DUE TO THE CORONAVIRUS PLAGUE, THE BLACK CHURCH AND OTHER CHURCHES HAVE CHANGED FOREVER TO THE MOSTLY DIGITAL CHURCH OR THE HOME CHURCH LIKE IN THE EARLY CHURCH SOME 2,000 YEARS AGO, WHICH DANIEL WHYTE III PREDICTED WOULD HAPPEN YEARS BEFORE THE CORONAVIRUS PLAGUE HIT. GOD’S TRUE CHURCHES DID WELL THROUGHOUT THE HEIGHT OF THE CORONAVIRUS PLAGUE AND ARE NOW THRIVING. BISHOP CHARLES BLAKE II PREACHED A PIVOTAL SERMON TITLED “THE CHURCH HAS LEFT THE BUILDING,” IN WHICH HE SAYS THE CHURCH MUST REDEFINE ITSELF. “THE CHURCH IS YOU AND ME,” HE SAYS, NOT THE BUILDING IT’S HOUSED IN. THE CHURCH “IS US.” Bishop Kenneth Ulmer said church people have found that “they can do Jesus with a cup of coffee and house shoes. Why get up and put on your clothes and put on your hair and put on your makeup when you can do it at home?” Pastor Ricky Temple agrees and says, “Think of all the energy it takes to get to a church service. It takes an hour and a half to get dressed and go to church. You stay there for two and a half plus hours to talk. Then it’s an hour to get home. That’s a five-hour commitment for one service. And you’ve got to come back Wednesday night… It’s a killer.” Because Dr. Tony Evans and Dr. T.D. Jakes were already prepared to have services online, they didn’t miss a beat.

Photo: Chat Karen Studio (Shutterstock)

DUE TO THE CORONAVIRUS PLAGUE, THE BLACK CHURCH AND OTHER CHURCHES HAVE CHANGED FOREVER TO THE MOSTLY DIGITAL CHURCH OR THE HOME CHURCH LIKE IN THE EARLY CHURCH SOME 2,000 YEARS AGO, WHICH DANIEL WHYTE III PREDICTED WOULD HAPPEN YEARS BEFORE THE CORONAVIRUS PLAGUE HIT. GOD’S TRUE CHURCHES DID WELL THROUGHOUT THE HEIGHT OF THE CORONAVIRUS PLAGUE AND ARE NOW THRIVING. BISHOP CHARLES BLAKE II PREACHED A PIVOTAL SERMON TITLED “THE CHURCH HAS LEFT THE BUILDING,” IN WHICH HE SAYS THE CHURCH MUST REDEFINE ITSELF. “THE CHURCH IS YOU AND ME,” HE SAYS, NOT THE BUILDING IT’S HOUSED IN. THE CHURCH “IS US.” Bishop Kenneth Ulmer said church people have found that “they can do Jesus with a cup of coffee and house shoes. Why get up and put on your clothes and put on your hair and put on your makeup when you can do it at home?” Pastor Ricky Temple agrees and says, “Think of all the energy it takes to get to a church service. It takes an hour and a half to get dressed and go to church. You stay there for two and a half plus hours to talk. Then it’s an hour to get home. That’s a five-hour commitment for one service. And you’ve got to come back Wednesday night… It’s a killer.” Because Dr. Tony Evans and Dr. T.D. Jakes were already prepared to have services online, they didn’t miss a beat.

A Dark Day

When COVID-19 first came barreling through the United States in March 2020, its impact on Black churches was nothing short of catastrophic.

It was a “dark day,” said Dr. W. Franklyn Richardson, chairman of the Conference of National Black Churches. “Churches were empty. People lost their jobs. People were dying and there were no funeral services.” As pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, N.Y., Richardson felt the effects acutely on a personal level, as he received as many as six grief calls a day from parishioners.

“We had to scramble to stay alive and to keep things going,” agreed Reverend J. Edgar Boyd, senior minister at First African Methodist Episcopal Church (FAME), the oldest African American church in Los Angeles.

Many wondered if the church would ever be back. And if it did return, would it be the same? Now, looking back it’s clear that the Black church as an institution has been radically transformed over the last three years. Not only has it survived, but it has thrived. Many now say they can see light again, as so many houses of worship across the country have learned to expand and grow in ways they couldn’t possibly have foreseen before the pandemic.

“The church never stopped being the church because you had to leave the building,” explained Richardson. Instead, the era of COVID-19 “became a time for reimagining.”

And reimagine, it did.

A New Beginning

Before the pandemic, only a fraction of Black churches nationwide had any kind of digital capacity. Of the 30,000 member churches represented by the Conference, said Richardson, only about 500 of those were streaming when COVID-19 hit. Most were forced to close completely, only reemerging months later after finding ways to pivot and reinvent themselves.

“Unless you were a church that already was doing something virtually, it took time to become competent,” said Richardson. There was a huge financial investment required and new skills had to be learned. Not only by the congregation, but also by those in the pulpit.

During those early months, church often took place in smaller groups by phone and on conference calls, said Richardson. Until, eventually, video streaming and Zoom meetings became the norm. Some pastors scrambled to offer services from their phones and iPads. Budgets shifted dramatically because of lost income. Many staff members were laid off to make room for experts skilled in digital technology.

One pastor began referring to TGIF as Twitter, Google, Instagram, and Facebook Day as the church’s whole outlook shifted to digital.

“Covid pushed online attendance forward by quantum leaps,” said Charles Blake II, co-pastor at West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles. Some churches were already famously online, he added, like Bishop T.D. Jakes in Dallas, Texas, whose messages were heard via weekly television and radio broadcasts. However, most churches weren’t at all prepared for the digital shift.

Blake, too, was challenged to pivot and reinvent.

In December 2020, he posted a sermon on YouTube called “The Church Has Left the Building.” In it, he stands outside, in the open air, against a classic backdrop of Los Angeles palm trees. The message begins by acknowledging the pain his parishioners are experiencing, after “nine months of not being able to come together as the assembly of the saints…nine months of not being able to share each other’s pain and bear each other’s burdens.”

From there, however, he quickly moves on to his main message: the church must redefine itself.

“The church is you and me,” he says, not the building it’s housed in. The church “is us.”

Today, West Angeles has more than 90,000 YouTube subscribers; a significant increase from its in-person reach, which fluctuated between 20,000-24,000 during the pre-COVID years.

But the transformation didn’t come easily.

Something Lost, Something Found

“We had to learn a whole new way to do ministry,” said Bishop Kenneth Ulmer of Faithful Central Bible Church in Inglewood, Calif.

As anyone who has ever attended an African-American service (or movie theater) knows, the Black church maintains the cultural specificity of long-held African roots and traditions, such as “call and response,” a mode of interaction whereby the congregation answers aloud to whoever is speaking from the pulpit.

“Well, what if there’s nobody to respond?” asks Ulmer. “What are you going to do? I know some guys who struggled with that psychologically. And looking into that camera, I struggled with it myself. Because for so long [we] were pitching into the wind. You don’t know what’s out there. I don’t know if anyone is home listening.”

Source: The Root, Kristal Brent Zook

To read more, click here: https://www.theroot.com/soul-survivors-covid-19-and-the-black-church-1849678515