Whatever It Takes

From Facetime with school teachers to livestreaming worship services, we’ve all been doing whatever it takes to carry on in this new age of social distancing. So many church services started using Facebook Live for the first time in the past couple of weeks they crashed the system. FB apparently didn’t see that coming but they have worked hard to get those archived videos back up. I’ve seen so many posts about how to participate in worship from home as well. Getting up and getting dressed is helpful for working from home and on Sunday morning. If you sing, clap, read along in your Bible and shout “Amen!” it makes worship a group activity and not just a spectator sport.

I’ve been blogging for over a decade and posting sermon audio to our church website for the past three or four years. “Whatever it takes” for me includes being backwards compatible. Our core group of senior citizens are not what you would call websavy. I didn’t want them to be left out when we stopped meeting together and everything went online only. So I did something I had never done before: I started recording my sermons on cassette tape. I found a portable cassette player at the church that runs on 4 AA batteries. And discovered that in our sound equipment room there is dual tape deck wired into the sound system. I have been the pastor since 2014 and as far as I know that machine has never been turned on during that time. It works great, pulling the feed in directly from the mixer. I have always known about the six or eight blank cassettes in my office desk drawer, just didn’t figure I would ever need them for anything. So as I preach now to an empty sanctuary I still record a .wav file with my phone that I later upload to unitybaptist.church but I also make a cassette tape that our seniors can pass around.

I showed our 10-year-old the cassette on Sunday morning and asked her if she knew what it was. She did not. I explained that it’s like a CD but you can’t select which track you want to listen to, the sound quality is not as good, and you can only replay it so many times before it destroys itself. She said “What’s a CD?”

We Need to Go Back to Church

I was listening to the Jimmy’s Table podcast this morning as he interviewed a local Charlotte, NC pastor. They discussed the recent wave of Facebook Live and other video/streaming church services and that brought up a few questions. Will church members go back to church when this is all over? Why send tithes to a church in your city when you could watch a live stream or listen to a podcast from a pastor anywhere?

Here is my response to why we need to go back to church.

Happy Monday

There has to be more to Happy Monday than scripture, quotations and coronavirus memes. We must not forsake our first love: scripture, quotations and coffee memes.

This is Happy Monday #369. 

Satur-deja Vu

Staying at home, avoiding large gatherings, homeschooling online, streaming movies… we’re all doing pretty much the same stuff right? There is almost nothing else on the news to speak of but let’s see if we can’t find one or two headlines besides covid-19 to review.

Happy Monday

The goal for this week’s post is to offer something more than a collection of coronavirus memes. But dealing with livestream church services, homeschooling and the slow return of toilet paper to the store aisles are things we all have in common right now and a lot of clever people are posting memes and drawing cartoons. We are literally all in this together. So Happy Monday will have some other things; but also a few of these.

Someday we will look back at this, laugh nervously and change the subject. This is Happy Monday #368.

We Need Something to Push Against

Whether you believe in a literal six day creation week 6,000 years ago or evolutionary processes that took eons, conservative Christians and anthropologists agree that before societies developed humans were hunter-gatherers. During times of plenty the human body stores extra in fat cells, using those reserves in times that are lean. Evolution at work or God’s providence? Since you’re reading a religious blog, and I’m a Baptist preacher, we’re probably on the same page. We probably agree on what happened next. Technology improved, life got easier, and since none of us have to spend the majority of time making sure we have enough to eat we have to go jogging or walk a treadmill to stave off morbid obesity. We are designed for the struggle. When we are provided an abundance, with no hard labor required, we get fat.

Satur-deja Vu

Yes I take the coronavirus pandemic seriously but humor is one way to process serious things. That moment it takes to process a punch line or understand a pun is a momentary challenge that the mind struggles to understand. Being clever and creative is a healthy way to deal with all this. So, we will try to be positive and upbeat in our review of this past week but honestly there is little else besides the pandemic on the news or in real life. If you have some good news or encouragement share in the comments but I’m not sure about covering a range of topics in this post.