It goes without saying that 2020 has been the year that has turned everything on its head, especially when it comes to maintaining and sustaining churches during a time when you weren’t allowed to physically meet together. Nobody has done this before and everyone has been trying to adjust and find their sweet spot in this ‘new normal’. Trying to plant a church in this time is like being an early adventurer setting sail in uncharted waters. There’s no manual, intensive, incubator or guide to know how and when to plant a church during a pandemic, but one thing we do know: God is still on mission and so are we.
From the get go we wanted to plant a church that reaches a diverse context of people. In the city of Pretoria, it means creating a space where people can build relationships who normally wouldn’t gather together. With this in mind myself and my team joined Rooted Fellowship for a church planting residency to amongst other things, learn and understand what it means to live as a ‘Transcultural’ Community.
Our team joined Rooted Fellowship in the beginning of 2020, looking to further broaden our missional team so that we could launch in August of 2020. As we were in the process of gathering people outside of our cultural context, the covid-19 pandemic hit and we were faced with hard lockdown for the next three months.
Suddenly all our conventional methods of loving, serving and getting to know people outside of our existing frameworks were taken away from us. It was like someone hit the pause button on all our plans and goals. Conventional methods of core group gathering were definitely not an option and left us with the nagging question: We know that God is still on mission during the pandemic, what does this look like for our small community? As we spent time pondering this we realized that with unique challenges we had unique opportunities as well. The first two opportunities that presented themselves were: time and service.
Time.
We were afforded the opportunity of time together as a missional team to further deepen our understanding of our vision and core distinctives of Red Door church. Furthermore, we could really invest into one another’s lives and ensure that we are already living out the DNA of the proposed church.
Service.
As a result of the pandemic, many opportunities arose where we could serve and love people in our community. Without having to look too far we could engage and serve our neighbours, estranged friends and even unbelieving family members. There were suddenly open doors in places that we never even thought of knocking on.
Looking ahead
There are definitely some storms on the horizon. Financial and social-distancing pressures mean that finding a space to meet together will be very hard. We could go the digital route, but that has its own challenges to launch something digitally rather than transitioning from an established platform. For the time being we will continue to serve and engage our immediate community to create opportunities for Gospel conversations and sharing the vision that has been placed on our hearts. Looking towards 2021, we will in all likelihood consider a house church model where we can still gather around God’s word, but in smaller clusters. This might even be in God’s providence to help church planters move away from a ‘come and see’, to a ‘go and share’ mindset. Whenever it might be, and however it might be, this we know: That we have been called to make disciples of all nations, and in that we want to stay the course.
Rhynhardt de Bruin
Lead Pastor