Let David Lead Us Through the Wilderness This Lent by STEVE DRAGSWOLF for Christianity Today
The pandemic has disrupted everything, but the Lord remains our strength and our song.
Who are you voting for? Do you require masks? Such loaded questions incited more than informed this past year. A friend and I commiserated over leading our churches through a contentious political season and a global pandemic, two realities rough enough on their own, but combined, they enflamed intense division and uncertainty in our congregations. We smirked at the sense of having been involuntarily cast into an apocalyptic film where the sky inexplicably remained grey as humans turned on one another. We pastors simply did our best to survive. Apocalypse wasn’t so far from our experience.
A little over a year into a deadly pandemic that’s killed over 2.5 million people, we find ourselves under the oppression of COVID-19 even as vaccinations proliferate. Our church, like many others, runs the gamut regarding whether to wear masks, when to attend church in person, and even the veracity of the illness itself. Most of our church members self-isolate despite in-person options for worship. Some do so because they, or someone they live with, has an underlying health condition that makes COVID-19 more dangerous. Some are angry and stay away because we follow state COVID-19 guidelines; to them the illness shouldn’t cause so much concern.
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We love helping others and believe that’s one of the reasons we are chosen as Ambassadors of the Kingdom, to serve God’s children. We look to the Greatest Commandment as our Powering force.
We are finding more aren’t returning because they’ve become comfortable with the convenience of watching online services. Worryingly, attendance for online worship has significantly decreased without much increase to our limited in-person services. We wonder: Are people still connected with us? We’ve navigated the fluctuating anger of politics before, but the habit of not attending church, alongside the newfound comfort of at-home worship, is proving more difficult to overcome.
