March 26th, 2020

• Keep the fundamentals of the faith in front of your people: staying in the word, not isolating themselves relationally, growing spiritually in the midst of the challenges, building an attitude of hope, keep making disciple your focus
• Multiply what you are already doing—one pastor is taking his daily devotional and journal reflections and creating a short 2-3 minute video. He is then posting it daily to FaceBook.
• Knock and Run—you used to do this as a kid with your neighbors. Now it can be a positive thing if you drop off a nicely worded note saying your praying for your neighbors and telling them if they have any specific prayer requests or needs to let you know—leave your e-mail address or phone number to text
•  Wisdom from the coaching world with a catchy rhyme thrown in at no cost:
  • Stabilize—pursue (be proactive) and innovate to create stability in the midst of chaos.
  • Re-normalize—in a season of chaos find peace and move forward within the new environment. We can spend too much time complaining and not get to adjusting.
  • Mobilize—bring all the resources you can muster to fight the crisis that is in front of you today. The first century church did not ask God to remove the persecution, but to give them boldness in the midst of it. (Acts 4:29)
  •  Futurize—recover and re-emerge. Lead through disruptive innovation and use movemental leadership—innovative and forward looking leadership.
• Post or send out in advance listening guides for your sermons along with resources to let folks develop or reinforce their family chapel time. Give them or point them to online tools that will help them engage their children and youth.
• Proactively identify the marginalized within your church an community: seniors, singles, couples whose marriages were already struggling, dysfunctional families, those who have been laid off, individuals who for a variety of reasons were already stressed by life BEFORE the virus made it even worse. AND then prayerfully consider how to minister to them.
• Find ways to assist parents who find themselves home schooling for the first time—connect them to tutors and/or teachers or to experienced home schoolers.
• To address the previous two issues, build a buddy system to connect people with one another so they don’t have to “swim alone”