Perhaps you’ve heard the adage, “He who frames the question wins the debate.” Those who fear COVID or HANTA or any other disease- they’re not just getting the wrong answers; they’re asking the wrong questions. So we need a better framework to test the worthiness of our questions.
During COVID, church doors were shut under the claim that protecting the congregation from sickness was the loving thing to do. Bulletins and announcements repeated the same line: shielding people from exposure was presented as neighborly love. There is a measure of truth in that impulse. Reckless exposure can be unloving and poor stewardship of the body. But love is rarely one-dimensional. When the church leadership reduces neighbor-love to one narrow definition—“keep them from getting sick”—they ignore every other way love might express itself in that moment.
Loving your neighbor can be multi-faceted, and there’s rarely a one-size-fits-all kind of love. With so many different neighbors and so many different situations, and with the persistent human tendency toward self-protection, the question becomes sharper: How do we actually love our neighbor when there is pestilence in the land?
How do we love our neighbors?
Jesus was asked which commandment is the greatest. He answered the love of God and the love of neighbor. The case laws of the Old Testament were not random rules; they were concrete instructions for what love looked like when a neighbor’s ox fell into a pit, when property was damaged, or when justice had to be administered. God’s people obeying God’s law was the embodiment of love.
When Scripture gives clear precedent, that precedent should shape how believers love one another in times of sickness. Part One explored several such texts. But even when case law feels distant, another path remains: ask the neighbor how he actually wants to be loved. Some during COVID asked, “Isn’t protecting my neighbor from sickness loving him?” Rarely did I hear the better question: “Is it loving for you to decide which risks I am willing to take?”
The desire to shield the vulnerable is understandable. But what is harder to understand is the assumption that one group of believers has the right to make that decision for another group who has already counted the cost and reached a different conclusion.
Ambient risk
Six years ago, Preachers wrote and based their decisions on minimizing the congregation’s risk to COVID-19. Today, they’re ramping that same rhetoric ‘round Hanta. We don’t measure risk in isolation, but as relative to our ambient. I was told stories about how many Christians were out of work or working from home during the quarantine. That means the ambient risk is low, like being in a room at 50*F. You might evaluate going to church as a relatively higher risk, say 70*F.
My ambient risk was high. I touched, climbed on, and breathed the dust of products from all over the country, all over the world, things that had been handled dozens or hundreds of times. My ambient risk was like a 90*F room, and public worship seemed like a risk-relief with its breezy 70*F.
Casting the well-being of our families upon a bankrupt and inundated public welfare system seemed a worse risk still, and the more people in the transportation industry who opted for the easy way out, the greater the strain on an overloaded supply chain at a critical, fragile moment. So I did the right thing, the hard thing, and I didn’t miss a day.
So I must ask again: “Is it loving for you to decide which risks I’m allowed to take?”
Staying home from church is a rich-people problem. My family and I were on the opposite end of the spectrum. When you’re poor, you make different assessments: “If I go to work, I might catch the COVID. If I don’t go to work, I will catch the FIRED and STARVED. I guess I’ll go to work.”
From the very first day, the government declared my work “essential”; our employers declared us “essential”; and we knew if the supply chain broke, the country could dissolve into lawlessness. Precisely because I was “essential,” I was also ineligible to collect from the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance fund. Rich people problems are cute.
Speed Limits
One preacher used the analogy of wearing a seat belt to defend closing the church during COVID. There are no real benefits to foregoing your seatbelt, but there are true and unique benefits to public worship. I believe God has called His people to worship, like an ancient royal court. I believe God truly attends these meetings He’s called, where He strengthens, feeds, forgives His people. I believe that the fabric separating the visible and invisible worlds wears thin during public worship. Unfolding that theology of worship would require a book; it took me 10 years to grow into believing it. If all that seems strange to you, reader, at least understand the benefits, the impetus, I perceive in public worship.
