Chapter 5 with Pastor Marcus Tso

2020 was certainly an unexpected year in so many ways.  For me, being in my first year as Newbern’s Senior Pastor, the pandemic brought unimagined challenges, but also surprising opportunities to serve God and His people under usual circumstances. 

Today, I just want to share one example of how God let me reapply a skill I had acquired in my former ministry context as a seminary professor. Back in my academic teaching days, online teaching was already a growing trend. Seminaries and other institutions of higher learning saw it as an effective tool to reach remote students. Industry standards kept changing, if anything could be described as a standard at all. So, over the year I had to learn and adapt my teaching to a number of platforms, the latest of which happened to be Zoom. When the church was bracing for the impending pandemic back in early March, 2020, we were making preparations to move our worship services online.

 In mid-March, triggered by a possible COVID exposure within our church, the Board decided to switch to online services that very weekend. The English service had the livestreaming support of Lucas, whose story was already featured last year. The Chinese (Cantonese) service, not having that technical know-how, needed another platform. Since Zoom was the online meeting platform that I had the most recent experience with, after some quick comparison with other alternative, I adopted it for the Cantonese service. The first online Cantonese service was minimalistic. Pastor Isaac was the scheduled speaker, and he did an amazing job after just one rehearsal session with me the night before. I put together a PowerPoint presentation will all the other elements and led the rest of it. Soon after that I provided training to other pastors and church leaders to use Zoom for leading small group and other meetings. 

Eventually, even the English service began to use Zoom as the virtual stage for the speakers and worship leaders to be livestreamed from. As a church, our proficiency in using Zoom has grown month by month, and is still growing.  Little did I know a few years ago that a tool for teaching could be so instrumental as a ministry platform through much of 2020 and into part of 2021!

Watch a day in the life of Pastor Marcus here: https://fb.watch/50kMXJ7AR-/

January 1, 2021