Coronavirus: 5 Ways Your Church Can be Proactive

If you’re like most churches around the world right now, you’re probably wondering what you should do regarding your worship services and events in light of the Coronavirus outbreak.  Some counties in the country have actually banned public events including religious services.  While we can’t tell you whether or not you should hold your services, we can give you 5 tips on how to adjust effectively.

1. DON’T PANIC: we serve the Great Physician!  Being a source of calm and reason is even more vital in light of an outbreak of this nature.  Remind those you minister to of Whom we put our trust, faith, and hope in!  Here’s a great article on a Biblical response to the Coronavirus outbreak, as guided by Martin Luther’s own response to the plague of his day. We think you’ll find it worth reading.
2. COMMUNICATE: Stay in communication with your members and keep them updated with how you will respond to the pandemic.  Remember you can email any of your groups from Servant Keeper and also send text and voice messages through the SK Notify system.  If you don’t already, you may want to get text messaging in place for your ministry.  Being able to send text alerts regarding meeting time changes, health policies, and any other alerts you may need to send is vital.  With Servant Keeper Notify you can send text, voice, and email blasts to any of your groups in Servant Keeper.
3. LIVE STREAM: Learn how to Live Stream your service in case you need to.  Live Streaming is super easy and best of all free through Facebook and Youtube.  Here’s a short video that shows you how easily, with just a smartphone, you can livestream your services for folks who decide to stay home.
4. EGIVING: Remind you members they can give their tithes and pledges electronically without having to come to the church.  Having egiving available by text, your website, or mobile app is critical as many people who decide to stay home will still want to participate in their tithes and pledges. You can help make it easy for them when you set up EGIVING.  Plus, with Servant Keeper’s built-in egiving solution the contributions come into Servant Keeper right alongside the rest of their ‘in-person’ contributions. – See more about using Servant Keeper with Vanco here.
5. WORK REMOTELY: keep your staff healthy by allowing them to opt to work from home. You can do this easily and keep your whole team connected with Servant Keeper since it’s cloud enabled and your staff can do anything they would do in the office, from the comfort and safety of home. Learn more about the benefits of using Servant Keeper on the cloud here.   You can also keep your staff in constant communication with one another using the free version of Slack and you can have different channels for #Elders, #childrensworkers, #staff, etc and you can set it so only those in the channel see posts to that channel. We’ll try to put together a brief Slack training in the next few days.  We use this at ServantPC and it rocks!  Two other tools are Google Hangouts and Zoom, both of which allow your team to video conference, and both of which have a plethora of tutorials.  We’ll attempt to get a training on these tools as well.

We’re here to help! Don’t have Servant Keeper?
Reach out to us at 800-773-7570 or email sales@servantpc.com

Do you have Servant Keeper, but would like information on adding the Cloud, SKNotify, or eGiving?
Call us at 800-773-7570 option 5, or email upgrade@servantkeeper.org.