Ask St Luke’s Vicar Harry Newton how the rural Greytown parish managed to thrive over lockdown and he’ll say, “we just tried random stuff”. His main question during lockdown was “how do you produce content that’s helpful for other people?” From hosting pub chats over Zoom to creating a “choose your own adventure” Easter service, Harry’s philosophy was to experiment and see what worked and what didn’t, and a lot of what St Luke’s tried worked very effectively.

As to how the digital content produced by St Luke’s achieved 10,000 views and 9,000 shares, Harry says the key was that the people of St Luke’s forwarded sermons, videos and posts to other people in the wider community, many of whom started attending the online church services held by the parish.

As St Luke’s is the only church community in Greytown, the lay of the land looks a bit different to other parishes, but Harry says the key is looking at the context you’re in and asking, “What do people value?”

Looking around at their neighbourhood, the answer St Luke’s came to was “kids and community”, so that’s what they focused on both before lockdown and once restrictions were in place. Over lockdown, parishioners dropped off Easter-themed craft packs (sterilised, of course) to households with children and St Luke’s had an engaging online kid’s programme every Sunday. Small groups flourished, connecting over Zoom for discipleship and checking in with each other each week.

Connecting with the elderly over lockdown was also a high priority. Once it was possible to make visits, parishioners visited elderly members of the congregation and checked that they were able to connect to the Sunday services.

In everything it does, St Luke’s wants to “to connect people to one another and to Jesus”. To this end, the church put out videos with Christians talking about their faith, around topics locals would find interesting, such as artificial intelligence, resilience and mental health. A pastoral care phone-tree system helped organise vestry and pastoral teams to contact members of the parish and wider community, so that everyone had someone checking in on them. When St Luke’s set up a foodbank in the area, the community rallied around to help. Harry says that “in everything we do we try to get people from the community involved”.

When it comes to mission, Harry says, “we don't want people to become like us, we want them to come to know Jesus”. People in the community have responded, joining small groups, tuning into online content and attending the online and in-person services once restrictions were lifted. In fact, a few weeks into lockdown the number of people from the wider community attending the online services outnumbered the regular churchgoers. A number of people from the community have become Christians over the last few months, which is a huge encouragement for the parish.

For anyone who feels technologically challenged, Harry says that he got a lot of help from a contracted tech guru, which was an investment that really paid off. He also contacted churches with established online presences and asked if he could use some of the resources they had already created, including content for online kids’ programmes which St Luke’s added its own flavour to.

In the same spirit, Harry says that if anyone wants some ideas on how to connect to their community in the digital era, they are welcome to look at the St Luke’s website (https://www.stlukesgreytown.co.nz/), which has plenty of resources to spark ideas. Additionally, St Luke’s has made the template it used for its website available, so if your parish needs a low-cost website update, contact Harry on harry@stlukesgreytown.co.nz and he can let you know how to adapt the template to your context.

In summing up St Luke’s, Harry says, “we're just a little Anglican church doing our little bit”. But as the Greytown lockdown experience shows, it’s certainly punching above its weight.

By Etienne Wain