Adapting Our Church in the Pandemic

Grace Bible Church has been a part of Converge long before I became the pastor as they were founded and led by the late Pastor Rod Walker. I became pastor in March 2020 right at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown. Thankfully, Converge MidAmerica has been there for me through prayer, encouragement, extremely helpful seminars, and personal visits by Bryan Moak and Gary Rohrmayer.

We are serving our local communities through praying for our community. We provide prayer request forms for them to submit. We do prayer walks through the community to engage them through prayer. We have partnered with our local Urban League to provide food for families who are hurting because of job loss. We also have a civil servants’ day where we honor and encourage our first responders and other civil servants.

The pandemic hit our communities very hard, and we had to shut our live services down and go to virtual services in March 2020. We provide a livestream via Facebook for our Sunday morning service using a “skeleton” crew. We also transitioned to virtual Zoom meetings for our Bible study and Children’s Ministry.

We have been doing live services this year with a limited capacity, socially distanced seats, masks, and temperature checks. In order to keep many of our older members engaged, we started a front porch prayer ministry where myself and an associate pastor go to members’ homes and pray with them and encourage them on their front porches.

Please pray with us that God would keep us focused on the mission of “loving God, loving people, and making disciples.”

Pray that God will bless the partnerships we have with our community to expand ministry beyond the walls of the building.

Pray that God would continue to give us innovative ideas and methods to expand our reach to be the salt and light throughout St. Louis, MO.

Ulysses Ross III
Grace Bible Church
Florissant, MO (northern suburb of St. Louis, MO)

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Related resources:

Five Reasons To Embrace Natural Church Development

By: Gary Rohrmayer How can the Natural Church Development Survey help your church? 1. The survey will close the gap between lay leaders and pastoral staff. Pastors sold out to the cause of Christ think

Navigating New Horizons at Converge MSC

Discover more about the promising future of Converge MSC in our latest article featuring Gary Rohrmayer’s upcoming retirement and his successor, Danny Parmelee. Read all about the details of the transition and explore what lies