I remember a pastor sharing with me that “These are tough times in the church, and we’re all being asked to do more.” I recall laughing! How true I found that the whole experience of COVID-19 left many areas, including the church, so uncertain — the unfamiliarity of not having done this for almost two years. I thought about a few lingering COVID-19 measures conspiring to make the whole experience a little odd. What should be familiar instead seemed a little foreign. Yet, the chance to laugh was welcome. And I knew what he meant. These are still tough times in the church. We all know why. Pastors, Priests, and Ministers do not know how many of us are coming back once we get to a sense of normal after the pandemic. Meanwhile, we have many senseless fights over what should be done. Around the globe, relationships between the community and the church have been fractured. It has not been a pretty picture. During the many times of uncertainty of being in service, then having to do virtual-only, followed only a small number being able to attend and going back through the cycle, like a lot of people, I had time to reflect on what I was missing by being away from our congregants for so long.
Early in the pandemic, I thought about what I came to think of, like our American “sacramental affluence,” the entitled sense that the Worship experience should be there and available for us whenever we want it. Many of the objections to public health measures that closed churches and limited attendance came from this sacramental affluence. Unfortunately, many of our brothers and sisters got more worked up about political lines surrounding the vaccines than they did about how we should have been promoting more how the first church was born as Acts 2:46 tells us that they went from “house to house.” It was discovered that many families were not missing in a brief period. Some would say they miss the gathering on days, but a home worship experience with a Liturgy of the Word every Sunday and during the week during the pandemic was acceptable. In important ways, they would say that it was better.
The ability to watch numerous services; jumping from one service to the other with the use of your fingers, became acceptable to so many. from some of the most thoughtful Catholic women and men everywhere in the world In Acts 2:42 – 47 – The early church’s experience before Catholicism became an institution. The home church was church long before there ever was church life. Our experience confirmed that it was a different, in some ways better, Sunday observance that felt very authentic. After a few months, it was realized congregants stopped hearing, and some had never heard from their places of worship (except twice when they appealed for money). Then, I heard about some places of worship that had organized phone trees to reach out to older or sick parishioners.
Sometimes that gave an opportunity to pray or talk together on the phone. Other times, it was a chance to make sure someone who could not go out still got their groceries or prescriptions. In a study, some said they had no such calls, and their sense was that very few places of worship were doing this kind of thing. I thought a lot about how the men trained by our seminaries were trained to lead an American church they expected always would show up on Sundays. Very little seminary training (if any) prepares men to think of their ministry differently. There were clergy who had enough pastoral sense, themselves, to know how to be ministers while their churches were empty. But the pandemic revealed how small their number is. It leads me to this question, wondering today how they will think about their ministries if very few of their parishioners come back at all. That is the question of the moment. Why go back? Many have asked that question. In some cases, there is not a readily answer.
However, some have gone back. Mostly, I think, we were motivated by a sense of obligation. Thinking a lot about our church and our places of worship during the extended time away did not yield many convincing arguments to return. But the answer began to come to many parishioners after attending service. They began to get the answer when they noticed what they had not experienced during all those home worship experiences across the long months away. Babies crying. Footsteps in the aisles. Laughter comes up from the other side of the church. The clatter of hands clapping, feet stomping. The whole, glorious mess of Catholicism means, “Here comes everybody.” The singer sang the offertory song, and I recall the words that caught my thoughts — “I see glory on each face/Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place.”
This is our faith. This is the faith of the church. Beyond the sacraments, beyond the ministerial responsibilities, beyond everything else lies a much deeper truth: What our faith tells us is that we encounter God together, in one another and when we assemble. Hebrews 10:25a states, “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together as the manner of some is;” Holiness comes from God. But we find it most frequently together when we are open to it. For all its faults, the corporate worship life prepares us to be receptive when God comes to find us. I pray that everyone will come back to their place of worship, eventually. But also pray that we will not forget our pandemic experience, and we will bring a new set of expectations to our worship experience. The best way to have a church worth coming back to is to build one. So let’s build it together!
Dr. Johnny M. Harris, Jr.Senior Pastor
Interlink Churches of Provision and Rehoboth
Buffalo and Rochester, New York
