NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP) — The latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance for groups during the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak recommended no gatherings of more than 50 people for eight weeks. As churches scramble to make decisions on how to move forward, new research finds many congregations are not prepared to shift their services online.

A study from Nashville-based LifeWay Research conducted last fall found 41 percent of pastors say they don’t put any portion of their church service online for people to view.

Around half (52 percent) say they post the sermon online after the service is over, while 22 percent say they livestream the entire service and 10 percent say they livestream only the sermon.

“As new technologies have emerged, churches have placed their primary weekly worship service online in much the same way they did with radio and television,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of LifeWay Research.

“However, instead of only a few churches in each city broadcasting their service, online and streaming are economical enough for churches of all types to take advantage of the medium.”

In a related survey conducted last year, half of Protestant churchgoers (50 percent) say they watched a livestream in place of in-person church attendance at least once in the past year.

Of those who watched a livestream of their church service instead of attending in person, 2 in 5 (40 percent) say they did so once or twice. Around 1 in 3 (32 percent) say they did three to five times. Fewer did so six to 11 times (13 percent), 12 to 17 times (6 percent), or 18 times or more (9 percent).

Slightly less than half of all Protestant churchgoers (47 percent) say they haven’t watched a church service through a livestream as a replacement for in-person attendance in the past year. Two percent are not sure how many times, if any, they used livestreaming as a replacement.

Those who are part of smaller congregations are more likely to say they haven’t livestreamed a church service. Those who attend a church of fewer than 50 people (57 percent), 50 to 99 attendees (45 percent), and 100 to 249 attendees (53 percent) are more likely to say they didn’t stream any church services last year than those who attend a church of 500 or more (31 percent).

This may be explained in part by smaller churches being less likely to place any of their services online. Pastors of Protestant churches with fewer than 50 people (69 percent) and those with 50 to 99 (48 percent) are more likely than pastors of churches with 100 to 249 (28 percent) and those with 250 or more (10 percent) to say they don’t regularly put any of their worship service online.

“If they need to, almost a third of churches can gather virtually this week using technology and processes they already have in place,” said McConnell.

“Half of churchgoers have recent experience livestreaming a church service. And churches impacted first by CDC’s COVID-19 mitigation guidelines — those with attendance above 250 — are most prepared to provide their service online.”

Male churchgoers (55 percent) are more likely than female churchgoers (41 percent) to say they haven’t streamed a church service instead of attending in person in the past year.

Younger churchgoers, 18- to 34-year-olds (33 percent) and 35- to 49-year-olds (39 percent), are less likely to say they haven’t watched a livestream of a church service in the past year than older churchgoers, 55- to 64-year-olds (54 percent) and those 65 and older (62 percent).

Source: Baptist Press

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LIBERTY, Mo. (BP) — Nathan and Rachel Rose had felt called to overseas missions. They prayed. They searched the Scriptures. They participated in missions. As they did, God clarified the call.

“I felt like the Lord was just reminding me that you could go and be on the front lines or you could stay home and encourage people to go, send people and raise money and support for missions,” Rose said. “We felt like, if we’re not going to be on the frontlines, we’re going to be at a church that is creating and fostering an environment where people are getting sent overseas, as well as providing resources.”

Now, as the lead pastor of Liberty Baptist Church in Liberty, Mo., Rose and his team have developed a system to mobilize and train church members to become a new generation of pastors and missionaries.

Liberty is among a growing number of Southern Baptist churches that are not only discovering potential ministry leaders but playing a leading role in preparing them to serve in North America and around the world. Last month, SBC Executive President Ronnie Floyd launched Vision 2025, a plan to see Southern Baptists reach “every person, every town, every city, every state and every nation with the good news about Jesus.”

As part of that vision, Floyd called on Southern Baptist churches to: “Increase our total number of workers in the field through a new emphasis on ‘calling out the called,’ and then preparing those who are called out by the Lord.”

The call, Strategic Action 3, is a critical part of fulfilling the first two action points — sending 500 more missionaries and adding 6,000 additional churches in the next five years. To achieve these goals, local churches will need to discover more potential leaders and work with seminaries to train them.

“As the church prays, God calls. As God calls, the church calls out those who are being called,” Floyd wrote in a February article on Vision 2025. “Regardless of the size of the crowd and the size of the church, God is calling people into the ministry of the Gospel. Pastors, educators, evangelists, leaders and missionaries are right now being called out to take the Gospel into places where the Gospel has never been before.”

Reaching the goal of expanding the number of ministry leaders called and requires engagement from a variety of entities within the Southern Baptist Convention. For example, last year the North American Mission Board launched its Multiplication Pipeline to help churches discover and equip future church planters and church planting team members in their congregations.

Gateway Seminary also launched the Call Project at youth and college events, which emphasizes a call to ministry and provides resources for those who sense that call. In 2019, 277 people indicated a call to ministry at 37 events in 13 state Baptist conventions throughout the West.

