Reopening Our Church: Well, Sort Of

I sent a letter to our church last week about our plan to reopen our Sunday morning, in-person services. As our pastor-elders wrestled with all of the thorny issues around reopening, we were helped by drawing from what a few churches in our area had shared with their churches (specifically, letters from Liberti, Grace Bible Fellowship, West Shore, and Living Water, just to name a few). It’s nice to have friends leading like-minded churches in the area.

In the spirit of cooperation and partnership, I’m sharing the letter and video I sent to our church, hoping it might serve as another of the many helpful resources floating into the inboxes of pastors and parishioners. I consider the letter “open-source,” meaning you can use anything you want, adapting it as you see fit.

Just one disclaimer, however. You’ll probably want to think through and reword the mask section near the end of the letter. Without going into details, that’s an area of the letter I wished I had tweaked to avoid misunderstanding and better love all of our members.

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Dear Community,

Last week I heard a pastor say he didn’t like the phrasing of churches reopening. “We never closed,” he said.

I understand his point. Neither did we close. For the last twelve weeks our church has been no less of a church. I came to the office as often in April as I did in February. At our church the Word has been preached, prayers have been prayed, people have been discipled, needs have been met, and, I trust, God has been glorified.

But we did temporarily suspend meeting together on Sunday mornings in our building, which was no small change. It’s been terrible, actually. Over the six-and-a-half years I’ve been a pastor at Community, we’ve canceled our Sunday morning services only twice. When nearly forty inches of snow fell on a Saturday, we canceled. Another time our heating unit broke on a Friday, and the sanctuary temperature dropped to just above freezing, and we couldn’t get it fixed before Sunday. Even then we didn’t cancel. A church down the road let us meet in their building that Sunday afternoon.

So, again, closing for twelve consecutive weeks was no small adjustment. The leaders of Community did not make this decision lightly, but we felt we did so wisely. And now, the same prayerful and Scripture-informed wisdom that led our pastor-elders to suspend services is leading us to begin the process of unsuspending services. To say it another way, we’re opening in ten days. On June 7, we plan to hold worship services in person.

Next week we’ll follow up with more information, but let me briefly mention a few of the details now.

In the month of June we intend to hold three services on Sunday mornings: 8:30, 10:00, and 11:30. The first and third services will be inside our sanctuary (8:30 & 11:30) while the middle service will be outside in the front yard (10:00), weather permitting of course. We hope the outdoor service will especially be a blessing to those who are uncomfortable going in buildings and those who have health challenges making them vulnerable. We are going to limit each service to seventy-five people, which is a number we feel can be socially distanced in a sanctuary of our size. We’ll use some sort of reservation system for people to grab their spot. I’ll share more on the reservation system next week.

During June, we’re also going to streamline what we offer. The worship services will be shorter than normal, probably about forty-five minutes, with a sermon near the beginning and most of the singing at the end. We’ll also rope off certain pews, asking households to remain socially distanced throughout their entire time in the building. This means all children will need to stay with families during the worship services, as we will have no childcare or Sunday school classes. That’s a bummer for many of you, I’m sure. But again, we hope June is just the first phase of several increasingly less restrictive steps. This might encourage you. Over the last few months, we installed the equipment to stream our worship services to the café and nursery. So, we’ll make the café and nursery open if you need to leave the sanctuary. In the café and nursery you’ll be able to watch and hear the service. Just know those rooms will not be socially distanced, and you’ll need to keep a parent with children. Speaking of streaming the services, the first service will be live-streamed on Facebook and recorded so that people can watch it on delay.

For June, we’ll just open some of the upstairs portions of the building. And we’ll do our best to clean the building before you arrive and between the two indoor services.

We’re still working on what to do about Sunday school. There’s talk about moving it to Wednesday nights over Zoom, but we’ll let you know more about that later.

Now, let’s talk about masks. We won’t require them for the outdoor service, but everyone over the age of five is strongly encouraged to wear a mask while you are in the building. It’s what we do in Pennsylvania at Home Depot and Giant Grocery Store (for now), so we should do it at church as well. We don’t think mask wearing will be done in perpetuity, but for the time being I will be wearing a mask when I’m not preaching, as will the worship team whenever they are not leading songs. Our church will buy some extra masks and have them at the door in case you forget. That being said, if you are uncomfortable being anywhere near someone who might not be wearing a mask, or if you are adamantly opposed to wearing a mask in church, you might just want to hang back for a few weeks. Our church leadership is doing our best to make our worship services a blessing to everyone, and we need your help.

If you are sick or have been exposed to those who are, please stay home. I know you’re itching to get back—we all are. But our ability to continue to meet in person is contingent on our being wise and thinking about the needs of everyone, not just our desires. If you are not ready to come back to church, that’s okay too. In fact, we can’t have everyone come back at first or we’d have to do six or seven services. I would guess nearly five hundred people might attend our church over the course of a month, and we’re only offering room for half of that each Sunday. But based on our informal polling, we feel like that’s probably a good number to accommodate those ready to return. 

Finally, please be gracious and compassionate with each other and not make unwarranted assumptions as people make differing choices about attending or not attending, and if attending, whether indoors or outdoors. We’re in an odd time where people who have never had to publicly share their health history with others are suddenly put in the vulnerable position of having others wonder about their medical history simply by choosing to sit outside rather than inside. Let’s assume the best of others as we would want others to assume the best of us.

This is just Phase One, if you will. Our leaders will re-evaluate each week and keep our eyes open for ways to serve the church better.

More to come next week.

Thanks,
Benjamin, lead teaching pastor

A encouragement to our church as we move toward reopening on June 7, 2020.

* Picture adapted from an unused design created by Matt Higgins for my book Don’t Just Send a Resume. Even though we did not use this design for the book cover, I appreciated the way he based the design on the steeple at our church.