After fielding back-to-back complaints about masks in church—one regarding a fellow parishioner who had shirked a mask during a recent service and the other wondering whether our congregation had changed its policy from “strongly recommended” to “required,” because “everyone” was wearing them—I realized something surprising: Leading a church is harder now, in 2021, than it was in 2020, during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic. Last year, state and diocesan mandates meant I could throw up my hands and respond, “Sorry, not up to me.” And anyway, the answer was, for the most part, a straightforward “no”—no, we can’t gather for services, and no, we can’t sing. Now it is up to me, the rector of St. David’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, and I am struggling to find a way forward.
Like so many other communities, we first closed to in-person worship in mid-March 2020. We reopened in a limited way that July: Singing wasn’t allowed, every other pew as well as prayer books and hymnals had been removed, masks and reservations were required, seating charts enforced social distancing, no plate was passed, and people in Ghostbuster-like getups sanitized between services. We were compelled to close again in December 2020 because of rising case numbers in our county, and we reopened on Palm Sunday this year. During the closures, I told everyone we were still open, just in a different way. We live-streamed on Sundays. We set up times when people could come pick up factory-sealed sacraments, without ever having to get out of their car. We put on drive-through events for kids. We provided Sunday-school videos. Kids created virtual stations of the cross—they drew, made Lego scenes of, or enacted the 14 stations—photos of which we collected and posted in a Facebook album during Holy Week.
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