Like everybody else, Seth King and youth ministers all across the state have had to do a lot of thinking, pivoting and canceling plans this past year.
And this month, the biggest question mark has been what to do about DNow.
DNow — or DiscipleNow — weekends have long been a staple of youth ministry, with small groups of teens spending the night in host homes for Bible studies and meeting back up at the church for large-group worship and activities.
But King and others wondered — can we pull that off in a pandemic? And if so — how?
In his area, the first thing to think about was whether or not they could keep with their large-scale tradition.
For more than 20 years, churches around Decatur and out into the rural areas of Morgan County had banded together to have one big DNow weekend.
Location questions
This year, they thought about renting out a local theater, but even if they required masks, they wouldn’t be able to distance like they should.
Then they considered holding it at Westmeade Baptist Church or at First Baptist Church, Decatur, where King serves as minister to students.
But even that was “difficult to navigate,” he said. “Depending on the context of your church, what we were finding was that churches were having to make different decisions for the different churches.”
For example, the median age of Westmeade Baptist’s congregation is older, so they wanted to take extra precautions to make sure their church was a safe place for their people to attend.
“To make accommodations to meet the needs of close to 12 churches was just impossible,” he said. “At that point, we decided to split for this year.”
So King decided to try to have a DNow for just his youth group, with worship times held in the sanctuary where they could spread out.
But as he talked with other church staff and leaders, and as COVID-19 cases continued to rise in their area, they decided their priority was to make sure their Sunday morning crowd felt safe to continue attending.
“Within the past three weeks, we’ve had three congregational members pass away due to COVID,” King said. “It’s sensitive to us; it’s hitting hard right now. So we want to prioritize keeping people safe on Sunday mornings.”
At First Baptist Church, Trussville, Spencer Jones said they also spent a lot of energy figuring out whether or not it would be safe for them to hold DNow this year.
In the end, they decided if they nixed the host homes, tried to keep students with their same small groups and spread everyone out across the sanctuary, they could pull it off.
“We passed out customized ‘Jesus Wins’ masks to go with our theme, and we chose not to hold activities at the church like we usually do — we didn’t feel like we had a space large enough to do that safely,” said Jones, minister to high school students.
Salvations reported
They did everything they could to ensure they weren’t a “superspreader event,” and in the end, he said he felt it went pretty well — they topped 400 students, their largest crowd ever, and spread them out using taped-off areas around the worship center.
“We saw 13 kids come to know the Lord,” Jones said.
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