It was good news to hear our governor announce this week that the number of new COVID cases in Georgia are beginning to decline. We have been praying for this and pray that it continues. It was also good to hear that plans are beginning for the gradual reopening of our communities. This will be a long process and I suspect when we get back to “normal” it will remain a very different normal than what we knew before for quite some while.
Of particular interest to us was the Governor lifting the ban against gatherings of more than 10 people for churches. Churches are among the businesses included in the Phase One reopening plan, though I am not sure how I feel being included with gyms, private clubs, bowling alley’s and tattoo parlors. Never the less it does open the possibility of First Baptist beginning to implement our reopening plans.
The state’s Phase One reopening comes with a lot of regulations including temperature checks, gloves, face shields, masks, 6 foot distancing, and several others. While most of these apply specifically to employees, church attenders will be expected to wear masks and maintain 6 foot distancing from anyone else. There are also requirements for heavy disinfecting routines of all touched surfaces that in a church would include every pew and hymnal along with all doors and restrooms.
There are some other things to keep in mind, as we make our plans. The governor also encouraged all vulnerable populations, which includes all of us over 65, to remain under stay-in-place restriction until at least May 15 even after it expires for the general population at the end of April. He also stressed the need for widespread testing and rapid quarantining to prevent a resurgence of COVID cases. Wide testing, while many are working heroically to make it available, is not yet available at the volume needed to assure protection of the population.
The governor in his deliberation is having to take in a huge range of considerations. He must listen to medical experts and economic advisors. He has to balance pressure from doctors, constituents, businesses, and politicians. It is not a job any of us would want and we need to be praying for our governor constantly.
As your pastor I have to balance a lot of considerations as well, when it comes to church reopening plans. I ache to see the members of First Baptist Church. I so much want to be together with them as we worship, fellowship, and study. But I also cannot tolerate the though that First Baptist Church could be the place where any person contracts a potentially deadly disease. I take very seriously, as well, that most of us as senior adults are not only being asked to continue staying at home, we really should continue doing so at least through May 15. I cannot fathom having a worship service and telling many of you that you should not come.
In light of all this I am putting my hopes in May 17 as the earliest possible day for gathered worship resuming. By waiting until then our government will have time to decide whether it is safe for our seniors to resume public activity and under what regulations. We will have a chance to see if the decline in new cases continues even with the easing of closuer rules. Between now and May 17 we will be able to figure out what restrictions we are going to need to require that worshippers follow when coming to church and clearly communicate them.
Pray with me that this best case scenario becomes a reality and that on May 17 we can celebrate the blessings of worshipping together not only As First Baptist Church, but At First Baptist Church.
A Pastor’s Thoughts About Reopening for Worship after Covid
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Palm Sunday with First Baptist Morrow
Below is a link to our Palm Sunday Service during shelter-in-place times.
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My Church and COVID-19, a Pastor’s Perspective
This week our county issued a stay-at-home order. A few days later our Governor made a similar declaration for our state. These restrictions place many constraints on what a pastor and his or her church is able to do to carry out the mission and ministry of the church. I have read the declarations carefully, studied the definitions of “Essential Business,” noted the exceptions, and have made plans for our church during this pandemic crisis. We will be offering online worship and Bible study. Ministers will be doing pastoral care by telephone. The administrative assistant will be in the office only to process bills and do payroll. The food pantry will continue its once a week ministry adapted to curbside pickup and compliant with guidelines as food needs are greatly heightened during this crisis. No one else will be at church building for any other reason.
These are our plans. But I want to explain why we are enacting these limitations and offer a critique of what some others are choosing to do. As a Baptist I treasure our tradition of upholding the separation of church and state. A mandate by the goverment about what a church should do is always to be questioned as a breach of that wall. There are pastors who are pushing back agains imposed restrictions for this reason.
But for me there is a higher consideration that leads me to make the changes we are enacting. I believe that now is a time when the church needs to make very real the willingness we have of making sacrifices out of loving concern for our communities. It is clear to me that staying at home, not gathering in groups, and social distancing saves lives. What more loving thing can a church do during this crisis than fully follow restrictive guidelines in an effort to lessen the impact of the pandemic on our community?
