More Thoughts on Church Life After COVID

I have had two articles percolating in my brain for the last two years. One is called How to Leave a Church Well. The other is Pastoring in the Age of AI Psychosis.

I’ve been hesitant to publish the first because I don’t want to come across as passive-aggressive. There’s always someone who has just left your church, and in many cases, you don’t want them to feel singled out.

The second article almost became my talk at the Evergreen Summit. As a matter of fact, a good bit of the talk I gave came from a half-finished draft of that article.

One thing that connects these two articles is that they deal with an old problem that took on a particular shape during the COVID era.

Our church attracted a lot of people who were simply looking for a place that was open without restrictions and willing to speak with clarity about what was happening in the culture. Many of their churches had shut down or had become quite authoritarian. So people left churches they had been part of for a long time to join our church, which had just come into existence.

We always did our best to caution them against leaving without making a real effort to work things out with their elders. I’m happy to say that, on more than one occasion, this led to people staying at their churches, which eventually became more reasonable.

There’s also a pragmatic reason for taking this approach as a church planter or pastor. People tend to leave your church the same way they came to your church. You’re doing your future self a favor.

People often just up and leave with very little conversation. Usually, the conversation is a single phone call or a long, detailed email. Sometimes it’s a list of complaints. More often, it’s an email explaining how they’ve changed, how thankful they are for you, and how God has called them somewhere else.

Frankly, the complaint-filled emails are easier because the conflict is right on the surface. The “it’s not you, it’s me” emails are more difficult because they’re often trying to sidestep a conflict that is actually there. It may be a conflict worth leaving a church over, but you still have to have that conversation and work through it.

It is amazing to me how many people seem to think that God calls them to make major spiritual decisions without seriously consulting their pastors. That reveals a very immature doctrine of the church because the importance of pastors is something every form of church government agrees on.

Besides dislodging people from churches and institutions they had long been part of, the COVID era also brought an explosion of podcasting and YouTube streaming. As local pastors failed people, or at least appeared to in some cases, many Christians turned to social media for guidance.

It is incredible to me how much content people consume. Hours and hours of streams and podcasts reshaped people’s entire way of thinking and undid what years of discipleship had built into them.

Now, in some cases, this was a good thing. I’ve been glad to see the poison of feminism and egalitarianism reversed in many individuals. I’ve been talking about these things for more than two decades. Ideas that once seemed to live out on the fringes have entered the mainstream.

But many of the new voices weren’t anchored in historic biblical theology. They also carried a deep current of anger and frustration. For some people, those years of online discipleship took a turn for the worse.

The people caught up in this usually experience it as a spiritual awakening. They had been asleep for so long. Then, by consuming all this content, the dots connected and they finally felt alive. At last, they saw things as they really are. Maybe they became Roman Catholic. Maybe they became an annoying cage-stage Calvinist. Maybe all they wanted to talk about was marriage courts and the Nineteenth Amendment. Whatever the issue, they became supercharged by a handful of ideas and allowed themselves to be almost entirely reassembled.

Usually they did all this without involving their pastors, at least until the very end.

I can already hear people defending themselves as they read this. “Yeah, but churches are so bad today.” “Pastors are so bad today.” “There aren’t any good men anywhere.” “Look how many people capitulated to feminism.” “Look how many capitulated to government overreach.”

True enough. But the abuse of something isn’t permission to reject it. Much of that is nothing more than a justification for radical individualism.

Now this has taken on another form with the introduction of AI into everyday life.

I think chatbots would be much more helpful if they were bullies. Instead, they’re flatterers. They tell you your thoughts are brilliant. They reinforce your instincts. They rarely tell you that you’re the problem.

So now, instead of emailing their pastor or asking for a meeting, people are having long conversations with ChatGPT.

In both cases, whether it’s social media or ChatGPT, they’re entering into a parasocial relationship. One is with someone who doesn’t know them and might strongly disagree with the decisions they’re making if he actually did know them. The other isn’t even a person.

So here we are, a few years out from the COVID era, dealing with the aftermath of people who no longer trust institutions but do trust YouTubers and chatbots they have carefully curated to tell them what they ultimately want to hear.

Recovering from this will require a revival of robust ecclesiology that begins with the necessity of the local church and its pastors*.

And if you start teaching that, people will get angry. They’ll hand you a long list of failures to justify their individualism.

That’s simply the price of being faithful. You’ll have to bear it.

As kind of a P.S.

*Now, of course, there is much more to be said. Part of that teaching is a return to shepherding, to actually caring for the souls of the people in your church and making yourself available to them.

Even that will be a challenge because shepherding has been reinterpreted through a therapeutic lens and the idea that everyone should have an almost BFF sort of relationship with their pastor. I don’t think that’s true. It’s not bad, but I don’t think it’s required.

Nonetheless, I learned growing up on a farm that if you want something to trust you, you feed it and spend time with it. The shepherd must live among the sheep.

More on that maybe tomorrow.

Painting: Frederick George Cotman