Introduction Robert A. Danielson As of January 5, 2021, the COVID-19 virus has wreaked havoc on the physical and emotional well-being of the people all over the globe. As of this date, there have been 282,000 total cases in Kentucky with 3,067 total deaths. In the United States there have been 20,900,000 total cases with 354,000 death, and in the entire world there have been 85,900,000 total cases with 1,860,000 deaths. While several vaccines have been created and are currently in the process of distribution, the world is still in the midst of this challenging crisis, a crisis which can only be compared to the Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1919, long before most of us were even born. It is expected that these numbers will rise before they begin to decline. As a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, I, like many others, was thrown into the challenge of moving classes online for most of 2020. This was a particular challenge, since I was teaching two courses of Missional Formation, one in the Summer of 2020 and one in the Fall of 2020. This course has traditionally used an ethnographic component to teach students how to study a congregation through observation and interviews, but as churches moved online with social distancing and mask wearing increasing, I was left trying to figure out how to deal with this assignment in an online format. In the start of this crisis, I was invited to work with two other colleagues on writing a paper on how the Spanish Influenza epidemic impacted Christian Mission.1 This was an historical approach beginning to wrestle with what impacts COVID-19 might have on Christian mission in the near future. As I delved into my research and writing, See Robert A. Danielson, Benjamin L. Hartley, and James R. Krabill, “COVID-19 in missiological and historical perspective.” Missiology: An International Review 49 (1):1-15 (January 2021). DOI: 10.1177/0091829620972386 1
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