5 minute read
The joys and challenges of community under lockdown
Andrew Shead / Head of Old Testament and Hebrew, Lecturer in Old Testament
As every Australian well remembers, lockdown dropped over us quickly. Over the course of ten days of rapidly evolving messages, we moved from comfortable normality to a fully online environment. Our IT team did six months’ work in one; the student deans listened ceaselessly to feedback as we experimented with new models; and the faculty bravely threw the academic programme up in the air to see how it could be made COVIDfriendly. Ironically, the first thing isolation did for us was bring us together—faculty, students, and staff—to work on the problem. The challenge: to support our students to keep learning and growing spiritually while also managing the stresses of lockdown life and ministry.
Most of our students have set aside years of their life to train for a life of ministry. They come to Moore to work hard, to get every scrap of value they can from these short, relatively undistracted years. But lockdown is the enemy of productivity, the friend of anxiety, and dangerous for the soul. When all interactions are on a screen, human efficiency can drop by up to 50%. So says recent research, and our experience bears this out. Screens are mentally exhausting, work in isolation is demotivating, and uncertainty about the future creates anxiety. The College responded to this challenging situation in four ways.
Clear communication
Uncertainty breeds anxiety, so clear communication became even more important. Mark Thompson gave regular COVID briefings; Paul Grimmond, our Dean of Students, delivered a weekly video message with advice for godly resilience; Chaplains chatted with each student individually. Good communication reassures everyone that we are all in this together, that nobody is forgotten.
Make the mechanics of online College as simple as possible
This required the simplicity of ‘genius’—the genius in question being our IT team. They collected every activity of the college into one system: a virtual interface which integrated with our existing online learning system, internal communications, and calendar, and gave each student a single point of access to lectures, seminars, chapel, chaplaincy groups, informal meetings, the library, and more. The library staff team spent long hours identifying eBooks to purchase, so that students had access to the materials they needed for their research and writing. We soon had virtual classrooms, discussion groups, private meeting rooms, collaborative work spaces, shared resources, and more.
Make learning as easy as possible
The faculty examined all the demands placed on students, asking which were non-essential, and which could be achieved more flexibly. We reduced the number of assessments, focused courses down to one or two core skills, and gave students as much freedom as possible to reach their goals. This is all good educational practice, of course, so many of these changes will outlast the pandemic. The ‘return to basics’ which COVID has necessitated holds out the promise of even more excellent courses in years to come. Expectations from classroom teaching also had to change, given the difficulty of remaining focused for long hours of screen time. Teaching a class you cannot properly see, and whose discussion is mostly in a chat sidebar, is a skill that takes some time to learn. Chris Thomson, our professional development expert, gave the rest of us a crash course in the technology that now exists for making online learning more effective. This included technology for visual communication, for collaboration, for feedback, for reinforcement of learning, for communication, and for reflection. Of course, at the end of the day we were still isolated from one another, and the great danger this can breed is isolation from God.
Photo: Chris Montgomery | Unsplash
Keep the word of God at the centre of our lives
Early on, while cutting every non-essential activity, we resisted the temptation to cancel chapel. Instead we shortened it, eliminating most things we would normally say together. But we continued the systematic reading of Scripture (we are up to Chronicles in the Old Testament, and Acts in the New), listened to a short sermon, prayed, and sang a song. The resulting 40-minute service was then opened up to the entire community—staff and families as well as students and faculty. Our invisible congregation became much more diverse than it usually is! Chapel ran as a live event, so there were glitches from time to time, but it brought us two great blessings.
First, it united us around the word of God, and powerfully reminded us that the proximity we share in the Spirit, though invisible, is more real and true than physical presence. And secondly, it brought us face to face in a mundane but powerful way. Each day four different students (or staff members) were invited to read the Bible or pray, and the rest of us got to see their faces. By mid-year we had seen and heard almost every first-year student. For a year-group which had barely begun to know each other before being locked down, this was especially helpful. On Thursdays, we met in chaplaincy groups, where individual needs could be shared and people supported in their various circumstances.
We used many mechanisms for developing online relationships, such as the regular staff briefings and devotions, student prayer triplets, faculty prayer meetings and morning teas, and informal one-to-one video chats. Life online remains challenging however. Despite these mechanisms, and their blessings, lockdown has taught us more dramatically than anything just how precious face-toface learning in community is, for preparing the whole person for a life of ministry. Please pray for the handful of students who have not been able to return to us in person, that the Lord would sustain them. The other thing lockdown taught us is that our times are in God’s hands, whose plan is perfect. It is the hard times, not the easy days, that teach us what it means to call God faithful and good. In God’s amazing grace, the way the whole College has come together to bear one another’s burdens and encourage one another in Christ has been nothing short of remarkable.
