Local pastors reflect on lessons learned during COVID-19
A year ago, the COVID-19 pandemic forced many churches to close their doors and find other ways to reach their congregations. Now, a year later, three local church leaders reflect on the challenges and successes of the past year.
“Right off the bat, what I remember this time last year, we had to make a decision to be safe and so that meant stopping our live service,” said Lamar Trieschmann, teaching pastor at Lake Valley Community Church.
Trieschmann said that the jump to a virtual church service wasn’t as hard as it could have been, because “fortunately we had already been online and had also had an app.”
“There were some ways we were already connected outside of Sunday morning that really helped us,” he said.
Fellow teaching pastor at Lake Valley, Morgan Golden, said “we kind of had the view of streaming as a convenience if you weren’t able to attend, and we intentionally said ‘We’re not going to make this — we don’t want the quality to be so good that it becomes an alternative for people,’ and now we don’t see it that way,” Golden said.
“We shut down all of our ministries. We had to kind of pivot, like everyone else, to stay connected. That was the biggest thing,” Trieschmann said.
Phil Kramer, lead pastor at Crossgate Church, also spoke about the importance of staying connected during the pandemic. “As we all know, the worst possible thing that could happen during COVID is for someone to become isolated from their church, from their community, and so we were doing everything we could to ensure our people did not become isolated,” Kramer said.
Like Lake Valley, Crossgate also turned to a virtual service when the pandemic hit.
“Well, obviously we want to remain true to our calling
as a church of Jesus Christ and making our purpose here is making more and better disciples for Jesus Christ, and we’re going to do that regardless of the context, regardless of what’s going on in our culture and community. Obviously, we wanted to be wise and prudent on how we ensure we were maintaining a safe environment for our folks on campus, like all churches we went to an online service exclusively and there were a few months where we did not meet on campus at all,” Kramer said.
Kramer said that their church had also already been providing their services digitally prior to the pandemic, but they quickly found that the way they did their service did not translate well for home audiences.
“We turn our Sunday services online, and first we basically did from the stage … but then after a couple of we weeks we said, ‘Look, all of our people are watching this from their living room and so we want to create something that’s a little more intimate that would translate better to someone’s living room versus someone who is on stage,’” Kramer said.
To get this intimate feel, the church’s technical team “set up a studio in (a) hallway in the lobby of the church, lighting, camera, the whole nine yards, and it was me, with a table like this, talking straight to the camera the whole time,” he said. Kramer said that while preaching to a camera does “take more concentration,” he said that it was a smooth transition because “I’ve always been a huge guy for eye contact when I’m preaching.” He said that looking straight into the camera “translated extremely well into the more intimate deal.”
Trieschmann, however, said preaching to a camera took some getting used to.
“It was very awkward initially,” he said. “I’m trained, like any speaker, to read an audience. … It provides feedback to you when you are teaching to a group of people, and you didn’t have that.
“I struggled with finding the energy that I typically get from people when I read faces and can tell if people are listening and see emotions,” Trieschmann said. “I kind of went back to the emotion that I felt before when talking to a group of people and just trusted that it’s still there,” he said, calling it “an internal battle that you’re going through.”
Golden said that his speaking style is “very different” from Trieschmann’s. “Where Lamar is more of an inspirational style of speaking, I’ve had people say mine are more like ‘Ted Talks,’ and so I actually kind of liked it,” Golden said. It’s been harder, though, “speaking with a group with masks on.”
“That feels harder than speaking to a camera to me,” Golden said, “because when I’m now speaking to a group of people who’s there but I can’t tell what they’re thinking, that’s been a bit of a challenge,” Golden said.
Both churches said that initially, their virtual attendance numbers were incredible. “Surprisingly, we saw greater numbers than we had ever seen,” Trieschmann said, noting that “everybody was kind of looking for something probably just because of the state of crisis that our country was in. People were desperate for good news … for leadership and direction, so we had a lot of people checking in.”
“It was just like any other church. At first, we had huge numbers of people watching, but even the best product on the screen is not going to be as good as in person,” Kramer said. About three months after going entirely virtual, Kramer said that “I could tell that some of our people were kind of getting tired of Zoom, of online stuff.”
Both churches also called it a difficult year.
“It’s been hard. It’s probably been the hardest year in ministry for both of us,” Golden said. Golden said he has been preaching for 15 years, and that Trieschmann is approaching his
26th year.
Kramer said that 2020 was “in some ways” the hardest year of his 25-year career. He spent
16 years as a chaplain in the U.S. military. “I spent 16 years as a chaplain going to Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said. “In terms of leadership challenges, yes, this has been a very challenging year, but compared to some of the things I had to do over in Iraq and Afghanistan, this was not that bad, but overall yes, it has certainly been a challenge.”
Both churches have since reopened their doors, and today, Lake Valley is returning to offering two Sunday services for the first time since the pandemic hit. “We’ve been at one service, before the pandemic we were two services, so we’ve been at one service. This Sunday we’re going back to two for the first time since the pandemic started,” Trieschmann said. Golden added, “we realized late this week it’s almost to the day, one year since we stopped having physical service, that we are going to relaunch with two,” noting “that’s kind of an interesting milestone.”
“A couple of silver linings that I’ve seen is, it has forced people to grow in their personal growth and development,” Trieschmann said. “I think it’s caused us to be grateful for the worship we do have and the gatherings we do have, because we probably were taking it for granted,” he added before saying “No, we probably weren’t, we were taking it for granted.”
“I have seen families take greater responsibility for teaching and training their children because they don’t have a fallback plan, and that’s been encouraging,” Golden said.
“One of our mantras is that we want minimum sacred cows, but that said, we’ve had sacred cows. COVID has killed those cows, and so we’re learning what is necessary and how can we simplify, how can we do better post COVID,” Golden said.
Kramer said that a good thing to come out of the pandemic is that the members of his church have devoted a lot of time and effort to helping others. “We have two families that we sent from this church to the foreign mission field. One family is in Thailand in Bangkok, and the other family is in Vanuatu, a little island nation in the South Pacific,” Kramer said, noting that the church collected over $25,000 for the family in Thailand.
Both churches said they are looking forward to seeing restrictions eased in 2021, and both also said that they are looking forward to using the things they learned during the pandemic after it has ended.