An Open Letter to the Government: Please Don’t Open Our Churches Just Yet.

Dear Government,

Please don’t open our churches just yet.

We are only just getting started.

We’ve started to pray more. We’ve started to care more. We’ve started to get to know our neighbours and started to love them as ourselves more.

We’ve started to realize that church is not about a Sunday Service, or even a LiveStream. We’re seeing that it’s about connecting with God and connecting with each other. It’s about being equipped for ministry, and being the church in the world. It’s truly astounding what we’ve been missing out on, and it’s exhilarating to realize what we now have.

We’ve started reading the Bible for ourselves. Some of us are even calling it a “Bible Revival”, and we are falling in love with the word once again.

We’re learning how to worship when no one else is looking.

We’ve just started uniting across denominations. We’re even uniting across nations.

We’re beginning to rediscover the power of prayer and fasting. We’re even praying for you more, our governments.

We’re getting innovative in the ways we are sharing our story and sharing the gospel, and we’re caring for more now, feeding more now, and being Christ’s hands and feet all over the globe.

You’ve deployed us into our neighbourhoods, you’ve forced us out of our routine, and it is such a good thing.

We have a saying in the church, that comes from the Bible, that new seasons of new wine need new wineskins to hold them. Some say, this means that for a new time we need a new way of doing things. Times have changed, and we need to too. You’ve given us the circuit breaker we needed to make those changes and hit the reset on how we do church. Thank you.

Please don’t open our churches just yet. We are just starting to get it, just starting to redesign it, just starting to reimagine it, just starting to find again what we once were.

If you could keep us meeting home to home for just a little longer we may even form a habit of this.

If you could limit our dependency on a service and a Pastor for just a few weeks longer we may even begin to depend on God even more.

You may even do our Pastors a favour and help those of them that are dependent on us get free of that crippling condition too.

By limiting the sizes of our gatherings you are forcing us to do what the early church did, multiply. You’re encouraging us to raise up leaders, to release more Pastors and missionaries, and movements. We might even get back to a model of church where disciples make disciples who make disciples, until there is no place left to evangelize, imagine that!

Please, not yet.

Just give us a few more weeks, and if we need it, a few more months. We don’t want to miss what our God is teaching us in this time.

We can go lower still, we can pray even more, we can hunger and thirst for righteousness even more still. We need this gift you’ve given us. Please don’t take it away too soon.

We’re not in a hurry to go back to normal. In fact, we may never want to go back there again. Our new normal is looking a lot more appealing and a lot more like what our Jesus may have been envisaging when He said, “Go and make disciples…”

Thanks for your time, thanks for your leadership, and thanks for helping the church see what we’ve needed to see for quite some time.

Sincerely,

Andrew

PS- A huge thanks for all you’re doing by the way. We’ve found whenever the Governments of the world have put restrictions on the church, it grows faster than ever before and we’re in need of a revival. Blessings to you and know, sincerely, that we are praying for you.