I suggest the speed limit might be a better parable [than seat-belts] for this analysis. Some 30,000 Americans die every year in traffic accidents, and doubtless that number would dwindle if the federal government required all speed limits to be 35mph or less.
Simultaneously, we have another instance of he who frames the question… “Aren’t the lives of 30,000 people per year worth slowing down?” “You mean 30,000 people die every year just so we can drive faster?” I reject the frame… America is one of the most prosperous nations in the world, with one of the highest standards of living, which requires an infrastructure moving at 70mph or faster. By arbitrarily limiting speed, we might see fewer traffic deaths but more deaths from other causes. How many people might die for lack of medicine or expertise or food, etc, if we hamstring the supply chain at 35mph? While that number is perhaps incalculable, the threat is realized for us when we recall the diphtheria epidemic in Alaska. How many people died because of a supply chain which could not move faster than a dog-sled?
This brings us back to our analogy. Is the answer to traffic death one of government regulation lowering speed, or for each man to understand and accept the risks of driving over 35? Likewise, is the answer to public worship during disease to close the churches, or for each man to understand and accept the risks?
Is the juice worth the squeeze?
This brings us to the heart of the matter. I was willing to assume a relatively high risk to serve the American people and provide for my family. Would I then be willing to assume a lower risk in answer to Christ’s summons to worship and fellowship of the saints? Yes and Amen! Everyone is always running a cost-benefit analysis; sometimes we do this poorly, sometimes subconsciously, but I’ve given at least three months of deliberate thought to this one.
You can’t protect them anymore anyway.
I applaud the desire to protect the congregation; I think it stems from a pastor’s heart. However, at this point, as we look back at COVID and forward to HANTA, we have to face a practical question. Will closing the church doors again even protect anyone anyway? More than that, by “protecting” the church from viruses, are we leaving them vulnerable to something far worse?
The Barna Poll provides us with a wealth of statistical data to support the fact that 4 consecutive weeks is enough to break the habit of going to church completely. After that point, the person requires a new effort or event to restart the habit of regular attendance. What about people with a desperate desire to attend public worship despite plague? Could the willingness of another pastor to reopen and serve the saints build a sense of camaraderie in hard times? Could this permanently pull people away from the closed churches?
During COVID, I watched one church’s weekly viewership dwindle from nearly 80 at the beginning of quarantine to about 45 just 3 months later; that last question becomes a pressing one. Either the people were doubling-up [with multiple families in a single home], or they’re going somewhere else, or they’re doing nothing at all. If they’re doubling-up, we can’t protect them. If they’re attending somewhere else, we can’t protect them. If they’ve stopped watching/attending, we can’t protect them [and they require the most desperate kind of protection].
Every action has risks. Opening the church doors leaves us vulnerable to diseases which can kill the body. Closing the church doors leaves us vulnerable to maladies which can kill the spirit. “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”
Learning to let go
This is one of the great challenges of parenting. Scripture often compares the preacher’s job to a father’s charge over his children. Certainly, while our children are very small, we make many of their decisions for them; we labor to frame good habits of action, and good habits of thought. But we make these decisions in anticipation of the day when we stop making their decisions for them. The goal of parenting is not raising good children, but raising good adults.
By closing the doors of America’s churches, our pastors decided for all of the Christians that they shall not attend public worship. Might American Christians have felt more loved if we’d opened back up and let each one make his own decision? Is the pastor’s job to keep people from making bad decisions, or to teach them to make good ones, and to accept responsibility for all of their decisions?
Oikos
“Why don’t we just go back to house-churches; that was the New Testament pattern anyway?” Meeting in homes is absolutely Biblical. If the proposal is to sell the church building in favor of fully re-establishing that practice, then the author is all ears. But that is not really what anyone had in mind.
An “oikos” without context is a proof-text for a pretext. Some used the word “oikos” as justification for streaming worship services from individual homes. In reality, the return to the oikos pattern would see families and saints collecting into larger groups and meeting at the largest house available. This is a good thing, and it is exactly what I did all through the COVID lockdowns.
