To Regather Or Not To Regather: Decision-Making Tools For Your Leadership Team

Doug Cushing, Pinnacle Associate

Like most churches that dot the COVID-covered landscape of America, the church I serve (the bridge Presbyterian Church) is wrestling with the decisions of when and how to regather for face-to-face Sunday worship. In our congregation, there is a group eager and ready to return to our worship center; another group eager but not quite ready to regather and a third group neither eager nor ready for face-to-face worship. 

Our leadership team wanted to take a deeper dive into the attitudes, expectations and readiness of our congregation to return. Our elders - keenly aware of the financial costs associated with regathering along with the people-power needed to safely and responsibly re-gather for Sunday worship – felt a survey would provide clarity and guidance into where the Spirit was leading.

We adapted our questionnaire from the St. Andrews/Covenant Presbyterian Church and tweaked it to gain perspective on the questions we felt were most important in discerning the Spirit. Our questionnaire helped us determine that over 30% of our congregation was ready and eager to worship and many more were ready for an outdoor worship service. Additionally, our survey gave our leadership team important insights about such potentially controversial decisions as whether or not to wear masks in worship and how eager parents were to bring their children to worship.

Finally, we gained important feedback about what percent of the bridge Presbyterian Church watched our live stream worship every week and how many of our people have continued to or increased their giving during the season of COVID 19.

The data we uncovered offered us some surprising and helpful nuggets. We learned that there were more people watching our worship every week than we anticipated. This was helpful feedback during our transition to live streaming Sunday worship. Additionally, we learned that a number of respondents have committed to increasing their weekly giving. Finally, we were surprised at the robust response to the questionnaire. All of these epiphanies encouraged our leaders while also providing us with a clearer picture of the path forward.