Yet Another Resettling

I’m the pastor of what you might call a COVID church. By that I mean our church was founded right in the middle of the pandemic, at the height of people getting canceled online and fired for refusing the vaccine. We did not practice social distancing or require masks, and I wrote more than two dozen religious exemptions, all but one of which were accepted.

For that reason, people from many different backgrounds and locations were drawn to our church. But we never wanted to be the anti-vaccine church. We saw those decisions as a consequence of our commitment to Christian liberty and sphere sovereignty. Our vision was always positive: to bring historic biblical Christianity, in all its depth, to the people of Clermont County, Ohio, and the surrounding area. That has always been the vision.

Because of the moment in which we were founded, many people came through our doors who were rethinking everything from sexuality to the doctrines of grace. We had a large influx of Methodists. I remember one family had attended a church with a lesbian minister the previous Sunday before joining us for about a year. For many of these people, the common thread was a desire to be in a church where the Bible was taught, the issues of the day were addressed, and Christians could gather freely for public worship.

At the same time, I knew many of these changes were only surface deep. Americans are deeply independent and generally don’t like being told what to do. Many people had mixed motives, to say the least. The real question was whether we could disciple them into deeper biblical convictions held for biblical reasons.

I think people quickly discovered that our elders weren’t interested in trends. We didn’t want to build a church driven primarily by social media or a media ministry, but by faithful local ministry. Over time, those looking for something trendy or edgy either left or stopped knocking on the door. To be sure, some who left did so for perfectly good reasons.

The reason I bring all this up is because the COVID era is over. In my estimation, it effectively ended in November 2024. The external pressures that held together many unlikely coalitions have largely disappeared. That process began toward the end of 2022, but I think it reached its fulfillment with Trump’s reelection. One result has been the breakdown of political coalitions, media coalitions, and now church coalitions. People who were united by shared enemies or broad ideals no longer feel the same pressure to stay together. They’re reconsidering commitments they may have embraced too quickly.

Churches that built themselves around trends will pay dearly for it. Churches that built themselves around their confessional standards and ordinary discipleship will certainly lose some people, but they will endure because they have built a genuine core.

Over the past several years, our nation experienced a great migration. People relocated geographically, but they also relocated ecclesiastically. Now we’re entering a period of resettling. As life normalizes, many people will return to where they came from. That’s simply a normal part of the process.

The lesson for pastors is straightforward: stay committed to the ministry of Word and sacrament, faithfully applied to the circumstances of your own day. If you do that, you’ll build a church that’s built to last.