Because people couldn’t meet during the pandemic, churches began to develop content to grab the hearts and minds of congregants. To me, this felt similar to times in the past when churches made fun programs to get the attention of kids who had left Sunday school. Some churches don’t realize how big of a mistake this is and still try to touch the hearts of children with pizza and trips to amusement parks.
While these attempts to win the hearts of children are helpful and needed, if the goal is to entertain then kids soon lose interest. At first, when kids participate in worldly activities they are intrigued and think “Wow! We do that at church, too!” but later on think “this is lousy.” The thing that the church should have been more focused on was the thing that the world doesn’t have but only exists in the church: the power of the gospel. The church should have relied on the Holy Spirit and proclaimed the good news of Jesus Christ, giving them time to pray and experience the Holy Spirit. There used to be a prayer service after the worship service.
Therefore, I thought that congregants would soon lose attention gained from making new content. Instead, our church chose to keep it simple and have worship services and cell meetings that focus on what’s really important. But still, we made just one special online meeting. “The Alcove Project” teaches congregants how to meditate on the bible.
The reason this project was first conceived was that we thought that there may be a time when we couldn’t freely gather together. For example, it’s expected that the world will become anti-Christian like China is today as surveillance systems become more prolific, and in most of the remaining mission fields missionaries aren’t able to gather in public in one place. Even in these circumstances there is one thing that is possible to lead a spiritually bountiful life: mediation.
Meditation is not simply researching the Bible. Of course you should read and research the Bible, but you should also spend time listening to what the Holy Spirit is telling you as you meditate on the Bible verses you read. If you learn to meditate by yourself, you are able to learn and walk with God even if you are alone, even if you can’t meet in a grand building with hundreds or thousands of people, even if you attend a worship service with a few members in a home like the early church.
The Bible study that we do in our cell group meetings is to encourage this experience of meditation. It is training to improve our ability to interpret the Bible without any special materials and to pray and listen to what God is telling us. It would be great if our congregants could become meditators of the word.
