It strikes me as strange that some are calling the restrictions as a āright to worshipā issue. Canāt we as Christians worship just fine outside a designating building?
For me I guess it depends on how long and what restrictions. Like you can have hundreds of people inside of a big box grocery store , and itās very common, but then people get upset over 80 people in a church. Or I see ton of support for protests but others angry about a fraction of the people at the beach.
For me I will do my best to respect basic laws such as wearing a mask when around others, only touching items Iām going to buy, using hand sanitizer, and keeping roughly 6 feet between me and another. But I will still definitely meet up with other disciples and Iāll still approach strangers and share the gospel with them carrying out the commission and baptizing those who want to be baptized.
So for me it depends on what someone is pushing for the restriction.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
5
Seems strange to me .In Greece orthodox churches have opened.We have communion every Sunday (although from different spoons).We have 0 cases as far as i know.
Probably that depends on the size of the congregation. Larger churches probably donāt have room for that many people to meet in one place (or even in several places if thereās a 50-person restriction). But my husbandās been co-pastoring a very small church of about 20, and weāve been able to have physically distanced services on our large side lawn. It does help to have a good sound system, and of course we have to watch the weather beforehand. I do sympathize with all the logistics involved in that, especially for larger churches, but think many American evangelicals operate with a fair amount of entitlement too.
Church includes some practices that tend to help spread the virus. These include Holy Communion, passing the peace, singing, preaching, and, quite often, reciting/singing responses/creeds/or whatever. . Vocalizing is basically spraying droplets. Singers with trained voices are going to scatter droplets much more than folks with small microphone voices.
For me and it seems the general thought within our congregation is that we are going to meet in groups of 10 at houses twice a week and once a month the whole congregation is going to gather at a public park. Itās only 80-110 members on average. We now have 6 elders and they bounce around between all the house churches along with a few evangelists. For us fellowship and assembly under elders is a essential aspect of our faith.
Originally all the talk was a waxing and waning of restrictions. So next week Iām back into being more social and then when it gets closer to fall when this virus is supposed to be worse Iāll pull back.
650 too many. In several areas, itās impossible to do contact tracing given the high density of infections so we might not ever know the true impact.
The church is far more dangerous than a grocery store because:
more activities to release respiratory droplets that are potentially infectious (singing, talking, etc.) or things like hugs and handshakes
longer time spent in proximity to other people
Iām not sure about this number, but many cases outside of the church can also be traced back to churches:
You have like 50 new confirmed cases a day, we have over 50,000.
These 50 are nor from churches alone. And yeah i didnt say open the churches. It was a bit strange to me because here we have few cases and pur churches are opened. Meaning i expected more
Oh, it takes time for things to start increasing. We had a blissful month of May as things reopened. Many COVID-19 downplayers were saying āwhereās the new cases, see I told ya! ha!ā Hereās hoping this is not your future:
I really do hope that the same measure of attention and regulation is handed off into other areas. In my state 20x as many people die each year from ādiseases of affluenceā as from covid. Itās still amusing to me to see families in vans with kids getting fast food with a father smoking in the drivers seat but they have masks dangling from their ears.