Church is Essential Service

As hypercapitalism has ground to a halt under the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States government and its citizens have been forced to decide who counts as an essential worker. One of us is a psychologist, a healthcare provider at a hospital in a major city, and universally considered an essential worker, along with liquor and gun store employees. 

The other one of us is a progressive Christian minister. Whether or not Molly is considered an essential worker depends on the state you live in. But when the threat is to faith and hope, liquor and gun stores are not essential. Church is. 

“Faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen,” wrote the Biblical author of Hebrews. These days, the evidence of a thing not seen--a microscopic novel virus--is wreaking havoc with our lives the world over. As the pandemic wears on, the virus threatens not only our physical, but our mental and spiritual health. The very nature of a pandemic raises existential questions that call for spiritual responses. We see this need in healthcare workers clad in PPE kneeling to pray on a hospital helipad and in patients dying alone, leaving their loved ones to grieve without the embrace of community. 

As psychiatrists prepare for possible redeployment to emergency rooms and ICU’s, Ellen and her psychologist colleagues are preparing to fill a potential gap in mental health care at a time when the need is spiking at a rate to rival the curve of the virus. Mental health providers are going to need all the help they can get in providing potentially life saving support to the suffering.  Churches can help to fill this void. 

Many faith communities have figured out in the blink of an eye how to keep functioning even in pandemic, finding innovative ways to deliver services, safely. Priests offer drive-through confession. Humble parish ministers turn televangelists, hustling to learn how to broadcast church from their living rooms, while the faithful bring DIY communion elements to the altar of their screens. Technophobic septuagenarians push through their frustration to navigate Zoom committee meetings, meditation hours, and story time with the children in their churches to give overwhelmed parents a break. Church ladies re-create the old-fashioned sewing circle in self-isolation. Socially-distanced members gather to make to-go meals for their homeless neighbors. Wealthier members give to parish emergency funds in the greatest income redistribution the Church has seen since the first century of Christianity. 

All of this activity gives us purpose and connection, analgesics that help us manage the pain of this moment until we are past the peak. 

Even better than pain relief, good church gives us hope. Not the false hope of failed and frankly dangerous promises to have churches and business open by Easter, but the real hope that resurrection and renewal come in many forms. Easter Sunday has come and gone. But resurrection arrives daily, and not by Presidential fiat. We are saving lives not just by staying home, but by doing what church has always done: overshadowing the bad news with Good News ascendant in both the concrete quotidien kindnesses we offer one another, and the perspective we have on the eternal. This moment is one brief chapter in a much larger story that is still unfolding.

We are dispersed, but not despairing. Church has endured for millennia through war, natural disaster and previous pandemics. Some religious historians posit that the bubonic plague eventually led to the adaptive shift of the Reformation, as the superstitiousness, incompetence and corruption of the Church was exposed by the stressors of pandemic, and the people, women included, rose up to remake the faith and take on leadership. 

Remembering how the faithful, and the faith, have endured and evolved over time to meet the needs of new generations gives us hope. We know we are equal to this moment. To the punditry of those who say Christianity is irrelevant and itself facing terminal illness, we say: not yet. Perhaps this pandemic is the just weakened virus we needed to activate the immune system of the Body of Christ. 

The author of I Corinthians says, “I tell you a mystery: we will not all die, but we will all be changed.” The author got it half right: we will all die. Maybe now, maybe much later; and those of us who believe in a life beyond this one take comfort from our faith. But all of us can take comfort that even the hardest things we endure in life, if they don’t kill us, will change us, including bringing us into deep awareness of our blessings and strength, and the people and communities who are ready to help us through.