However, too many churches are not using this time to demonstrate sacrificial love. We have all seen news accounts of COVID-denying mega-church pastors giving Christianity a bad name. But browsing online services will also quickly yield evidence of groups of 10+ people recording at churches together. A local musician arrived for a service recording session at a neighboring church to find 40 people involved in the production. I received an invitation to listen in on a conference call with the governor and concerned pastors. The questions they wanted answered all amounted to, “Why do we have to do this? Aren’t we exceptions?”
Now is a time for churches to model a willingness to accept whatever restrictions are needed to slow the spread and lessen the impact of COVID-19. If everyone is an exception then no one need comply and more people will die. We all were aghast to see pictures of crowded beaches during spring break flood news and social media as if it never occurred to us that teenagers do stupid things. There are people drawing similar conclusions about what some churches are doing. As a pastor I am glad I am part of a church willing to use a higher wisdom and demonstrate love to all.
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A Strange Morning
It is a strange morning. Unlike any Sunday morning in my life. This is the first Sunday of our COVID-19 closure. I am at church expecting no one to come. No classrooms will be filled, the sanctuary will remain silent. I am missing the happy greetings of friends arriving at church together, the purposeful scurry of leaders doing the jobs they have committed to accomplish, and my anticipation that soon I will be preaching to a people who have graciously come to listen.
I know there are many pastors who are having the same experience today. Like me, they have spent the week carefully listening to government proclamations, contacting health agencies, finding the best medical advice, talking to other clergy and church leaders, considering options, and most of all, praying in order to make the difficult decision to suspend services.
It is not an easy decision to ask the church not to gather as the Body of Christ on our chosen day to study, worship, pray, and share the love we have for God and for each other. Coming together is so central to being the church that we cannot imagine not spending the first day of each week with fellow believers. So why take such a dramatic action?
I understand the epidemiological and medical reasons for the large-scale cancellations we are seeing. We are at a critical juncture when this virus becomes a community-spread germ instead of an infection traceable to specific encounters. Public health agencies are asking for social distancing at this point to prevent an explosion of cases severely impacting medical facilities as seen elsewhere in our world.
But there is another layer of consideration that is more significant to our core values as a community of faith. We are cancelling services as an act of love. First, it is a loving act for our fellow believers in our community of faith. We can say, “Don’t come if you feel ill, are over 65, are in a high-risk group, or have been around sick people.” But the desire to see friends, fulfill obligations, a sense it can’t happen to me, or just plain good habits often overrule thoughtful decision making. Sometimes collective wisdom in more important that individual choice. We are loving one another by not exposing vulnerable individuals to the possibility of infection. Our care for sisters and brothers in Christ necessitates that we sacrifice in this significant way.
Secondly, canceling services is an act of love for our world. “Love your neighbor,” we are commanded by Jesus. As governments and medical institutions struggle to deal with the threat of this pandemic virus it is our ministry of loving our neighbors that leads us to step forward and set an example. We are making necessary sacrifices to follow government agency guidelines in slowing the spread of COVID-19 because we love our neighbors, our community, our world.
I don’t know how many Sunday mornings I will spend alone at church, I don’t know the impact this pandemic will have on our community. I don’t know when “normal” will become normal again. But I do know this. There is no greater force at work in our world than the love of God. And we, at First Baptist Church, are going to do everything we can to be a part of expressing that love in our church and to our world.
Filed under Church, God, Grace, Love, Making a Difference, Morrow, Pastor, The Future
Praying over Bagels
For ten years I regularly saw a family at the bagel shop I frequented many mornings; a mother, two daughters, and a son, the son being in the middle child with an older and younger sister. I assumed the mother was home-schooling her children given the time of day I saw them and the fact that they often drilled academic subjects together. By the long dresses, lack of makeup or jewelry, and uncut hair of the mother and girls, I also assumed they are a part of a holiness tradition.
I admired this family. They were happy and had fun together, sometimes too much fun for the pastor dosing on caffeine in the next booth. I had at times wanted to pull out my hair on hearing another Latin verb congregated with enthusiasm! They behaved lovingly to each other and polite to everyone in the bagel shop. And they were devout, often discussing biblical subjects and always praying over their bagels.
I also admire their holiness tradition. Courageous willingness to live out radical distinctiveness (to be holy, separate) based on biblical convictions provides an important critique of society’s values that we all should note carefully. Holiness tradition invites all Christian traditions to consider the dynamic balance of being, “in the world but not of the world.”
