How Senior Adult Church Members Can Still Pray-Give-Go During Social Distancing

Recent religious landscape studies by Pew Forum reveal demographics for 65+ years of age of the membership of the Southern Baptist Convention varying from 27% to 84% (depending on the sample study). With the COVID-19 impact, that almost 1/3 to over 2/3 of the congregation happens to be one of the hardest hit demographics for life-threatening illness. And yet, no one wants to feel helpless or confined to simply observing the rest of the world go on with living out the Great Commission. So what are some things that Senior Adult church members can do to be a missional influence in the midst of a pandemic. I’d like to offer a few suggestions (please share other helpful ways in the comments section):

    1.      You can ask your pastor for a list of prospects to call and pray for or with. Right now your pastor may be overloaded with the demands of sermon preparation and visits with the sick, so he may really appreciate your offer to be an outreach director of sorts by picking up the phone. If your pastor is bi-vocational or tri-vocational, the time demands right now may be extra-heavy, so your help would be tremendous.

    2.      You can prayerwalk the Sunday School rooms. If the church is not being used during this pandemic, perhaps you could arrange an isolated visit to walk the halls and pray over the rooms, the pews, the building grounds. You could pray for lost souls that will be visiting in the coming weeks and months. You could pray for the pastor and for teachers to have clarity in sharing the Gospel in their messages.

    3.      You can offer to help another church with an extra cleanup times while church building is not being used. Some churches don’t have a groundskeeper or maintenance person or a paid janitor, so your offer to help clean up and tidy up in this down time could be a big help to them.

    4.      You can find other Community Missions projects – If you are a Southern Baptist, your local Associational Missions Strategist who works diligently to lead your association of churches probably has some unique missional opportunities right now for community missions. Some of them won’t require face-to-face work, but your help would be greatly appreciated. I’d highly recommend your reading Keith Ivey’s article at https://buckburch.blogspot.com/2020/03/guest-post-by-keith-ivey-community.html. Keith is the Northeast Missions Consultant for the Georgia Baptist Mission Board, and his article has great insights.

    5.      You can have an online yard sale for future missions trips. Did you know that there are websites and apps that allow you to take pictures of items and sell them online? If you’re doing spring cleaning at home and have some items you no longer need, why not consider selling them and donating the proceeds to your church’s future missions trips or to the work of fulltime missionaries? I’m not making a recommendation for particular sites, but there are multiple companies that can help you do this: Amazon, Shopify, Ebay, Bonanza, and Etsy are just a few.

    6.      You can help deliver tangible help for single-parent families. Your church may know of some single moms who are struggling right now with bills or meals. Perhaps your Sunday School class or church wants to adopt a struggling family, and you could help deliver the help to the front door. Perhaps you can call ahead and simply say, “Our church is ordering a meal for you through (local restaurant with delivery) and we’ll paid for it online. When would you like it delivered.”

    7.      You can do internet research on a new geographic area of your city for outreach or on an international missions focus. One of the greatest tools the Lord has given missionaries in the 21^st century is internet access. Have you considered the massive help you can be to your pastor, associational missionary or state missionary by helping do internet research into an unreached zone in your state or unreached people group? There are even tools to help you do that at peoplegroups.org.

    8.      You can create an online prayer video or daily Facebook post for encouragement from your church. Do you have a smart phone or a laptop with a camera? Do you have a Facebook page? Then you have all you need to record yourself leading a prayer time for missional needs or for encouragement for your church during this time. There are a couple of great instructional webinars about this at https://gabaptist.org/webinars-and-training/

    9.      You can start and maintain a telephone prayer chain. If you get a membership directory from your church, even if its just a list on a piece of paper, you can start enlisting others to form a prayer chain for daily or weekly prayer requests. As new requests come in, you could be the catalyst for feeding those prayers into that prayer chain.

    10.   You can serve as a “hotline” operator for prayer requests. If your church would send out a notice on their Facebook page or website asking for prayer requests to come to a telephone number, you could offer to be that person who receives them, prays with the caller immediately, and gets follow-up information for later contact as the Lord answers their prayers.

These are just a few ideas. What other ideas do you have? Let’s share best practices!