"He who dines with the devil should have a long spoon".
Both Chaucer and Shakespeare borrowed from this 14th century French proverb. When approaching combustible people or hot topics, they saw it as a clever word of caution and a necessary caveat. Watch yourself around certain folks! Duly warned, I wade into the feeding frenzy over the opening/shuttering/navigating of California churches during the Covid crisis. From my modest perch as just a pastor I've kept my eyes open and here's what the last seven months have taught me:
1. Shepherds can get eaten too. The first job of a pastor/shepherd is protecting the flock. False doctrine, well groomed but snaky TV religion hucksters, dirty demons, a sickness inducing culture all try to scatter and feast on the sheep. There's also the ever present lions and tigers and bears. Prolonged isolation, loneliness, anxiety, months of numbing uncertainty, restricted human contact, along with an uptick in the circulation of silly ideas have all been part of the everyone's pandemic experience. The increased presence of well funded spiritual predators, topped off with the extra craziness of an election season, adds layers of difficulty to the pastor's already difficult primary responsibility of protecting the sheep from harm. The importance of the pastor's protective role is not diminished but is probably heightened by the unusually taxing, unprecedented life altering challenge we are living through. You can be a smart pastor, eloquent, well connected, innovative and respected but if you fail to protect the people you've been entrusted with you won't even qualify as an also-ran. You don't deserve to. Protecting others is hard work.
All church leaders know that the wounded never wait, but the Covid experience increases the risk of pastors and other care givers also joining the ranks of the wounded. Adhere to health directives and close the sanctuary or creatively, cautiously try to maintain healthy smaller groups and somebody won't like it. Try Zooming a Bible study and somebody will balk. Responsibly cancel indoor services and step cautiously into re-opening with outdoor services. Some won't return until the building opens. Choose mandatory masking or optional masking, singing or silence. Weighing it out in the most careful, granular fashion possible won't save a pastor from criticism. Selecting any option or no option means there will be discontent from somebody, predictably followed by voting with the feet and maybe hostile mud slinging from armchair generals, both in and outside the church. The brilliance of the generous generals' advice is matched by the stunning absence of their skin in your game. No matter what you do there will be plenty of losses and even your wins will carry an asterisk. Years of work and prayer, hours of emotional investment and trust building can evaporate with the easy second guessing of one misunderstood move. It happens whether you're closing or opening the church. It's rough out there and the toll taken on shepherds trying to protect the sheep they love is unlike any other.
Daily, even hourly, heaps of statistics on the economic and physical damages of the pandemic have buried everyone in America, but the emotional, psychological and spiritual price we've all paid and will continue to pay is largely unreported and unknown. Maybe it can't be known. What is certain is that some of Covid's bills haven't even been opened yet. As interest compounds on these unpaid expenses they could become a shadow casting debt-curse bringing harm to the next generation and beyond. This thing isn't finished with us.
Pastors, by nature a breed that absorbs a lot while disclosing little, aren't immune to Covid's non-viral side effects. Pastors, this thing has hurt us. Just as many small businesses will not survive, I suspect many church leaders, especially in smaller settings. will also not survive. As casualties of the upheaval, some excellent shepherds will get out and find something else to do.
2. To some people, you're a big fat nothing. Some pastors, along with legal eagles eager to represent them and smiling public figures happy to slap backs in hopes of votes, sense that our churches have been singled out by health officials, office holders and bureaucrats for harsher shut-down treatment than other enterprises where people gather.
I don't think government leaders targeted churches so much as ignored them.
In the initial shut down orders in March, it's unlikely that a malevolent, religion hating cabal saw an opportunity to strangle the baby in its crib by ordering places of worship closed. It's closer to reality and maybe more painful to imagine that people in charge simply never thought of churches or church goers. Unfamiliarity with the church universe was evident in the very wooden, byzantine, old timey sounding California church guidelines released in May and June. They aren't picking on us. They don't know us. We aren't on their radar. Let that iodine sink into the wound.
Don't let those rare but much photographed election year church appearances from candidates or their out-of-context Sermon on the Mount quotes fool you. Ambitious politicians and their more ambitious handlers don't give churches or church leaders much of a thought unless it's election time. Hey, don't get offended that you're not invited to the table and for sure don't be surprised to see highly placed pagans acting like pagans! Cheer up, that's a sandbox you don't want to play in anyway and the Bible is clear that God prefers to tabernacle in our weaknesses, not our strengths. That's where He does His best work.
3. Some churches cheat. Some restaurants cheated. I noticed that some gyms and hair salons never really closed. Same for some churches. While most of us struggled, they cheated. Currently in our area, the local Public Health Department allows indoor church services at 25% seating capacity or 100 people, whichever is smallest. Not largest. Smallest. Masks and distancing are also required and congregational singing is not permitted indoors if you care more about protecting people than protecting the brand. Even if you don't care more it's still not permitted. If you want more people you have to endure the hassle of moving it outside and braving the elements like the rest of us. Still, some churches quietly open without regard for the guidelines. Guidelines are for chumps.
There's a bunch of church cheating going on. More than sneaky, it's dangerous. We're dealing with an unusually transmittable virus that has no cure and kills people. In despicable fashion, cheating churches have cast the lure of having greater faith or the patina of brave defiance of godless government to attract fish from other ponds. Remember the first rule of shepherding? Protect people? Oddly enough, that gets tossed when your first concern is larger groups of people and not individual humans. I can't do much about the church cheats, but I've been watching and at the next ministerial breakfast, I'm bringing the longest spoon I can find. Maybe I'll stay home and read a book.
4. Obstacle or Opportunity? My thinking about ministry has changed in the last seven months. I now see what a great tool has been handed pastors in the goofy world of social media platforms. Prior to the shut down of churches, live streaming was something I had little appreciation for really. It was something cool kids and tech nerds touted because it was the newest shiny object the magpies were squawking about. I was dead wrong. For months the use of live streaming, Zooming and staying connected via social media have been our only options. We have been forced to make them work and the results have been surprising. We are getting pretty good at it and many people are being reached. Whatever the church looks like post pandemic, we will continue to put at least as much time and effort into our online presence as we are currently. Live streaming can never replace an in-person experience with God and His people, but it may be the new, welcoming front door of the church opening into a very broken world. Other pastors have discovered what we have and some are finding more and better ways to stay in touch that we haven't touched yet. The quality of life in their communities is being enhanced in ways that makes much of Christ. There's more than one way to be His body.
It's a much published fact that the church in America has been losing impact for some time. Many prominent and not so prominent pastors are demanding Covid restrictions be lifted so churches can get back to normal. Doesn't that strike you as odd or short-sighted? Why would we want to return to what wasn't working before? If church leaders learn nothing during this forced shut down about better ways to do church, it's clear the decline will continue. If we only want to get back to our failing, tired, deck chair shifting way of handling Jesus' transforming message of good, decline is what we deserve.
I'm not in favor of merely reopening churches. Let stuff die that deserves to die. Instead, let's restart churches, refashioning and re-launching them by throwing overboard the bloodless, tedious, 'new' ideas that are only repackaged failed ideas. We have a chance at making space for an infusion of genuine spiritual power and Presence. We don't need something new but something very old.
Book of Acts anyone?
