Imagine if the current pandemic sweeping our world and our country were to linger on for 18 months. That’s right—we remain in quarantine for one and a half years. You church cannot meet in person. Get used to those online worship services and small group meetings. How would your church function without the gathering? Would it? If you are a pastor, what would you do? Lose your mind?

We’re praying this doesn’t happen, of course, but Colin Marshall and Tony Payne used a mental experiment in their 2009 ministry book The Trellis and the Vine: The Ministry Mindset That Changes Everything (Matthias Media) that featured the above scenario, and it sounded eerily like the scenario we now face in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Ivan Mesa interviewed Marshall and Payne on that book’s scenario as well as how to multiply discipleship beyond COVID-19 in “The Decade-Old Ministry Book That Envisioned the Pandemic.”