The Internet has greatly changed people’s daily lives in recent years. We can conveniently shop or communicate from a click away on a mobile phone without leaving home. In the three-year pandemic, the Internet has especially become a “cyber bridge,” connecting numerous isolated souls.
An increasing number of pastors are exploring innovative approaches to their ministry through adopting online platforms. Recently, the Gospel Times interviewed a pastor in North China, who shared how her church relied on the Internet to do their ministry.
Church C is located in the suburban county of a city in North China, serving as the central location of the region. In addition to taking care of the 300 believers, the pastoral staff also needs to look after thousands of believers from more than ten grass-roots gathering points in the surrounding areas.
At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, on-the-spot gatherings were suspended, but Church C initiated a rich and compact online spiritual program from morning until night via its ministry app.
Pastor H introduced that during the lockdown, the church broadcasted morning prayers from 5:30 to 6:00. From 8:00 to 9:00, Bible studies tailored to believers of different fellowship groups were conducted during the week. At 12 pm, all staff joined a reading activity. At 2 p.m., a special live prayer meeting was on air. All participants could type their prayer requests in the chat box, and the pastor would quantitatively extract the requests according to their priorities and pray for them. In the evening, the church would hold two live evening prayers at 8 and 9, respectively.
“Sometimes reading out the requests alone was tiresome for my throat, and it would be more so after saying all the prayers for them. However, we could not stop; we must stick to it,” Pastor H said.
For Church C, which has less than 10 preachers, uninterrupted online leadership during the lockdown was full of unspeakable challenges. Yet all preachers, including Pastor H, never gave up. “This is the only job we could do during the pandemic. There was no other way to gather.”
In order to ensure that there was no shortage of believers, in addition to daily online pastoral leadership, several pastors did the most the rest of the time by calling believers one by one and taking them to online spiritual activities.
“Many believers couldn’t see each other during the lockdown, so there was no motivation to attend the services. If the church didn’t constantly contact them for attending online services, they would really become ‘lost sheep’.”
While providing necessary intercession support for believers, the church also used online spiritual time to teach believers how to establish a true and intimate relationship with God through prayers and find a way to regain strength in struggles.
Pastor H said that in online leadership, pastors would teach believers the structure of prayers based on the Lord’s Prayer. The teaching started with personal daily food and gradually grew to include praying for the things of the family of God and the salvation of more souls. The church would also keep audio or video recordings of their online sessions as a witness to the development of the church and the spiritual growth of believers.
“Through continuous online spiritual study, believers’ prayers have become much more mature, and increasingly, they start to pray boldly.” To the delight of pastors, through the revival of prayers, an increasing number of believers began to give full play to their gifts and take up service positions.
In the middle and ending periods of the pandemic, Church C added praise and sharing sessions online to encourage everyone to respond to the Lord’s love.
Taking online praise as an example, Pastor H introduced that before the every-day morning prayer meeting, the church would coordinate the believers who spontaneously signed up for praise service to open their own cameras and offer preparatory praise.
As for the sharing meeting, in addition to the conventional verbal sharing, the church carried out sharing activities with the characteristics of different fellowship groups. For sororities that paid more attention to parent-child families, the content would be interspersed with the exchange of life skills in addition to the sharing of grace. For the youth fellowship that paid attention to speculation, the sharing meeting was more about discussing hot topics combined with faith.
In the spring of 2023, as restrictions eased, localities gradually resumed normal orders, and Church C has not put down the position of online ministry. The main practice is still traditional on-the-spot gathering, while online ministry is used as an auxiliary means.
“Thanks to online ministry, the number of decreasing believers can be said to be very small due to the pandemic in the past three years. Now nearly 40% of believers have participated in our service groups, and the vitality of the church has improved dramatically,” Pastor H shared with cheer.
What is even more amazing is that with the Internet spanning geographical space, more hungry souls in different places have heard the gospel.
According to church data, during the pandemic control period, the pastors of Church C lead online prayers for believers hundreds of thousands of times, with the total number of participants in online spiritual activities exceeding hundreds of thousands. The average number of people who entered the live broadcast room to participate in online prayers every day basically remained at around 1,000. Among them, at a New Year’s prayer meeting, the number of people in the live broadcast room exceeded 5,000 in just one night. Moreover, believers from other places and even other provinces who participated in online prayers and worship accounted for more than half of the total.
“If there was no Internet, our church might have remained just as a grass-roots church with two or three hundred people, but thanks to the Internet, we can unite thousands of believers in prayer and worship together in the cyber space, which is really beyond our imagination.” Pastor H is increasingly determined to continue the online ministry.
Despite the resumption of in-person gatherings, there are endless rumors in churches around the world that believers are slack in returning to physical worship because they are used to listening to sermons online. However, in Pastor H’s view, the causes of spiritual slacking are complicated, but they can never be attributed to the Internet alone, let alone giving up online ministry completely. On the contrary, the church should reflect on whether it only provides information on the platform, but there is a flaw in the care and guidance for believers, so as to improve it.
In her view, the Holy Spirit has been working without any restrictions or boundaries, and the Internet can also break the boundaries of time and space. “Therefore, the church needs to work hard to explore and make the Internet an auxiliary and extension of ministry, transforming it into a channel for the greater operation of the Holy Spirit, and ensuring that the gospel genuinely reaches the places touched by the Internet.”
Although the capital investment of Church C in webcasting has gradually increased in the past two years, Pastor H views that this investment is “spent wisely” and is willing to pay more attention to it.
- Translated by Charlie Li
