Let’s not go back to church

A lot of my family and friends spent the last three months asking: “How can we get back to church?”

But I found myself asking: “Should we go back to church?”

What I mean is: Should we go back to “doing church” the way we did it before COVID?

Is COVID a once-in-a-lifetime chance for the church of Christ to “throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles…and run with perseverance the race marked out for us” (Hebrews 12:1)?

Is COVID giving the church of Christ “new wineskins” in which to make “new wine”?

Is going back to church the way it was before COVID the best that the Christ has in mind for the church? Or, after months of freedom from the status quo, are we able, ready, and willing to see what the Christ would do with us now?

I believe the church of Christ is an answer to the Christ’s own prayer: “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

The church, if we pray our Christ’s prayer, must ask daily: What does it look like to live in the kingdom of God? What does it look like for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven?

Jesus gave us a picture of what it looks like by how he lived his life. He gave us a picture of the kingdom of God by the kind of people he had in his life and the life they made together.

Does the life of the church of Christ today look much like the life of Jesus?

Do the people in the church look much like the people Jesus had in his life?

These are questions the church of Christ should ask all the time in all ages. But COVID gives us a long pause and a step back to look at things in a way that none of us could look at them before.

In our rush to get back to normal, will we miss our chance to follow the Christ to something better?