Ministry during a long, tough Iowa winter is certainly challenging, but after sixteen years of living there, Randy Abel and Heartland Baptist Church have figured out a few things. One of the most important is to make sure the parking lot is taken care of and safe. For us, this includes 270 parking spaces that need to be plowed and salted. To help save money we do this ourselves. It typically takes around five hours with our skid steer and plow along with a snow blower on our tractor. This is usually 5 hours before church starts on a Sunday morning. Something else we have learned is to keep a hot pot of coffee and hot cocoa available. In our new building we made sure to include a church café to provide these drinks and snacks. I oftentimes hear on a winter Sunday morning, “I’m here for the coffee.”
Modern technology is also extremely helpful for our ministry during the winter months. Online giving is usually 25-30% of our offerings on bad weather weekends. We also print our church address on offering envelopes to make it easier for members to mail in their offering. It is common for us to receive several offering envelopes in the mail after a bad weather Sunday. We recently started using “Facebook Live” on Sunday mornings. We have been gaining traction and there are people watch it weekly, but on bad weather Sundays that number goes up drastically. For example, this past Sunday (February 24,2019) we had blizzard-like conditions outside. An average Sunday for us is around 500. We had 97 in attendance, but we had 432 watch the service on Facebook Live.
Perhaps the toughest aspect of ministry in the north during winter is trying to not get discouraged. Don’t get me wrong, we have a great church. I am honored to pastor my church, but when it is -22 degrees or someone’s road has a snow drift that is four feet tall, people, especially new prospects, just don’t get out on a Sunday morning to go to church. We use the winter months to get ahead on projects and long-term planning, but week after week of bad weather certainly does test your attitude. But we keep at it, and no one is as excited for spring as a bunch of folks who have been shoveling snow all winter.