While business is primarily transactional, the life of a church congregation is inherently social. We gather to worship God, but we also gather to connect with one another.
Unless we run into a close friend, we don't normally shake hands or hug someone in the grocery store or movie theater, but where a community of people is knit together spiritually and socially these interactions happen frequently.
In addition, formal rituals, such as sharing in communion or pausing during a service to shake hands or hug, obviously increase the risk of infection.
Even if churches decide to forego virus-sharing practices, the informal contacts are almost unavoidable, even if we consciously plan to avoid them. Worship services - as well as the social time before and after - have their own rhythms, with norms we are conditioned to participate in. It is asking a lot of those gathered, distracted in a variety of ways, not to fall back into pre-COVID-19 ways.
No matter how we plan, people in disaster situations are notably bad at assessing risk and predictably overconfident about the control they have over their environment. Nor can church leaders control the behavior of whoever might walk in the door.
We must consider how to not fuel the spread of COVID-19 and that not put our most vulnerable at greater risk.
The full article is available here
