The FaithX Project

Strategic Missional Consulting

Online Bible Study and Formation in the time of COVID-19

by Steve Matthews
Online Bible Study

This post on forming an online Bible study is part of a blog series on
“Keeping Congregations Connected in the Face of COVID-19”
Click here for the previous post

“Our intention creates our reality”
Wayne Dyer

I grew up in an area that prided itself on self-sufficiency and hard work.   The phrase “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” still resonates in my mind as a corrective for not meeting my goals.  Today, I think differently.  Intentions matter.  Intentions can be like cairns that point me in the right direction and help navigate me toward my goals and where I feel the Spirit may be leading me.

Last week Ken Howard wrote in his blog about online Bible Studies and formation in a COVID-19 world.  As you think about your church landscape in this reality and in the reality(s) to come, what are your intentions for spiritual formation and Bible Study?  What do you want the harvest of these online gatherings to be?  Who do you want to be there?  As most churches continue to rely heavily on online watering holes, FaithX provides resources that can help you with your intentions to invite your neighbors into these online gatherings.  It seems like a great time to hold an intention for invitation to online community.  Many of your neighbors may not want to walk into church, but meeting online is often less threatening (and less committal), so why not use this resource to learn about your neighbors and invite them into your programming?

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Online Bible Study: First Ask “Why?”

by The Rev. Ken Howard

This post is part of a blog series on
“Keeping Congregations Connected in the Face of COVID-19”
Click here for the previous post

Full-disclosure: There is a plethora of resources for online Bible study that you can find (where else) online. Go ahead: Search on those three words and you will find a virtually unlimited supply of suggestions, tips, DIY steps, even prepackaged programs you can buy. I’m not going to duplicate all those things that Google can get for you.

What I want to do is offer you a question to reflect upon before you start one. 

And that question is “WHY?”

Almost every online article I’ve read that outlines the steps to follow in preparing for and hosting an online Bible study starts in the wrong place. Step one is either “Choose a book” or “Choose a platform.” The former starts with “WHAT” and the latter starts with “HOW.” Yet, in any spiritual endeavor (or any endeavor, for that matter) the question we really need to start with is “WHY?”

Why ask “Why?” Because if you start without being clear about your motivation or with mistaken assumptions about what your audience, odds are your online Bible study will likely be a lot less fruitful. So consider these “WHY” questions:

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New Paradigms: Figuring Out What Comes Next

by Mary Frances, FaithX Senior Consultant
What Comes Next

Here and there in the world
and now and then in ourselves is a New Creation,
usually hidden, but sometimes manifest,
and certainly manifest in Jesus who is called the Christ.”

Paul Tillich

Paradigm: a typical example of something or model

The Oxford Dictionary

These are certainly some strange times we are living in. I admit that on some days I wake up and think to myself, “I can’t believe we are living through this.”  And it gets worse by the day. Six weeks ago the clergy who I coach were busy trying to figure out how to do online worship.  Today those same people are trying to figure out how to lead an online funeral or how to console the weary and grieving in their community from afar. These are awful times, indeed. Yet in the dark there is light, in the storm there is quiet and in crisis, opportunity. So, what comes next?

For decades the Church has been in decline and while there have been many who claimed to know how to reverse that trend, change has come hard for the Church.  Since the Church is at its core a gathering of human beings and human beings are inherently resistant to change, righting the ship has been more than difficult. We haven’t known how to connect with our communities, we haven’t known how to innovate and bring people along with us, and we have often been more interested in the days gone by than the days yet to come. 

Cue the Covid-19 pandemic.

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After the In-Reach, Time for Outreach…

By Mary Frances
Time for Outreach

Keeping Congregations Connected is a series on strategies and tools for helping congregations survive and thrive in the face of the COVID crisis.
Click here for the previous post.

It wouldn’t be an understatement to say that just about everything you learned about how to do church has been turned upside down in the last several weeks. You have led your congregations through change that may have taken decades previously, you have turned on a dime to offer virtual worship, online bible study, and calling teams for pastoral care. 

And to all of that I say, well done!

And now that you have all of that (AND Easter) under your belt, is it now time for outreach?  How do we make sure that the people outside of our communities can access what we are doing online?  How do we continue to invite, connect, and serve? I realize that this may seem a bit extreme to some, yet I think about the disciples, in the upper room after the resurrection, scared for their lives.  And what did they do? With the blessing and breath of Jesus upon them, they went out into a very scary world and told about what they had seen and experienced. It’s our turn to tell about what we have seen and experienced.  Perhaps we can’t go out physically, but we can still connect and invite. The time for outreach is now.

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