to spend intentional time with those far from God, we are living unbiblical lives. Will your pace accelerate in 2021, or will you make the shift?