With the return of face-to-face activities in churches, will the services and online programs go extinct or will they still have their role?
As lockdowns and other pandemic-related restrictions ease, what will happen to Seventh-day Adventist church attendance in the South American Division? It’s not entirely clear, but church-sponsored research offers some potential insights.
A recent survey of 1,930 Adventist Church members and attendees in the Brazilian Central Plateau region showed that 82.3 percent of them have regularly followed, in the past three months, the online services and schedules of their or even other Adventist congregations.
For Carlos Magalhães, the Church's digital strategy manager for the division, some factors suggest not all members will return to churches immediately. “Many will be afraid [of Covid-19] or prefer to remain isolated to protect family. Others will just follow spiritual content online,” he said.
Despite this, Pastor Rafael Rossi, division communication director, believes the sense of belonging to a community remains important. According to the survey, 52.4 percent of those interviewed, even though they’ve worshipped at home, prefer to attend preaching by their respective pastors and leaders, rather than looking for programs from other churches. This may indicate that there will be a relatively significant group returning to their congregations soon.
Although the closure of the local churches by the pandemic has made it necessary to migrate services and meetings to the virtual environment, Rossi emphasizes this was a provisional measure, and should not become a standard: “Christianity without a church may last, but it is far from the ideal designed by Jesus. The Christian needs to worship in community. If I live in isolation, I fail to exercise my gifts and support my neighbor's spiritual journey. It is in the church that I help and am helped,” he said.
The digital ministry continues
Rossi does not believe worship services and other online content will cease to exist after the pandemic. The Adventist Church has been using the internet to transmit the gospel message for years, Rossi explained.
“There is a group of people who will only be reached in this way. This is the environment of the new generation. We do not want to create a digital Church, but we have used this medium to bring people closer to a real Jesus,” Rossi added.
For Magalhães, the significant increase in prayer requests coming through official Adventist channels is proof of this. “As a Church, we have already reached the climax of productions and have made an audience loyal; now these people interact with us and, in an unpretentious conversation, we end up presenting a Jesus that they did not know. This is a big difference: the quality of service to the public that we captivate,” he said.
The communication department of the Unasp church São Paulo campus, has been working along the same lines. In addition to streaming traditional worship services, the team maintains regular Bible study and intercessory prayer programs to engage the public and have resulted in dozens of baptisms.
Fábio Bérgamo the church’s marketing specialist, believes this level of engagement is the true meaning of a church having an online presence. “I had no idea of a broadcast’s power until I participated in it. The message is ‘preached on the housetops,’ as Christ says in Matthew 10:27. This is the fulfillment of the mission; it's how we're going to reach people in the last days,” he reflects.
Strategy and innovation
When observing the behavior of internet users who follow the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s official channels, Magalhães points out some recent phenomena: “At the beginning of the pandemic, we acted quickly and gave people what they needed: sermons with eschatological themes and about the relationship between the pandemic and the end times. Our audience increased a lot in the first month. Since then, other waves have come, like that of musical programming. But, in the last few weeks, almost half of the Internet users stopped watching this type of content.”
According to Magalhães, "People lose interest very quickly, and the Church, in the digital environment, needs to be agile to remain relevant." Therefore, Magalhães and his team have formulated new strategies for the coming months: “The forecast is that the next wave is about health. People have realized that you can't stay in quarantine, so they're looking to strengthen immunity, and we've prepared content for that. We also noticed that they are looking for deeper biblical themes and are engaging more in the mission; we are supplying that as well.”
This agility is only possible with planning and strategy. For Bergamo, these items are even more important than the technical quality of the productions. "The success is in getting to know your audience and delivering what they need," he said. Online audience for the Unasp church soared in less than a year after a redesign of the streaming platform.
Adapting messages to current events and the social context is part of the new strategy. Since the beginning of the pandemic, pastors have prepared sermons with eschatological themes and an emphasis on hope for the future. Currently, the division’s channels on YouTube and Facebook add up to one of the largest audiences among the Brazil’s evangelical programming online.
This article was originally published on the South American Division’s Portuguese news site