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Every church I know is paying close attention to the safety of their members and communities as they plan the stages of regathering. Almost all of them are telling members what benchmarks they will watch, in consultation with up-to-date public health information in their areas.
Most of us want more than anything to be "back to normal." But regardless of when a church is re-gathered for worship, some things will be changed for a very long time. https://www.russellmoore.com/2020/05/14/when-will-your-church-be-back-to-normal/
States should treat houses of worship the same as they do other similarly-situated groups. When a casino or a mall is deemed safe to re-open, a state should not say that a church, practicing safety measures and social distancing, cannot gather simply because it is a church.
The state has an interest in promoting public health and safety; almost every church has shown full cooperation with that, and have helped lead communities in that mission.
The state should make decisions on the basis of actions that are measurably safe or unsafe, not on the basis of whether the institutions involved are religious or not. To do otherwise is to overstep the bounds of the state in unlawful ways.
It also creates confusion and mistrust where there is, largely, commonality of civic purpose in fighting this disease. And even when an area is safe to re-open, churches will make their own decisions on how and when to go about that based on the unique needs of their members.
Such decisions will also be based on their ability to make worship gatherings as safe as possible. That sort of planning is already happening in the overwhelming majority of churches.
The CDC guidance that is available seems reasonable and helpful. The tone is, appropriately, not a directive to churches but counsel based on the medical data--even though this counsel is hard to make specific since practices differ so much from congregation to congregation.
But again, every church I know is working through a staging plan, telling their members what benchmarks they are looking for to know when to re-gather, how they will then phase that re-gathering in, and what steps they will take to ensure safety when they do.
The CDC guidance is not a blueprint but a prompt to help leaders as they think through what questions to ask.
This is a tough time, but let's come out of it in a way that jeopardizes neither our first responders nor our First Amendment. We can do that. We've done it before.
This is a tough time, but let's come out of it in a way that jeopardizes neither our first responders nor our First Amendment. We can do that. We've done it before.
