FOCUS ON MINISTR Y


COVID-19: Opportunity Lost or Gained?


by REV. TREVOR KIRSCH


Last March, when everything shut down, I spent the first number of weeks adjusting and complaining like most everyone else. As March turned into April, I began to sense that maybe God was also showing mercy to us. We are all aware of countries where real persecution is the norm and the church has had to learn how to survive by going underground. I began to wonder if God wasn’t giving us a glimpse of how life could be in real persecution and also possibly giving the church in North America some time to prepare for that reality. I began to wonder what we were doing at Compass Immanuel to intentionally prepare for a time when attending church could be illegal. If that sounds too morbid, I also wondered what we were doing to prepare the next generation of elders.


Over the next several weeks, God burdened me


to start developing a program to train and men- tor younger men in our church for leadership. My goal was to teach our men how to study the Bible to teach the Bible via the Bible. We have so many resources at our disposal but what if they were all


taken away? How lost would we be as pastors if the only resource we had to prepare a sermon was our Bible? The more I thought the more overwhelmed I became, realizing this would take months to work through.


FELLOWSHIP FOCUS, JUNE/JULY 2021 6


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