By Martha Bush

It was March, 2020, and my pastor announced on Facebook, “Due to the virus, Sunday morning worship has been canceled.  However, you can still watch services on live stream, so join us at our regular time of 10 A.M.”

And so, it was…. Sunday morning came, and there I sat in my jammies, hair not brushed, no make-up, and a cup of coffee in hand, as I embraced a new type of worship. Not only was I not fully clothed, but absence from my usual method of church attendance, there was no hand-shaking, hugging, and cheek-kissing going on as I entered the worship center. (aka, my bedroom office with a seat facing my computer screen) My Mama would have turned over in her grave! I can just hear her saying, “What in the world is going to become of this generation? They are a disgrace to long-held church traditions!” Technology had hit the church!

In the following weeks, this new way of worshipping on Sunday mornings that stretched all over the world, left me with many questions:

• What about the offerings to pay the bills? I’ve heard it said that people don’t pay their tithes if they are not sitting on the pews.
• What about calling for the elders to lay hands on the sick? Guess the sick will stay sick at home by themselves.
• What is going to happen if the internet goes off? Grrr!
• One Sunday, I suddenly realized that I couldn’t gossip with Sista Gertrude about the preacher’s sermon, and what his wife was wearing to church. Have mercy, Lord!
• As time went on, my biggest question was, “God, where do we go from here?”

Suffice it to say, I don’t have the answer to the many questions I have pondered. But, I do sort of compare the situation to a prophetic word that was given in 1990 at a home Bible study I was attending by a lady named, Irene Farley. Copying from my journal, it goes like this:

There is a shaking going on in the land to shake up the pattern of the things of man. For I have a plan that won’t fit you see, for it’s a plan that’s ordained by me. So, yield to the shaking that’s going on in you. Let me shake you through and through. Let me change your thinking, for I have a new way that I want to reach you. I’m passing through the land in this day to show man a new way that will bring them closer to me, so draw not back to what’s going on within you, but let me shake you, and shake you through and through.

Irene then commented on the prophecy this way: “I believe God is saying that our plan and the way we’ve gone in the past isn’t going to work for now because He always moves in different ways. He never moves the same way twice. We get so patterned and so programed that if He doesn’t fit into our program, then we’re un-comfortable with it, but the shaking inside of us that’s going on, we don’t like what we feel, we try to blame it on everything in the world, but it just boils down to one thing—God is shaking us up. It’s so simple and easy just to yield, and let God do it His way, rather than hanging in there and resisting and holding out to make Him try to do it our way, because He’s not going to do it.”

At that particular time in my life, I took that prophetic word personally because I was going through major transitions in my life, and it seemed as though everything that could be shaken was being shaken. I didn’t know exactly what was happening, but I knew I was experiencing a new kind of life, totally different from my past life. And guess what?  Though uncomfortable, I began to realize that it was an opportunity to stop some things that had not been working for tradition's sake and start new things.

Could it be that the prophetic word of shaking that was given by Irene in 1990 be a prophetic word for our current time that began in 2020? 

My friends, if you are feeling discouraged by some of the things you see happening in The Church World today, I encourage you to remember the words of Jesus:

“I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

(Matthew 16:18 KJV)

Let me know your thoughts on our changing church.