Background

COVID-19 and its associated restrictions around in-person gatherings have created unprecedented challenges for religious congregations and those who lead them. While several surveys have attempted to describe how pastors and congregations responded to COVID-19, these provide a relatively thin picture of how COVID-19 is impacting religious life. There is scant qualitative data describing the lived reality of religious leaders and communities during the pandemic.

Purpose and methods

This paper provides a more detailed look at how pastors and congregations experienced and responded to COVID-19 and its associated restrictions in the early period of the pandemic. To do so, we draw from 26 in-depth interviews with church-appointed United Methodist pastors conducted between June and August 2020. Pastors were asked to describe how their ministry changed as a result of COVID-19 and interviews were analyzed using applied thematic analysis approaches to identify the most common emergent themes.

Results

Pastors reported that COVID-19 fundamentally unsettled routine ways of doing ministry. This disruption generated both challenges and opportunities for clergy and their congregations. In the findings, we describe how clergy responded in key areas of ministry–worship and pastoral care–and analyze how the pandemic is (re)shaping the way that clergy understood their role as pastors and envisioned the future of the Church. We argue for the value of examining the pandemic as an “unsettled” cultural period (Swidler 1986) in which religious leaders found creative ways to (re)do ministry in the context of social distancing. Rather than starting from scratch, we found that pastors drew from and modified existing symbolic and practical tools to fit pandemic-related constraints on religious life. Notably, however, we found that “redoing” ministry was easier and more effective in some areas (worship) than others (pastoral care).

Conclusions and Implications

The impact of COVID-19 on pastors and congregations is complex and not fully captured by survey research. This study provides a baseline for investigating similarities and differences in the responses of pastors within and across denominations and traditions. It also provides a baseline for assessing whether changes in ministry implemented during the early stages of the pandemic remain in place in the post-COVID world.

中文翻译：

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动荡时期的牧灵：COVID-19 大流行期间神职人员经历的定性研究

背景

COVID-19 及其对面对面聚会的相关限制给宗教会众及其领导者带来了前所未有的挑战。虽然有几项调查试图描述牧师和会众对 COVID-19 的反应，但这些调查提供了关于 COVID-19 如何影响宗教生活的相对薄弱的画面。描述大流行期间宗教领袖和社区生活现实的定性数据很少。

目的和方法

本文更详细地介绍了牧师和会众在大流行初期如何体验和应对 COVID-19 及其相关限制。为此，我们从 2020 年 6 月至 2020 年 8 月期间对教会任命的联合卫理公会牧师进行的 26 次深度访谈中得出结论。牧师被要求描述他们的事工如何因 COVID-19 而发生变化，并使用应用主题分析对访谈进行了分析识别最常见的新兴主题的方法。

结果

牧师们报告说，COVID-19 从根本上改变了日常事工的方式。这种破坏给神职人员及其会众带来了挑战和机遇。在调查结果中，我们描述了神职人员在事工的关键领域——敬拜和教牧关怀——的反应，并分析了这场流行病如何（重新）塑造神职人员理解他们作为牧师的角色和展望教会未来的方式。我们主张将大流行视为一个“不稳定”的文化时期（Swidler 1986），在这个时期，宗教领袖找到了在社会疏远的背景下（重新）开展事工的创造性方法。我们发现牧师不是从头开始，而是借鉴并修改了现有的象征性和实用性工具，以适应与流行病相关的对宗教生活的限制。然而，值得注意的是，

结论和启示

COVID-19 对牧师和会众的影响很复杂，调查研究并未完全捕捉到。这项研究为调查不同教派和传统内和跨教派和传统的牧师反应的异同提供了一个基线。它还提供了一个基准，用于评估在大流行早期阶段实施的事工变化是否在后 COVID 世界中仍然存在。