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.

The Exhaustion of Pastoral Ministry: Bending the COVID Bow of Bronze

A few weeks ago our national church office reached out to me, asking if I’d be willing to write about the coronavirus from the perspective of pastoral ministry. I did not want to do it.

But I’m glad I did.

Putting into words the struggles I felt brought more healing than I expected it would. Several pastors told me just reading it did the same for them.

“Bending the COVID Bow of Bronze” is the most extended and personal essay I’ve ever had published. I didn’t share it on Facebook because I almost preferred not having people read it. But since it’s been out a few weeks, and I’m doing better than before, I thought I’d share some of it here. Even though it came out second, it’s really the prequel to a related article I wrote that many people seemed to find helpful (“Come to Me All Who Have COVID Weariness, and I Will Give You Rest”).

If you know pastors or others in full-time ministry, perhaps you’d consider sharing this essay with them.

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Bending the COVID Bow of Bronze
One pastor’s struggle toward hope in God

Despite the numerical growth and spiritual maturity our congregation experienced, I presented my dilemma to the elder board. Something had to give. Now that I had been the lead teaching pastor for a while, I told them, I have learned one of two things: either I’m not called to pastoral ministry, or I’m doing it wrong. What other option could there be? I asked. Ministry should not be so hard.

Calm and lovingly, the elder board listened. This meeting, by the way, was a month before most pastors had heard of the coronavirus.

At the time, I had just finished reading and resonated with what tennis legend Andre Agassi wrote in his transparent memoir, Open. Agassi tells of repeatedly hearing his gruff father bellow, “Hit harder, Andre!” as they practiced grueling hours on their backyard Las Vegas court. Seven-year-old Andre was forced to return balls shot out of a cannon he called “the dragon” until he grew to hate the sport that made him famous. And from his youth matches to winning Wimbledon, that voice never stopped shouting. Hit harder. Hit harder. Hit harder.

Working hard or hardly working

I often hear voices telling me to try harder and do more, sometimes from the closest allies. In a recent Twitter thread about how pastors can serve their churches, one of my favorite authors said, “quarantine = overtime,” adding that if a pastor thinks the quarantine means part-time, then he’s “asleep at the wheel.”

Okay fine, I mumble under my breath. I’m sure some pastor somewhere needed that salvo, just as Jeremiah needed to be chided about competing with horses and surviving in the thicket of the Jordan (Jer 12:5). But what if a pastor feels drowsy at the wheel for reasons other than laziness? Sitting in the driver’s seat nine months behind a short-staffed church has exhausted me—and that was before a global pandemic hit.

Between March and June, we are attempting 20 new or re-tooled ministry initiatives to serve our church during the crisis and prepare us for when we return. We’re rebuilding our website, recording video sermons and worship songs, making phone calls to members and attendees, and posting daily Facebook videos throughout May.

Yet, for every three phone calls I make to church members, I feel guilty for not making ten. My theology tells me only the Chief Shepherd is omnipresent and omnipotent, but still I try to be everywhere at once, doing ministry fast and famously, as Zack Eswine critiqued in The Imperfect Pastor. I hear Jesus whisper that all who labor may come to him for rest. But for some reason, my sin and psyche assume “all” can’t include pastors; someone has to drive his sheep.

I know I’m not the only one who feels overworked. Our fridge holds a massive daily calendar to help coordinate the schedules of everyone in our large family. On day 21 of the lockdown, I stood behind my wife as she scratched a black X on the calendar. She looked at me and said, “That’s 63 meals.” We’re now on day 60. Comedian Jim Gaffigan once said, “You know what it’s like having a fourth kid? Imagine you’re drowning, then someone hands you a baby.” We have six kids, and the older ones can eat more than me.

// To continue reading this article, please click over to the Evangelical Free Church of America’s website (here).

* Photo from EFCA NOW blog post.

Come to Me All Who Have COVID Weariness, and I Will Give You Rest

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28–30, ESV)

My friend traded his pickup for a new one. I got a good look at it the other night. It’s the kind of truck neighbors peer out the window at as the rumbling engine idles in your driveway. You practically need a stepladder to climb up to the cab. The truck is a “dually,” meaning the rear axle has two massive wheels on each side. The lug nuts on the front wheels have those spikes you see on tractor trailers. The truck is a beast made for towing. I’d say you could chain a redwood to the back, and it would yank out roots seven hundred years deep like I pull a seven-day-old weed. It’s the kind of truck that makes you feel as though you could hitch the St. Louis Arch to the back and drag it like a horseshoe.

Back in the day farmers had a way of hitching oxen together. The wood and rope connecting system was called a yoke, which allowed the full force of two oxen to plow side by side. In parts of the world, farming still proceeds in this way. Two healthy oxen might not budge a redwood, but oxen could work you and me to our death.

