Living with Uncertainty

Yesterday I spoke to some local shopkeepers oppposite our church building. They were worried about the loss of customers, and fearful because their landlord was still demanding high rents. One of our church leaders, who runs a web-design company, told me that many of his clients are experiencing uncertainty, because they don’t know how to plan for their businesses.

For churches and pastors, similar problems arise. I read three US articles about pastors feeling stressed, and considering resigning, immediately the situation stabilises. One minister of a large UK church, said he “hadn’t signed up for this” when he began. In one sense, he’s right. In another, he’s wrong; because we sign up for whatever the Lord sends our way, to care for the sheep. 

Nevertheless, I too have experienced the strain of leading the church through this crisis. Several times, my old, Adamic, fleshly, nature has risen up, and I’ve got angry with someone, who certainly didn’t deserve it. We have had to learn new ways of ‘doing church’, getting used to fresh technology, doing pastoral care remotely. And then, when we think we’ve got the hang of it, it all changes again. The old saying about the only constant being constant change, is surely true in these times.

But one of the comforting things about pastoring during Covid, is that nobody really has any clue what to do, or how to do it. We are all in the same boat, from the biggest megachurch to the smallest urban congregation. We have never been this way before, and so we are all deeply in the dark. And it is helpful to realise that.

There are no ‘right answers’, and therefore no ‘wrong answers’.  We are all muddling through together. It’s trial and error. And I find that reassuring. Because that means I can’t get it wrong. Paradoxically, the situation makes us free: to experiment, take risks, try things. Through this emergency therefore, we shall discover new things, about ourselves and God. 

He is sovereign. He is in control; one of the main lessons is that we are not. We used to think that we could make things happen. Or we felt failures because we didn’t know how to produce the desired effects in our ministries. Now, however, we are discovering that none of our plans matter. Only God matters, and learning how to be dependent on him.

I heard a health expert on TV last night, saying that a vaccine may not be widely available worldwide until perhaps 2022. Combine this with climate change, and loss of biodiversity, and how would this affect our decisions, if we knew we were definitely planning until 2022? This longterm perspective would be both frightening and encouraging.

Frightening because we would face two more years of this uncertainty. Encouraging because we could have realistic, and yes, fairly low-level, expectations of ourselves, and our churches. This pandemic is for the longhaul. How will we revamp and revision our ministries for God in this new future?