We live in a world filled with time. There’s not enough of it, or too much of it. We save it, or we waste it. It moves too slowly, or it moves too quickly. Our minutes blend into hours, which blend into days, which blend into weeks, etc. and the next thing we know, a decade has passed and it feels like it was, at best, a year or two.
When our year begins and ends depends on which calendar you follow. There’s the “calendar year” which runs January to December. There’s the School Year which runs September to June. Then there’s the Church Year which begins with Advent and ends with the Reign of Christ.
With the Global Pandemic time appeared to stand stock still. At the same time there was abject panic about what we were going to do. The Church buildings were shuttered, but we still needed to “come together” for worship. For many of us we learned on the fly and became familiar with a little-known program at the time, called Zoom. Now, that noun, Zoom, has become a verb.
I thought it would be “over” in a matter of weeks, and stayed in that hope for the first two years of COVID-19. Ever so slowly I realised that we were not going to be “returning to normal,” whatever that meant, at any time soon.
Time shifted in a fundamental way for many of us during that time. We learned how to Worship online, while staring at a screen, often alone in a room. We stopped singing together, and when we tried to sing together by Zoom the results were humorous and occasionally disastrous.
Still, we persisted. Society as a whole shifted fundamentally during that time. Forced into isolation, it took a great toll on our mental health, especially our seniors. Many slipped into dementia or their symptoms worsened.
Time felt suspended, as we waited for daily medical briefings, or waited for a Zoom meeting room to open for weekly denominational briefings or updates.
Then vaccines were readied, people received said vaccines and we began to re-open our buildings, with strict conditions. No singing, no passing of the peace, no common cup. Services were shortened and we kept distances from one another. The word “bubble” took on a whole new meaning! Our buildings, newly sanitised, were gleaming. The smell of candle wax and furniture polish was replaced by the smell of hand sanitizer and bleach.
Soon we heard of lessening restrictions, increasing numbers in worship, and a return to things as they had once been. And yet, for many people things would never return to as they once were. For many of us, we had grown with an online congregation. As we returned to full in-person worship, would we blend the services, start a separate online worship service or eliminate it all together?
The answer for each of us was different.
The Church, as a building, has changed irrevocably. We don’t have the numbers we once did on a Sunday morning. We have to pay for custodians where we used to have volunteers to do that work. Our Guilds are aging, and there are few, if any, younger people joining. What does this mean? What it means is we need to find new ways to be “Church.” As much as we want to go back to the “salad days” of the Church when there were 75 children in the Sunday school, burgeoning ACW’s, Altar Guilds, Mother’s Unions, BAC’s and more, we simply cannot.
The institutional church is dying. It no longer serves us as it once did. It is time for us to focus on what is important in our faith lives. Is it our buildings? Is it our clergy? Is it our Church Family? I truly believe that faith will always find a way. The Holy Spirit will never forsake us; she will always find a way.
It is time for us to shift our focus from the past to the present and more importantly, the future. It is time for us to remember who we are and to whom we belong.
It is time for us to discern what is most important. To go deep inside ourselves and ask what we are willing to give and what we are willing to give up, in order to experience the fullness of our faith in God.
These are exciting, frustrating, hope-filled and anxious times. And through it all we must remember that we are never alone. We are loved more today, then we were yesterday, yet not as much as we’ll be loved tomorrow.
The answer for the future of the church is out there…it’s a matter of time.