There came a day, however, when this family changed in a way that saddened me profoundly and still weighs heavy on my heart when I recall the moment I realized what had happened. I had watched two older children reach adolescence. The oldest left behind her childish look and took on the striking appearance of a young teen-aged woman. The middle child, the son, began having a hard time determining what octave would come out when he opened his mouth. But these physical changes were not what caused my sadness. It was this. One morning as I was listening to the son’s awkward falsetto-basso warble I realized he was praying over their bagels. The mother had always led the children in prayer; often times having the children recite some blessing along with her. The son praying alone was a change. After a few mornings of confirming that this was the new pattern I knew that the son had reached some milestone in their religious tradition that required his mother and his sisters to be spiritually subordinate to him. Now he prayed and the three women with him, two of them older, sat in silence. Three female voices were muted before God because a teenaged boy was now over them in their spiritual hierarchy.
This family did get points for consistency. If Paul’s letters are interpreted to demand that a woman be silent and have no authority over a man, even to the point of a mother not praying in front of her son, then one should also interpret those same scriptures as forbidding the women jewelry and haircuts which this family did as well. They faithfully expressed their conviction of how to be separate from an unholy world and for that, even in my sadness, I continued to respect them for their devotion, sincerity, and commitment to live out faithfully their understanding of God’s will for their lives.
But what is the nature of the world that I want to be holier than and to separate from if I want to be faithful in my devotion to God? For me, “worldliness” would include perpetuating by participating in our patriarchal, sexist, society where men hold a vast majority of the power, and in which women are too often victims of that power; where women are more likely than men to be poor and to be kept poor by receiving less pay for the same work; where roles in family and church are assigned according to gender instead of ability, giftedness, or calling. Would not a holy, distinctive, in-the-world-but-not-of-the-world, position be to follow the example of Jesus? Our Lord ignored the gender-determined rules of his patriarchal culture. Jesus drew men and women into his circle of believers, defying the sexist norms of his society. Jesus treated everyone with the same dignity and love. Should not we do the same? I think so. I want the church to be holy, different from this world, by living out the equanimity of the gospel. That is the critique of the unjust, unholy, sexism that I want us to provide by our holiness.
Home Is Where the Espresso Machine Is
Well the official day has arrived for our move to Morrow, Georgia, to pastor First Baptist Church of Morrow. While one truck is already delivered and we will be back in Madison a few more nights to deal with Realtors, this is the moment that I deem to signify the move. Why? Because I just packed up my espresso machine.
When I was a teenager we built a house in Birmingham and moved out of the church’s parsonage. Before construction was finished we started having someone of the family spend the night at the new house for security reasons. We also started a moving process that took a couple of months as rooms were finished and furniture was brought over a pickup truck load at a time. We soon were referring to one place as “home” and the other as “the house” as in,”Are you going to the house before you come home?” As more and more stuff was moved, and more of us were spending the nights at the new house, the terminology shifted to the new house being the “home” and the parsonage being the “house” as in “Are you going by the house to pack the dishes and bring them “home.” The official moment when the shift was made was clearly determined. It was when we moved the TV. (No one had more than one back in the dark ages!) Yes, for us it was, “Home is where the TV is.”
So you may have a glimpse into my soul when I say for this move, “Home is where the espresso machine is.” I take a great deal of pleasure making and drinking very good coffee. Want a Cafe Americano with an extra shot of Tanzanian Peaberry? I’m the guy to see. Espresso Macchiato, latte, cappuccino, can do. So for me home is were the Nuova Simonelli Oscar Professional Espresso Machine is.
Of course all this is a tongue-in-cheek corruption of the proverb, “Home is where the heart is.” That proverb, of course, is as true now as it has ever been. For two an a half decades home was Madison, Alabama, as Melody and I raised our family, and I poured my heart into ministering at First Baptist Church of Madison. Now our nest is empty and we are ready for a new opportunity of investing our lives and ministry. First Baptist Church of Morrow, Georgia, is now home for that if where my heart is. I am thankful to God for the calling that FBC Morrow has expended and am excited that the official day has arrived for my move to Morrow.
And by the way, I now have to disconnect and pack this computer. So, home is where my computer is as well!