The New Testament does not support the idea of immediate families isolating themselves for worship. In Acts 2, about 120 people gathered in the upper room for prayer and breaking bread. These ancient gatherings packed in as many as were willing to come. When Paul greets the prominent saints of a particular “church that is in [a certain] house,” he often names 15 or 20 people. A worship team or church staff of 20 suggests a membership in the hundreds. When the New Testament use of “oikos” is thoroughly explored, it becomes clear that house worship was not an alternative to public worship. House worship WAS public worship.
Promises and Protection
Previously drawing upon James 5, I wanted to underscore God’s command to touch sick people, and the presupposition that IF God healed the man, he would then almost immediately enter public worship. A modern medical expert might have written James 5 differently because God and [most] epidemiologists have differing ideas about disease.
During COVID, I saw some deaths and heard of many more. I’m sorry for those deaths, sorry not to have known them better on this side of glory, sorry that such great saints who’d so touched the lives of this church should enter their rest and rearward when their people could not celebrate life nor mourn passing as they desired to, as they were accustomed to. I’m sorry the LORD did not heal these, and I agree that, like Lazarus ’ death, these deaths also are for the glory of God. Like Lazarus, these too will rise from the dead at the voice of their Lord.
Nevertheless, the outcome of James 5 and the prayer of faith was not my point. James 5, with its command to touch sick people, and its presuppositions about the public celebration of healing, is a proof text for gathering and interacting in times of sickness. James 5 reinforces the fact that there is no fine print on Hebrews 10:25.
In a similar misunderstanding, some rebutted that they saw a distinction between God’s promises of protection to Israel and His promises to the church. I did not reason we should gather because God will protect us from COVID-19. I said we should gather because God has commanded us to gather. If I get sick, so be it.
Remember I wrote of driving this body till the wheels fall off, of raising children tender-hearted and fearless, of a single-hearted and reckless pursuit of the gospel of Christ… I do not appeal to “divine protection” as a justification for gathering. Even my arguments from Exodus are qualified by chapter 5:3 in which God threatened to “…fall upon the Jews with sword or pestilence…” if they would not gather to worship.
As passionately as I would dissolve almost every distinction between Old and New Testaments, dissolve every distinction between OT Jews and NT Christians, as dear as that doctrine is to my heart, and as central to my theology… that is not the point here. Were the Jews protected from disease when God killed 70,000 of them for David’s census? Were the Jews protected in 1Kings 8 when Solomon said God would send plagues among them? My arguments have nothing to do with protection; I argue for a command to gather without “miraculous protection”.
What of Luther risking exposure to the black death as he ministered to the sick? What of modern missionaries who minister in leper colonies? What of Jonathan Edwards and David Brainerd, who both ministered among the smallpox patients? What about William Carey and Adoniram Judson? If church history and the great saints who have gone before us are to guide our interpretation of Scripture, they cast aside questions of safety whenever the gospel has opportunity for advance.
Some turned the name of Rev. Glenn into a byword, saying he believed God would protect him from COVID. But Glenn did not speak this way. Rather, he vowed to preach until he was in jail or the hospital. He believed he could get sick, and he took his call to preach among the saints and to this dying world as deathly serious. Glenn died with his boots on, and “precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of His saints”. I didn’t know Rev. Glenn, but I’ve read a little about him. I don’t think he believed himself invulnerable, simply that he found the risk of not gathering greater than the risk of disease. I think he was right. We trivialize the sacrifice of great men like Glenn if we claim they thought themselves invulnerable. It’s no sacrifice for Superman to walk into a gunfight, but Glenn looked COVID-19 square in the face and obeyed the call of God upon his conscience. Cowards viewed Rev. Glenn’s death through the lenses of safety and pragmatism, concluding his death was a “bad” thing. I’m operating with limited evidence, but I don’t think Glenn or God viewed his death this way.
The day of my measuring has not yet come, but if in that day God grants me courage as He gave to Rev. Glenn… what a glorious day!
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