Churches Were Eager to Reopen. Now They Are a Major Source of Coronavirus Cases

From the NY Times, July 8, 2020

The virus has infiltrated Sunday services, church meetings and youth camps. More than 650 cases have been linked to reopened religious facilities.

Churches Were Eager to Reopen. Now They Are a Major Source of Coronavirus Cases.

Caution, people!

We should definitely be cautious. 650 cases out of how many?

As in considering itā€™s spiderweb or direct contact within church?

It strikes me as strange that some are calling the restrictions as a ā€œright to worshipā€ issue. Canā€™t we as Christians worship just fine outside a designating building?

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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 itā€™s 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 Iā€™m 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 Iā€™ll 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.

Follow the money.

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 donā€™t have room for that many people to meet in one place (or even in several places if thereā€™s a 50-person restriction). But my husbandā€™s been co-pastoring a very small church of about 20, and weā€™ve 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.

I suspect that in most cases we can safely delete the qualifier ā€˜Americanā€™ from that statement, Laura :wink:

Evangelical pastor: ā€œBut itā€™s our right to meet!ā€

Jesus: Gives up rights to make ā€œhimself nothingā€ and take on the ā€œvery nature of a servantā€ (Phil 2:7 NIV2011)

Itā€™s all getting rather embarrassingā€¦

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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.

I posted this earlier, before I saw this thread.

My church decided to cancel in-person services through the end of the year. There have been a few surveys seeking input.

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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. Itā€™s 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 Iā€™m back into being more social and then when it gets closer to fall when this virus is supposed to be worse Iā€™ll pull back.

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The follow up email in a 3 minute video from my church.

650 too many. In several areas, itā€™s 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:

  1. more activities to release respiratory droplets that are potentially infectious (singing, talking, etc.) or things like hugs and handshakes
  2. longer time spent in proximity to other people

Iā€™m 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 ā€œwhereā€™s the new cases, see I told ya! ha!ā€ Hereā€™s hoping this is not your future:

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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 ā€œdiseases of affluenceā€ as from covid. Itā€™s 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.

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