Andy Stanley Explains Why His Megachurch Won’t Gather on Sundays Until 2021, Part 2

This is one of the things I'm telling leaders: during times of uncertainty, our voice is more important than our words. People need to hear your voice.

Daniel Yang: What do you think the cadence of communication is going to be like for you?

Andy Stanley: This is one of the things I'm telling leaders: during times of uncertainty, our voice is more important than our words. People need to hear your voice. About every third email I send out I actually video myself reading the email to our congregation. People need to hear our voice, not just read our words, and our presence is way more important than our preparation or our presentation. We have to figure out how to be more present. We have to figure out how to help people hear our voices. Not because we're important, but because they look to us for leadership. And then the third part of that is people want clarity. One of the things I know our staff tells me they appreciate is, "Andy, thank you for not making us go week to week and wonder, because some churches in our area, they won't announce ahead of time."

They're saying, well, we're going to wait and see. Well, you can't plan. You can't be strategic. And I don't think you can be missional if it's wait and see. I told our staff, Here's the good news. You don't have to think about coming up with an opening plan between now and Christmas. We are a hundred percent going to create assets for children, preschoolers, middle school, and high schoolers. We're going to continue to focus on small groups and online preaching. We've been doing that for a long time anyway, so that clarity doesn't remove the uncertainty, but it helps people know what to do.

And that is the key. It's like Joshua at the Jordan river. The people want to know what's going to happen. Joshua says, Hey, pack your stuff, get some lunches ...