Advent season is always a time of Christian hope and anticipation. But this year, amid a pandemic, deep racial divisions, and an economy that is battering working people – and their churches, too, “Advent feels especially important,” one pastor told the Boston Globe.
Anticipation is always a function of publishing, and houses that specialize in religion subjects are paying attention. In new and upcoming titles authors consider the aftermath of so many deaths in pulpits and pews, the financial losses that cut services and programming, the fracturing of congregational worship as gatherings were shuttered or steeply restricted. They address demands for racial justice and attention to inclusivity in membership, leadership, and programming.
“Churches can’t just flip the switch back on when Covid-19 wanes. There are long-term consequences of this pandemic that will impact ministry for years to come,” says LifeWay research director Scott McConnell. A recent LifeWay survey of Protestant pastors found most churches were now gathering in person for worship but attendance had plummeted by 30% to 70% of attendance rates in February, pre-pandemic.
Will the faithful return? What can – or should – a future church be like? PW asked publishers for titles that look ahead.
Tyndale Momentum’s title from Thom Rainer, consultant and founder of Church Answers and the author of several survey-based studies of church organization and challenges, takes the crisis head on. The Post-Quarantine Church: Six Urgent Challenges and Opportunities That Will Determine the Future of Your Congregation (out now) proposes, “In the midst of heartbreak, tragedy, and struggle due to Covid-19, here’s hope, wisdom, encouragement and vision,” according to the publisher. It’s Rainer’s first book in a planned new series with Tyndale. The second, planned for summer, tackles a question that plagued churches even before pandemic restrictions set in, Where Have All the Church Members Gone? What You Can Do about Declining Attendance, and Why It Matters So Much to Our World.
Thomas Nelson offers Building a Multiethnic Church: A Gospel Vision of Grace, Love, and Reconciliation in a Divided World, (April 6) by Derwin Gray, pastor of a multi-ethnic church in North Carolina. It’s a “revised, retitled, and repackaged edition of his 2015 book, The High Definition Leader, but "still feels very current and applicable," says book’s lead editor, Brigitta Nortker, a senior editor at Nelson. “Derwin has been thinking and writing about many of the factors that brought our country to a boiling point this year—systemic racism, division in the church, and the problems with homogeneity—for most of his career, so the framework for addressing those issues in 2020 was already in place,” she tells PW.
InterVarsity Press released Analog Church, a look at how churches were dealing with the digital age, in March 2020, just as the pandemic upended traditional worship and churches scrambled to reach believers Zooming in isolation. Now, IVP has contracted the author, Jay Y. Kim, a Santa Cruz pastor and podcaster, for a follow-up title. Analog Christian, planned for spring 2022, will examine the impact of on discipleship when the community of Christ is reconfigured by technology.
Nancy Bryan, editorial director for Church Publishing, highlights three titles dealing with topical issues:
— We Carry the Fire: Family and Citizenship as Spiritual Calling (February 17) by Richard A. Hoehn, a grassroots organizer and ECLA pastor, addresses “direct, concrete work churches and the citizens of God’s world can undertake to foster both spiritual grown and social solidarity. The Bible is political but it is not partisan,” says Bryan.
— The Church Cracked Open: Disruption, Decline, and New Hope for Beloved Community (Mar. 17) by the Rev. Stephanie Spellers, looks at the church’s urgent need to let go of racism and privilege. Spellers is canon to the Episcopal Church’s Presiding Bishop Michael Curry for evangelism, reconciliation, and stewardship of creation. “It’s not surprising that a global pandemic and once-in-a-generation reckoning with white supremacy—on top of decades of systemic decline—have spurred Christians everywhere to ask who we are, why God placed us here and what difference that makes to the world,” according to the publisher.
— We Shall be Changed: Questions for the Post Pandemic Church (out now) is a collection of essays by thought leaders, edited by Episcopal Bishop Mark Edington, has a forward spin, looking for the energy and creativity that will be needed to “re-gather the people of God,” Bryan says. In his preface, Bishop Edington acknowledges that change is not optional. He writes, “Opportunities have been set before us to shake loose the systems and structures that cannot get us to where God invites us now to go, that answered a different set of needs for a different time.”
Baylor Press looks at race and the church with Church in Color: Youth Ministry, Race, and the Theology of Martin Luther King Jr. (out now) by Montague R. Williams, associate professor of Church, Culture, and Society at Point Loma Nazarene University. He delves into the lives of three young men longing for Christian discipleship. Through them — and the teachings and practices of King — Williams “models an effective strategy for actual ministers: listen first, and listen well. When you do that, you realize that issues of race are very much not irrelevant, but are enmeshed in our churches,” says Baylor Press editor Cade Jarrell.
