Pastor, Are You Missing Your Sheep?.

“I lost a church member to COVID yesterday,” Steve Bezner, Senior Pastor of Houston Northwest Church in Houston, Texas, told me on Monday. “Because I’m at-risk and my son currently has COVID-19, I can’t go sit with a new widow in my congregation. I can pray with her on the phone, but it’s bizarre. I felt very inadequate and helpless.”

I heard a similar story from Tommy Welty, Lead Pastor of Inland Hills Community Church in Fallbrook, California, just one day later. “The thing I miss most is hospital visits and visiting shut-ins,” Welty said. “Praying over the phone is not the same as holding hands and praying.”

Welty’s congregation also lost a member to complications related to COVID-19. “The shame of not being able to be with him in his final moments, the grief of having lost a dear friend, and the difficulty of ministering to his family from a distance has taken a tremendous toll on myself and the congregation that Facebook Live can’t heal,” Welty said.

Similar laments have poured out on social media since March. We see you, shepherds. You miss your sheep, your pastures. You miss the sheep you haven’t even gotten the chance to meet—all those livestream visitors you haven’t had the opportunity to greet in person. You became pastors to care for people, to sit side by side and counsel, comfort, teach, disciple. Now, you’re largely stuck behind screens, trying to work and connect, wondering if it’s working.

“One thing I realized was how much information I was receiving on Sunday mornings from conversations in a hallway,” Bezner said. Without those touchpoints, it’s remarkably easy for needs and heartbreaks to fall through the cracks.

There’s no quick fix for any of this. We can’t create a technology that replaces the feeling of an arm around a shoulder or of a beloved pastor walking through the door of the hospital room. And we can’t recreate the Sunday morning church lobby with decades of conversations still echoing around its halls, a legacy of connection and community that’s difficult to translate online. If we can’t recreate the incarnational, and we feel exhausted by the digital, what is there to do?

Pastor, let me say that the answer is “not everything.” You do not have to understand the internet the way you understand Scripture. You don’t need to have social media acumen that parallels your ability to facilitate a gathering. So much of what you need starts with the ache you feel—the grief and lament over the way things have changed, the fear that congregants won’t physically come back to church even when they can, the hope that your people can be cared for even now.

That longing to pastor is exactly the type of shepherding people need. You don’t have to become an online expert in order to survive this time. You can be yourself, armed with a tool or two that helps you bridge that divide from incarnational to digital, so that you’re not just looking at numbers or click rates but continuing to find ways of connecting with sheep in need of shepherding.

CULLED FROM – CHRISTIANITY TODAY : POSTED – OCT 10 – 2020.