But local churches are at the heart of the SBC’s plan to train more leaders for ministry.

Rose describes Liberty Baptist’s effort to train members as two tracks. The first is the church’s Pastoral Training Center, led by church member Jared Wilson. Wilson also serves as an assistant professor of pastoral ministry at nearby Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The training center focuses on an 18-month cohort-based process where men discuss assigned readings, participate in individual and group coaching and take part in “on-the-ground ministry experiences.” These experiences include teaching, preaching, evangelism and accompanying Rose on pastoral care calls.

Many of Liberty Baptist’s participants, who must be either church members or working toward membership, are also enrolled at MBTS, but seminary enrollment is not required.

Liberty Baptist, which has 300 in attendance on a typical week, has also a newer and more informal process to develop and deploy potential missionaries. Rose says he regularly challenges the entire congregation to consider God’s call to missions. The church operates a missions house, where missionaries on furlough can come and stay free of charge. The church creates opportunities for members to engage with these missionaries and learn more about the missions experience. Rose also says the church has created fellowship groups around missions that meet regularly where people sensing a missions call can share a meal and discuss where they are in the process. They also work toward getting these members on a mission trip so they can experience intercultural ministry firsthand.

“I think it begins with the preaching that calls people into missions, but honestly we have a lot of people in our church who are missions-minded and wanting to go overseas and trying to figure out how can they not only go overseas but help other people go overseas,” Rose said.

Source: Baptist Press

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Vinson Synan, one of the first historians of Pentecostalism and a powerful advocate for the breadth and depth of the Pentecostal movement, died on Sunday. He was 85.

Synan was a professionally trained historian with a doctorate from the University of Georgia. He was the son of a Pentecostal pastor who himself became a Pentecostal pastor and eventually the assistant general superintendent of the International Pentecostal Holiness Church (IPHC).

He sometimes experienced a “tug of war” between his scholarly and religious commitments, Synan wrote in his 2010 memoir. But in both roles, he helped people understand Pentecostalism as a tradition with deep Protestant roots and as an ongoing movement that was expanding to include Christians in all denominations all over the world.

Born in 1934 and raised in the Pentecostal Holiness church, some of Synan’s earliest memories were listening to his father and uncle preach to poor white people during the Great Depression in small Virginia churches and revivals.

“People would be up on their feet ‘shouting the victory,’” he wrote. “The altar calls were a sight to behold and sometimes painful to hear. People crowded the front of the church seeking salvation, sanctification, baptism in the Holy Spirit, or divine healing. Often the roar of concert prayer was deafening.”

These people were known derogatively as “holy rollers.” Synan found the term offensive and grew interested in the history of Pentecostalism. He was surprised to find that the elders in his church knew little of their Pentecostal past.

His father, Joseph Synan, didn’t know anything about Charles Fox Parham, for example, the original proponent of the decisive Pentecostal doctrine that speaking in tongues is “Bible evidence” of a second baptism and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

The elder Synan did know about the second leader of the movement, William J. Seymour, who led the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles in 1906, but he didn’t have all the details right. He told his son that Seymour, an African American, was “a one-legged man.” Seymour actually had two good legs but was blind in one eye from smallpox. In the tangle of testimonies of faith and miracles, passed down from preacher to son, the bad eye had somehow become a missing leg.

But 12-year-old Vinson Synan was awestruck. The misremembered and half-remembered history fascinated him. He had to know the true scale and scope of the Pentecostal tradition.

That became possible at the University of Georgia, where the historian Horace Montgomery allowed Synan to write his dissertation on the history of the movement. Pentecostalism was an unusual subject for an academic study, but Montgomery—a Unitarian Universalist who studied the politics of poor white people—thought it was interesting, and he promoted the project. It became Synan’s groundbreaking 1971 history, The Holiness-Pentecostal Movement.

The book rooted Pentecostalism in the teachings of John Wesley, arguing it didn’t spring from nothing but developed out of British and American revivalism, Anglican spirituality, and the Keswick “higher living” theology. Synan’s account has become the standard narrative of Pentecostalism, but at the time it cut against Pentecostals’ sense of themselves as a Holy Spirit rupture in history.

When Synan published a revised version of the book in 1997, he changed the title to The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition. He was arguing, he said, that Pentecostalism was a tradition, “despite the fact that most Pentecostals have disdained the word ‘tradition’ as belonging to the older and colder ‘established’ churches.”

In the process of researching and publishing the book, Synan also met and befriended the archivists and church historians at the different Pentecostal denominations. He brought them together in 1970 to start the Society for Pentecostal Studies, the first academic guild for the purpose.

Synan was not interested in a purely academic relationship to Pentecostalism, though. Even as he was working on his dissertation, he planted and pastored a Pentecostal church in Georgia. And as a minister, he found his own sense of Pentecostalism expanding in the 1970s.

Source: Christianity Today

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Many Christian artists are temporarily halting their tours and advising fans to look to Jesus as countries implement different measures to stave off the spread of the new coronavirus.