New Opportunities
Last Sunday I had the very great privilege to receive a call from the First Baptist Church of Morrow, Georgia, to become their pastor. It is an opportunity that I have been eagerly anticipating. It is a marvelous thing to have confidence in having discovered and be following God’s will in moving to Morrow and beginning this new relationship.
Let me share some things that have impressed me about First Baptist, Morrow. One is a solid commitment to be an agent of change in its neighborhood though sharing the love of God in a variety of ways. This clear vision of God’s calling for the congregation, already articulated through ministries, will continue to be a guiding commitment in the future.
Another is First Baptist, Morrow’s recognition that we are all, both women and men, gifted and called into the ministry of the church. Having ordained ministers and deacons of both genders is an essential aspect of the church’s relevancy to the world in which we live, reliance on a careful reading of God’s word, and respect for the transformational grace of God express in all who believe.
I am also impressed with the church’s ongoing commitment to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship movement while maintaining historic connections with Southern Baptist life. The respectful way that Morrow deals with each members preferences for supporting cooperative relationships with other Baptists reflects a solid understanding the priesthood of the believer and the value Baptist have always found in their diversity.
I could hardly list reasons I am excited about new opportunities at First Baptist, Morrow, without mentioning the great ministerial staff already there. I know that one of my greatest sources of joy will be building new collegiate relationships with each of them as we partner together in leadership at First Baptist.
Filed under Blessing, God, Missional, Morrow, Pastor, The Future, Transformation
Maundy Thursday, 2011
I have never waited longer to share in the Holy Meal. It is April 21, 2011. The last time Maundy Thursday took place this late in the year was April 22, 1943, the latest it is possible for it and surrounding Holy Week events to ever take place. The next year I will wait this long for Maundy Thursday will be 2038 when I will be 83 years old.
We owe this movable observance to the Hebrew lunar calendar by which the date of Passover is determined. Simply put, Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon of spring. So Easter and its connected religious observances are constantly wandering around our calendar. The result is that people younger than 68, along with me, have never waited this long for Maundy Thursday before.
The wait this year focuses my attention to another wait always a part of Holy Communion. In the words of institution found in First Corinthians chapter eleven Paul says, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.” The last three words, “until He comes,” make every Lord’s Supper an anticipation of an other event for which we wait.
Deep in the believer’s heart is a yearning for a more complete experience of the presence of God than it seems possible to know in the midst of this world. There is always a dark edging in on the light when we stand before the table of God. Inexplicable tragedy, the fragility of life, injustice unheeded, and many other troubles are over our shoulders, waiting on us to turn and leave the Presence behind. Today I will not be able to hear, “This is my body broken…” without thinking for the thousands of bodies mangled in the debris of Japan’s tsunami.
“Until I come,” is a promise that this will not always be so. As God was present in the incarnation of Jesus, as Christ is present in the church as we gather in communion, so will the presence of God banish all else in the eternal and complete revelation of God’s redemption through the coming of Jesus Christ for which we wait.
We have had to patiently wait the coming of Maundy Thursday this year, the timing determined by the movements of heavenly bodies we do not, nor will not, control. And we will patiently wait, as people of promise, in faith, for the eternal moment whose timing we can not understand when we will be in God’s presence forever.
Filed under Church, Corinthians, Holy Communion, Holy Week, Hope, Japan, Jesus, Maundy Thursday, Paul, The Future, Waiting
Palm Sunday Morning 2011
The world is perfectly still, waiting the day. The water of the lake mirrors the shore where the tallest trees are crowned with the glow of a new sun. The fog resting on the water is moved only by the silent beat of the heron’s wings and the leaves only by the timid ventures of a squirrel. Then a sound – a mockingbird praises the creator.
“Be still and know that I am God …” – Psalm 46:10
Forgiveness and Hope
The link in this post will play a sermon I preached at First Baptist Church, Madison, on July 19, 2009. The texts for the day were Jeremiah 18:1-6 and John 8:2-11, the potter reforming the clay and the woman caught in adultery. The sermon focuses on the importance of forgiveness for the past in order to experience hope in the future.
Click this link to listen to the sermon: ForgivenessAndHope
Filed under Blessing, Forgiveness, Grace, Hope, Jeremiah, Jesus, John, The Future
Quiet Faith 