Jesus picks up this imagery in his familiar invitation in Matthew 11 to be yoked to him, to have rope and wood harnessed between our neck and his. Jesus promises, however, his yoke is easy and his burden is light. He promises this because, he says, “I am gentle and lowly.” Can you imagine being yoked to my friend’s dually? Nothing about that ride would be gentle.

The encompassing word all grabs my attention. Not some, not a few, not even many, but Jesus invites all who are heavy laden. All who feel hitched to a too powerful pickup, all who feel yoked to the servitude of sin, all who stagger under the weight of weariness, all who have rope burns across their necks and sun-scorched shoulders and arthritic aching knees from plowing, plowing, plowing. All may come to Jesus for rest.

Do you see yourself in the all or is the all only for someone else? As the COVID yoke lies heavy, will you come to Jesus for rest?

Mothers, will you come to Jesus for rest? You who are forced to put the stay in stay-at-home mothers, you may come to him for rest. Children follow you about the house as you run IT support and troubleshoot their iPads and Zoom calls and fix three meals a day with the food you could only get from a long line at the grocery store while wearing a mask.

Fathers, will you come to Jesus for rest? You work from home from when you wake until when you crash. Your family life and hobby life and work life and exercise life and church life ooze together. The compartments that contained the floods of craziness have collapsed. And you want to collapse as well.

Singles, will you come to Jesus for rest? Your social distancing feels more like acute social isolating, and you’re starved for conversation, laughter, and a hug.

Students, will you come to Jesus for rest? Your college dorm room was cooler than your bedroom in your parent’s house. Some of you celebrated your graduation with handmade caps and gowns and no other students or faculty. Others missed prom. Staying motivated to study when the weather warms was already difficult before COVID.

Health care workers, will you come to Jesus for rest? You labor risky hours over those who cough and sneeze and wonder if their fever will break first or them. The friends and family of your patients want to visit the hospital, but they are not permitted. So this familial labor also falls to you: not only must you take vitals and intubate, but you must hold the hand of those in intensive care.

Business owners and those who side-hustle to make ends meet, will you come to Jesus for rest? Your whole life you’ve achieved through your assertiveness, by showing up early and leaving late. Now—for reasons out of your control—you’ve been rendered passive. You can’t forge ahead because you’re not allowed. Now, homebound and without work, you wait for permission. Your spirit has restless leg syndrome.

Teachers, will you come to Jesus for rest? You lecture to a webcam and answer emails and walk the dog and grade papers all from your home classroom, which is far more of a home than a classroom.

The retired and elderly and all with compromised immune systems, will you come to Jesus for rest? Your friends cannot come to see you, and you feel more forgotten than before.

Government officials, will you come to Jesus for rest? Never have you made fewer people happy, and never have you shouldered more responsibility—responsibilities you never asked for or wanted. Weighing lives and livelihoods leaves dark circles under your eyes.

Pastors, will you come to Jesus for rest? Your church needs you. Your family needs you. You give and give and give. Ministry does not stop; it just changes venues. But when Jesus invites all, the all includes those who live to help others.

The flowing current of COVID sadness can drown the strongest swimmer. You might already be gasping for air. If you feel this way, come to Jesus. Pray to him. Read his word. Belong to his church. His grace can tow you from the mire better than any pickup. Come and enjoy the freedom found in being loved by the Savior, not controlled by a harsh slave master.

And if the waves of endless lockdown days break upon you, Jesus also wants you to tell a Christian friend. Send an email right now to a Christian who loves you and doesn’t want to see you succumb to struggle. Your friends probably don’t know how bad you feel; their own dose of quarantine might have made their gaze myopic. So, right now, send an honest text to a friend. Send the text if you feel the yoke of alcohol or porn or pain killers calling to you. Drive to the house of a friend and ask for prayer. Call your doctor if you feel the flood of depression rising.

A verse from an old hymn reads, “Come, ye weary, heavy laden, / lost and ruined by the fall; / if you tarry till you’re better, / you will never come at all.” For over two hundred and fifty years, these lyrics from Joseph Hart’s hymn Come, Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy have extended the invitation of Christ to countless weary congregations. Let the lyrics welcome you today.

You don’t have to come with superior strength for Jesus to help you. You don’t need to come with the dirt under your fingernails manicured. You can come with a COVID haircut. You can come to Christ without makeup and wearing your pjs. It may prick your pride, but you don’t need to be business casual for Christ to help you. All you need is to know your need and the urgency that if you wait until you’re better, you will never come at all.

* Photo by Ana Cernivec on Unsplash

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