As of Tuesday afternoon, more than 184,900 people worldwide have tested positive for COVID-19 and 7,529 people have died, according to the World Health Organization. The average age of those who’ve died is 80.

On Sunday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended that there not be gatherings of 50 people or more for the next eight weeks to reduce the virus’ spread. As a result, tours worldwide are being canceled.

“When we’re out on the road, my heart is to give you a place to escape, a space to laugh, dance, sing, and experience joy without worry,” Lauren Daigle shared on her Instagram account. “In response to the COVID-19 developments, we’ve decided to reschedule all our upcoming shows…through 4/29.”

Daigle was on the road, headlining her first world tour and said she will refund purchased tickets for the dates canceled.

She added: “We love you all so much, and we are doing our best to keep everyone’s health & safety in mind. May the peace of Christ cover you in this time. Please keep those impacted in your prayers. Our hearts go out to all of you!”

TobyMac also suspended some of the tour dates for his “Hits Deep Tour 2020.”

“It is with a heavy heart but a responsible mind that I have to announce that the remaining 10 shows of the Hits Deep Tour are being postponed until August. We are at this very moment completely set up in Simmons Bank Arena in North Little Rock and regretfully, but responsibly won’t be able to play tonight. We love you guys and are so thankful for you. We encourage you to be safe, pray, and care for your families. We have faced so much lately, but I am holding on (with everything in me) to the promise that He will never leave or forsake us. He is a Good, Good, Father and I will stand on that,” TobyMac wrote on Instagram.

Amy Grant also announced her decision to reschedule a string of tour dates beginning March 14 in Durham, North Carolina, and running through April 9 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

“The band and I have worked for weeks putting together a show we were so excited about sharing with everyone,” Grant said.

SOURCE: Christian Post, Jeannie Law

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A Nigerian Christian girl who was abducted in January and forced to convert to Islam has finally been reunited with her family in the country’s northcentral Kaduna state. 

The Hausa Christians Foundation told the independent daily newspaper Vanguard that Sadiya Amos has escaped from her captors and returned to her family in the Kubau Council Area after being held hostage for more than a month.

Last month, the Anglican Church and Hausa Christian community in Kubau raised concern over Amos’ abduction and alleged forced marriage to one of her captors.

According to an earlier report from The Guardian, Amos went missing on the night of Jan. 5.

Amos’ father, Amos Chindo, was forced to go to Sharia court on Jan. 7, where he was threatened by a lawyer claiming to be an advocate for Sadiya and a Sharia court judge. Both accused Chindo of preventing his daughter from converting to Islam.

The judge and lawyer were accused of forging a birth certificate in which Sadiya’s age was raised from under 17 to 19. Additionally, the lawyer and judge refused to give Chindo access to his daughter or tell him about her whereabouts.

The trial was adjourned until Jan. 14.

According to a statement from the HCF, Amos and her parents attend the church where the Anglican Bishop of Ikara Diocese, Yusuf Ishaya Janfalan, presides.

According to Vanguard, Janfalan delegated priests to attend Amos’ court hearing on Jan. 14 and call for the Sharia court to acknowledge that both parents are Christians and not subject to Sharia law.

“[T]he judge didn’t listen to them or even give them the chance to speak and never even listen to Sadiya’s parents,” the HCF statement reads. “Instead, the Sharia judge went ahead to read his predetermined judgment and closed the case without the Sadiya in court.”

SOURCE: Christian Post, Samuel Smith

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The multi-campus Church of the Highlands in Alabama says it will begin offering drive-through coronavirus testing at its Grandview campus starting Tuesday, even for people who can’t afford to pay for it. 

In partnership with Assurance Scientific and the Christ Health Center, Alabama residents who have either been exposed to someone with COVID-19 or are experiencing symptoms such as a cough or fever can receive testing at the Church of the Highlands campus on Grandview Parkway.

In a statement on its a website, Alabama’s largest church said the test site will be open daily from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and will be operated in consultation with the Jefferson County Department of Health.

Testing will be limited to 500 people per day to best allocate resources.

“Testing resources are scarce nationally and are limited to those experiencing symptoms of cough or fever or persons who have had direct in-person exposure to someone who has been diagnosed with COVID-19,” a Church of the Highlands Facebook post reads. “Please help protect these resources by not presenting if you are not certain you need to be tested.”

Test results will be made available within 72 hours.

Those who come for testing will be asked pre-screening questions to see if they qualify for the test.

“In the interest of public health, all persons must remain in their vehicles with their windows rolled-up,” a joint press release from the Christ Health Center and Church of the Highlands explains. “As you are presenting for possible contagious disease, no restroom facilities will be available.”

The release explains that anyone coming for COVID-19 testing is declaring that they “should self-quarantine until such time you receive a negative COVID-19 test result.”

Those who are tested at the site will be billed through their insurance provider, whether that be a major insurance carrier or Medicare or Medicaid.

SOURCE: Christian Post, Samuel Smith

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