There is no substitute for live social interaction–even meeting online. You cannot pat someone on the back or hug them by phone, online, or by mail. Eye contact is impossible by phone, text, email, mail, and even one-way video (challenging even with two-way video).

Knowing that, what can be done when circumstances prevent meeting in person? As a nation and world, we are in the midst of the COVID-19 virus (Coronavirus) pandemic. Limits have been set on group gathering size.

That impacts churches. If worship does not happen in person, groups are usually cancelled as well. But even without a virus crisis, sometimes groups cannot meet in person. Vacations happen. Illness, family member death, and a litany of reasons occur that take members or even the leader away. My question in this day of technology is why cancel?

Meeting Online

There are tons of methods for connecting when you cannot meet in person. Consider some of the following ideas:

• Conference calls (for groups less techno-savvy) can enable a lesson to be taught with Q&A or discussion, announcements, and prayer together;
• Facebook Live and YouTube Live can enable the group leader to pray, share announcements, and teach a lesson; while this is one-way communication, it can be supplemented by text to receive prayer requests and lesson questions/comments;
• Zoom, GoToMeeting, Google G Suite, and others can enable groups to see and hear each other and tend to work best for smaller groups if there will be much interaction; they offer chat during video which allows written prayer requests, announcements/reminders, and lesson questions/comments (the video link and the chat conversation can be emailed to those who missed it);
• Facebook Groups and other social media can provide posting of lesson outlines, questions, and discussion along with announcements and prayer requests;
• Text generally works best with really small groups (2-4) and short texts; if the group or texts gets larger, then participants won’t have enough time to read what is texted.

Again, I am not advocating online meeting in place of live meetings in person. But your class or group can meet online when special holidays or circumstances prevent meeting live in person. A small group could still meet online when a group leader or host has to travel. A D-group could still meet online when a discipler is out of town. And these ideas can also work for the sick, traveling, etc. to join when the rest of the group is still meeting live in person.

Comments?

Do you have additional experiences, resource suggestions, or ideas you could share? Press Leave a Comment to share. Don’t stop meeting just because you can’t meet live in person.

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Darryl Wilson serves as the Sunday School & Discipleship Consultant for the Kentucky Baptist Convention. He is the author of Disciple-Making Encounters: Revolutionary Sunday School and the Sunday School Revolutionary blog.