Back in Business: Lessons Learned in the Pandemic

After a nine-month, unplanned hiatus, I'm happy to announce that my blog is back in business! Nine months is a long time, long enough to gestate and deliver a baby. Between church planting, the sudden onset of the coronavirus pandemic, and taking care of our three-year-old son at home around the clock for several months, major adjustments had to be made, putting the blog on the backburner being one of them.

It has been quite an eventful nine months. The most significant update is that my wife and I started a church! In actuality, the church was conceived in the months leading up to the pandemic, but those initial months were focused on establishing the foundations of the church (i.e. lots of government forms and paperwork). Our team and I didn't start organizing events and ministry activities until February, but by then, the first whispers of the encroaching plague were already on the horizon.

A Rocky Beginning

We had planned our first public preview service for Sunday, March 15th. We booked a large hall in a rec center in our area, putting down a hefty deposit and making signs and purchasing A/V equipment for the service. Two days before the event, we were notified by the rec center that they would be shutting their doors and cancelling all events. The lockdown started on the very weekend we had planned our first public service.

“The lockdown started on the very weekend we had planned our first public service.”

The fine people at the rec center said we would get our non-refundable deposit back, but that was little comfort to us. We had planned for weeks for the preview service and were more than a little excited about it.

The news came as a crushing blow to Hannah and me. I was at my other part-time job when we got the news. I went out to the parking lot and went into my car to call Hannah. We sat in silence for a few minutes, wondering what to do.

The moment of despair did not last long. Hannah, in her typical strength and indomitable spirit, said, "Don't worry. We can do this. We just need a plan."

“‘Don't worry. We can do this. We just need a plan.’”

I walked briskly back into the office and got to work on said plan. We reached out and secured a new venue within minutes. We switched gears and came up with a new approach on the fly. Within a day, we had a new vision to live stream our preview service with a skeleton crew of four.

And most importantly, the sermon I had labored over for days would not be wasted.

I jest, but in all seriousness, I was glad to have the opportunity to give that first message, otherwise the series I had planned would have been thrown off schedule. Little did I know that maintaining my precious sermon series schedule would be the least of my concerns over the next several months.

The Lessons Learned

If there is one lesson I have learned during this pandemic, it's that you cannot hold on to your plans too firmly. We hold our plans with a loose grip, always allowing for the Holy Spirit to take them from us and lead us in a new direction.

“You cannot hold on to your plans too firmly.”

When I submitted to God's call to plant a church in Columbus, I did not anticipate doing much virtual ministry, if at all. But since March, the Lord has led us to do nothing but virtual ministry, in many different ways. We've done recorded services, live streamed services, virtual Bible studies, worship sessions, and prayer meetings. Through trial and error (many, many errors), we've become masters of Zoom (which I hadn't even heard of before the pandemic), webinars, live streams, and premieres.

Because the Lord led us to church plant virtually, we have been able to reach people in our city that we would never have been able to reach if we started a physical service, people that we had no physical connection to and communities that we had no inroads into. And because we did not have to occupy ourselves with running a weekly service (although we are quite busy with other things), the Lord gave us the time and space we needed to see the bigger picture.

This bigger picture allowed us to remember the heart for justice that God gave us back in Korea. He has brought that to the surface again and we are excited to pursue and promote God's justice in our city as we did a decade ago.

“This bigger picture allowed us to remember the heart for justice that God gave us back in Korea.”

Looking Ahead

With COVID numbers on a sharp rise once again, no one knows what the future holds (that could be the slogan for 2020). But given God's incredible grace and faithfulness to us over the past nine months, we have no doubt that He will see us through this pandemic and will lead us to sunnier shores.

So, Hannah and I do not hold on to our precious plans tightly anymore. We always have a sense of what we want to do and where we want to go, but in the end, whenever we hear the Lord directing us elsewhere, we're more than happy to lay down our crude maps and follow the one who knows the terrain and what lies beyond because He created it all.