To be honest, we don’t need more content about COVID-19 & the church. But alas, you’re reading & I’m writing. It is neither my responsibility nor my intention to speak definitively about what churches should do, nor is it time to speculate on how this may impact the way we understand & do church in the future. (I think that conversation may come later, though.)
My goal, instead, is to offer some insight into the tension so many of us face this week. Pastors around the country are facing difficult decisions and reaching different conclusions about how to proceed in light of the threat posed by COVID-19. I want to make abundantly clear that nothing I say here is meant to imply I am right and others are wrong. Our church is sharing more precautions & actions that we’re taking. Here, I’m less concerned with where we end up & more concerned with how we got there.
To be frank, I don’t really care if I get sick. I don’t want to get sick, obviously. But I am confident I’ll be okay if I do. I am, however, very concerned that I may get someone else sick. Faced with hundreds of questions, two loom large. First: Do we have church? Second: Why?
We steward the legacy of countless saints who chose costly love over self-preservation. In an incredibly helpful post, Andy Crouch writes:
The Roman world was full of plagues. Epidemics regularly decimated cities and regions. Though ancient people did not understand the germ theory of disease, they knew enough to flee cities, if they had the means to do so.
The first Christians, who saw themselves as the household of God in their cities, did not flee the plagues. They stayed, and they served. In his book The Rise of Christianity, sociologist Rodney Stark develops a statistical argument that this commitment to providing meaningful care to people stricken by the plague was, all by itself, a major contributor to the growth of the church in the first centuries of the common era.
After you had recovered from the plague, after all, where would you want to worship? The pagan temple whose priests and elite benefactors had fled at the first sign of trouble? Or the household of the neighbor who had brought you food and water, care and concern, at great risk to themselves?
So we gather! Right? Well, maybe not. What if the act of gathering actually endangers both ourselves and our neighbors? This question leads to yet another question. How can we embrace danger to serve our neighbors without inviting danger upon our neighbors?
Consider why we gather regularly. It’s not about drawing a crowd or even evangelizing the masses. We gather as a family of missionary servants to build one another up & spur one another on to love and good deeds. (Heb. 10:23-25) We gather to worship & grow then we scatter to serve. We may now be in a situation where the act of gathering itself prohibits us from achieving the purpose of gathering. The most loving thing (for ourselves & neighbors) may be to suspend services while this virus runs its course. Or the most loving thing may be to gather with extreme caution, pray, and plan tangible ways to serve our neighbors. Different contexts call for different approaches.
So what about my context? For practical advice, I prayed and turned to Scripture, knowledgeable friends, and the civic leaders God has placed over us. I watched the press conference with Mayor Goodwin & Commissioners Salango & Carper. Right now, gatherings of 250 people or more are cancelled in the Charleston Civic Center. (Sorry, I’ll always call it the Civic Center.) Currently, our church is less than 250 people & we have a decent idea who may show up. If they lower that threshold, if our church doubles overnight, or if our understanding of the virus changes, we will not hesitate to suspend our gathering.
But this Sunday, we gather. We’ll be in little clusters around our big old theater. We’ll pray for our neighbors. We’ll bring food for our neighbors. And if the situation changes, we’ll change for our neighbors. We won’t forsake our convictions. We will rightly understand & act on our convictions. This is not a time for political angling, church marketing, or self-preservation; this is a time for sacrificial love. Let’s show grace & listen to our leaders as we all figure this out together.
MB
