At Light & Life Isla Vista, we are not trying to maintain the status quo, but strive to frame the pandemic and other upheavals of 2020 as divine opportunities.

It started with moving to Facebook Live for our Sunday services. Our online congregation is much larger than our in-person congregation, and we have many people logging into our services faithfully from all over the country.

Ministry in the pandemic looks like a masked pastor making lots of visits to the members’ homes. We used to have weekly Bible Study in the common room at the Pescadero Lofts, but that is now closed.

For our weekly ministry in Isla Vista, our church family did some deep house cleaning and bought a cargo trailer to organize all of our meal sharing supplies, along with tables and chairs. We anticipate opportunities will come to expand our outreach ministry to other locations as restrictions lift.

With the racial and political tensions at stress levels, we see a great need and associated opportunity for deeper-level discipleship. As our summer study of Richard Foster’s “Celebration of Discipline” winds down, we are organizing for multiple discipleship groups to study “Mansions of the Heart” by Tom Ashbrook. It appears the number of people involved in our fall study will be our highest by far—reflecting the increase in numbers of people getting involved in our ministry virtually who now want to move deeper into life in the Spirit.

It’s good to belong!