Peering into the Future
Reviewing worship attendance numbers at staff, it was noteworthy that while in-house attendance has remained flat over the last year, online viewership has increased 39%. What those numbers really mean is hard to parse. But of those numbers, we have had a consistent average of 86 YouTube accesses each week, which does not tell us how many people are worshiping in each home. If that is even 1.5 persons per view, then that attendance number is 129. Add that to the average 302 people in-house plus some number of Facebook worshipers and you have a total that approaches our pre-pandemic attendance totals.
These are calculations of reality that I never imagined five years ago. Online? QR codes for registering attendance? Zoom meetings and virtual classes? None of these were part of our life together in 2019. Now it is difficult to imagine our lives without them, they seem so common. Technology – and the future – came at us all jarringly fast.
It should not surprise us then, that as we gather in our small groups over the next several weeks to discuss what our church could look like 5-10 years from now, we will feel discomfort – even jarringly so – because it will seem so different, strange, and even off-putting. Our Church Council created a Futurist Team to imagine scenarios for our church in the future given several unavoidable “drivers” that are changing the way people think and act about their faith, worship, and involvement in a church. Like the pandemic, these drivers are unavoidable and affect nearly all churches in similar ways. Our responsibility as leaders is to prepare FUMC Plano for those coming changes. Therefore, as we did with the sale of land and the reality of disaffiliation in our denomination, the Futurist Team is holding a series of Open Chat Sessions for you to hear and respond to our best research and prediction of our likely future. You will also have the opportunity to offer your best ideas; this is, after all, the church of all of us.
These Open Chat Sessions will be via Zoom at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 17, and Thursday, Sept. 19. Click HERE to sign up and receive the Zoom Link. There will also be two in-person Open Chat Sessions on Sunday, Sept. 22, at 9:30 and 11 a.m. No need to RSVP for those; just come to the Chapel.
So, bring your open minds, bring your imagination, and bring your faith as together we lean forward into our future with our best collective thinking. As the Spirit moved through the house churches in the first 200 years after Christ before there ever was a formal “church,” so the Spirit will move through us and move us toward the Christ who is in front of us, always leading us into the future that God sees.
Thank you for your prayers, participation, and investment in that future.
Connecting God and Grace to Self and Community,
