coronavirus

When I asked members of our worship commission what they thought the future of hybrid church might be for us, Rosene wisely reminded us that there are many aging people in our congregation. Before we didn’t have the capacity or technology to continue to include these older adults and disabled people in our regular Sunday worship. What a gift that now we could!

This new survey found a remarkable number of Americans reporting serious family conflict over COVID-19 vaccinations. Fully one in five Americans (19 percent) say that disagreements over COVID-19 vaccinations have caused “major conflict” in their families. Similarly, earlier this fall, PRRI found that 22 percent of Americans reported that their extended family relationships have been “strained to the breaking point” over the issue of getting a COVID-19 vaccination.

The FDA’s full approval in late August of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, known commercially as Comirnaty, has led to a spate of government and corporate vaccine mandates for employees and patrons — as well as the inevitable backlash. Much of that backlash has been on religious grounds, with some Christians claiming exemption from the mandates using what journalist Mattathias Schwartz describes as the “rhetorical Swiss Army knife” of religious freedom.

Editor’s note: On Sunday, the Texas Supreme Court temporarily blocked mask mandates in two of the state’s biggest counties, upholding Gov. Gregg Abbott’s executive order prohibiting them. As school begins across the country, some districts in Texas, Florida, and elsewhere are defying mask mandate bans, in some cases risking school funding. Teachers and administrators are preparing for a year of unknowns as the Delta variant rages among the unvaccinated.

Tammy Stallcup has been teaching junior high and middle school choir for 34 years in Texas public schools, primarily in Odessa. Now teaching near Fort Worth, Texas, she begins her 35th year this fall, and wrote this prayer for teachers.

BACK IN FEBRUARY, I volunteered to drop off Lenten kits to members of the church I started attending several months earlier. Being relatively new to the city and congregation, having recently moved to the area, I was unfamiliar with most of the people on my list, as well as the neighborhoods, street names, apartment complexes, and long-term care facility indicating their residences. Assisting with Ash Wednesday before the pandemic might have been a fairly routine way of familiarizing myself with fellow parishioners—one of those innumerable little face-to-face encounters that slowly builds familiarity and trust in a church. This year, of course, there was none of that. My volunteer experience was isolated and individual. Ferrying containers of ashes, devotional booklets, and craft activities to people’s doorsteps and mailboxes, I saw no one, save the care facility receptionist.

This almost completely impersonal experience was also the most powerful ecclesial encounter I have had throughout the pandemic—the one that felt most like church.

During the course of COVID-19’s restriction of in-person worship, I went inside a church only a handful of times. Once to say goodbye to the congregation I left when I moved from Washington, D.C.; once to get ordained in my hometown; twice to pick up liturgical kits at the church I started attending in my new city; and once to guest preach at this church, standing inside a sealed pulpit and preaching to a mostly empty sanctuary. All visits, except for the kit pick-ups, were livestreamed. I initially thought that being back inside a church after a forced separation would be some awe-inspiring faith moment—like coming home to God. What my experience this year taught me is that we never truly left. It sounds cliché, and maybe a bit untrue—after all, though the church is the body of Christ, the people and not the four walls, Zoom is not people. Virtual is just that: virtual. But that difference is precisely what I experienced when making Lenten deliveries. Driving to people’s homes, walking along their streets, encountering new neighborhoods (or rediscovering old ones, as I did upon realizing that people whose names I had seen only on screen were around the corner from me)—with each delivery, I felt like I was drawing invisible lines of connection between my residence and those of my fellow church members, my body and their bodies, locating us together in the world for the first time. It felt like communion.

The new CDC guidance has also prompted many pastors and faith leaders to revisit their own masking and social distancing guidelines for worship. But as an immunocompromised person, I want churches to know that if you choose to allow your congregation to unmask now, before we have any sort of herd immunity, you are asking immunocompromised people to choose between risking their lives or being excluded from church.

Today marks one year since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic. As we enter year two of this pandemic in the middle of Women's History Month, we must reckon with the fact that women have disproportionately felt the negative impacts; the fallout of this inequity will be felt for years to come.

This week the United States surpassed a tragic milestone: Half a million people in this country have died from COVID-19 — a number that, while devastating, doesn’t even take into account the full human toll of the virus. While numbers of cases, deaths, and hospitalizations have begun to fall precipitously (for a variety of overlapping reasons) and nearly 50 million Americans have received at least one dose of the vaccine, this dark winter feels like a prolonged wilderness of grief and loss.

If we are going to overcome vaccine hesitancy and achieve equitable distribution of the vaccine, the Black church will have to take the lead in advocacy for our people who have been among the hardest hit, messaging accurate medical information, and providing greater vaccine access.