Pastoring your congregation right now
Perhaps you have seen the meme floating around social media of the lady looking off into the distance attempting to see which plague is hitting us today. I don't know about you, but I don't know that I have seen a truer depiction of life right now.
Going into last week I found myself having conversations with tons of pastors who were weary and struggling to know how to care for their congregation:
They had people mad that they were opening churches too soon, and too late.
People were fighting over whether masks worked or not.
People were arguing about stay at home orders or opening up the economy.
And somehow, we were supposed to shepherd our congregation through the season with unity and love.
And then Minneapolis happened. With the death of George Floyd, we have seen racial tensions take the division in our country, and our churches, to a whole new level.
I don't know about you... but seminary never prepared me for this.
Our calling, as pastors and church leaders, is a difficult one during the best of times. Add a pandemic, riots, and racial injustice and it just got exponentially more difficult. I hate to say this, but there are no easy answers. There are no quick fixes and there are no magic bullets.
But there is hope: our God is still at work.
Tomorrow morning we will be hosting our final Now What? webinar. With all that is going on in our world, we have shifted our focus slightly from pastoring in a pandemic to pastoring right now. Our guests are committed to speaking openly and honestly about shepherding our congregations through this season in a way that preserves unity as much as possible.
We don't have all the answers.
We don't have a helpful 6 step plan to fix the situation.
But we will have a helpful dialog that deals with what is going on in our congregations right now. I hope you will join us (register here).
P.S. I'd love to hear what you are struggling with in this season and what you'd like to hear us discuss tomorrow. Would you mind replying to this email with your biggest question? I can't promise we will answer them all... but we will try.