Nicole hadn't been to church in years, but when the COVID pandemic hit, she remembered a Seventh-day Adventist church she visited as a kid and wanted to reconnect.
“Dover is a very unique place. It’s the capital of the state of Delaware. You have four universities. You have the Air Force base. So it's kind of a mix of a lot of different, very unique cultures together in a small city.”
“My name is Nicole. I am born and raised in Dover, Delaware. I actually attended this church a few times as a child. And as I went through middle school and high school, I kind of got away from church. I went through college and became a teacher here in the community.”
“During the pandemic, I just felt like something was missing. And I think it was just the world pressed pause for me and having the time to reflect and to sit still. I really do believe it was the Holy Spirit working through me. I didn't want to resist that pull anymore.”
“When the pandemic first hit and everything was shutting down, you're kind of afraid of the worst case scenario. It's, Oh, you know, is the church going to survive this? You know, Is our school going to survive? This was one of the first concerns I had. My first priorities when the pandemic hit were just trying to make sure that we were still staying a church family. We couldn't be here in person. All right, we need to make sure that I'm here with our team and I'm still preaching at least every Sabbath.”
“I started to livestream some different churches. And of course, Dover First was on my mind because this is the church I had attended as a child. It was through Facebook that I found some live sermons from Pastor Knott and felt a connection as I watched from home.”
“Streaming went from being the secondary thing to being what church was for a while. So we went from a one camera setup to three cameras. We invested in some new lighting because we wanted that experience to be as close to being in person as possible. We wanted it to feel familiar to our members, but as a benefit that we weren't even thinking of, it made it more engaging for people who were searching online, too.”
“So I reached out to Pastor Knott through the church email.”
“Dear Pastor Evan and others at Dover First, I want to take a minute to introduce myself and to thank you for your live streaming of church services. I've been watching and listening from home…”
“I got this email at a very interesting time. It was the middle of the pandemic, obviously. We had just started opening up for in-person service. This is maybe a few weeks before. But actually a hurricane came through and a tornado hit our school and it caused some significant damage there and at our church, and it was very stressful. It's like, you know, the pandemic felt bad enough and now there's this tornado and everything seems to be going wrong.”
“And then all of a sudden there's this email on my phone and it's Nicole. This person who says that she's been watching online for some time, and now she's ready to give her heart to Jesus and she's ready to join our church. As a pastor, there's nothing better than that, especially when it's something that you just weren't even thinking about or expecting.”
“Pastor Knott reached out to me and I told him I wanted to learn more, and he and I scheduled weekly Zoom sessions to do a Bible study online. And it was during those Zooms where I did share with him that it was on my heart to become baptized and that I had never been baptized before. When he announced that he would be moving to Maryland and starting a new job and a new chapter in his life, I thought, Now is the time, I want you to be the one to baptize me and he agreed. We went over the baptism vows together and he baptized me in March of 2021.”
“I think it's important for pastors and for churches to really just step out in faith and trust God. A lot of the times when we think about church growth and evangelism in a way we make ourselves self-reliant by trying to come up with clever strategies, marketing campaigns, whatever the thing is going to be that's going to result in evangelism.”
“Really, for us, it was at a time when we were mainly just focused on just preaching God's Word, and just trying to present that effectively to our members. But broadcasting it online, we saw multiple people come to Jesus during that time. And so sometimes it's when we stop focusing on what we need to do to draw people to the church and we kind of let go and just trust God, God blesses in ways that we never expected.”
