How The Pandemic Will Change Us

Last night my son came home from LSU, which is reorganizing, and will resume classes online in three weeks. Thank God. This morning my other kids’ school announced that it was shutting down for the rest of the semester and moving to online instruction, starting Monday (they have Fridays off). So we’re homebound and social distancing like champs here, for the duration.

Last night, my college son told me that one of his favorite professors mentioned to him his fear that the university administration would seize this opportunity to move most instruction online, even after the crisis passes. It’s cheaper, after all. This would be a pedagogical loss, a terrible loss. But can’t you see it happening? I can, absent meaningful resistance.

This may, in fact, be the event that causes the higher education bubble to pop. I’m very interested in what you academic readers have to say about this.

I’m thinking also about how American churchgoing will be changed by this crisis. Dr. Anthony Fauci said on TV this morning that we could be in this emergency situation for at least two months. I heard this morning that at least one hospital is quietly planning to be on emergency status for six months. As we have all heard, masses in some Catholic dioceses have been cancelled, and many Protestant churches are moving their worship online during the crisis.

Here’s what concerns me. What if people get used to being exiled from their actual house of worship, and come to believe that “virtual church” is good enough?

For Christians who are part of a heavily liturgical, sacramental tradition, that could never happen. There is no substitute for being there to receive the sacraments. The danger there is that people who are nominal, or tending that way, but who go to church out of habit, will simply not resume once the danger has passed.

This may happen to low-church Protestants — Evangelicals and charismatics — too. But it seems to me that they also face a greater danger from congregants deciding that it’s good enough to hear the sermon online, from home. They will have done it for months by the time this is over; maybe they won’t go back.

It seems to me that religious leaders ought to be thinking right now about having to face that challenge down the road, when we come out the other side. This is not a liberal-vs-conservative thing, but something that all churches will deal with, one way or the other.

Can any of you think of ways we can encourage each other to resist the temptation to think of exile from the temple as a normative condition, to be embraced?

What other ways do you foresee this pandemic changing the way we live in a permanent way?

UPDATE: Wow, here is a fantastic piece by Andy Crouch, about being the church in this time of plague. Here is what his long essay is about:

What is happening? An overview of the most important things for Christian leaders, anywhere in the United States, to know about SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19.

What should we communicate? A list of the most helpful messages others can hear from us — and the most harmful messages as well.

What decisions should we make? Recommendations for decisions about large gatherings, medium-size gatherings for Christian worship, and small groups meeting in households.

What can we hope for? A few reflections on the genuine possibility that our decisions in the next few weeks could reshape the practice of Christian faith in our nation and, God being merciful, lead to a revival of the church of Jesus Christ in America.

More:

At the same time, some people are taking steps, sometimes extreme ones, to protect themselves and their families, often out of terrible anxiety, and this will likely increase in the coming days. This is not a Christian posture. We do not change our behavior out of fear. In a very different context, the Apostle Paul wrote, “I want you to be free of anxieties” so that his community could serve the Lord (1 Cor. 7:32). We prepare for our expected needs, and others’, so that we can be free of anxieties and serve freely when the time comes.

It is entirely possible to prepare, even to prepare urgently, out of love. Rapid decisions to prepare are not panic unless they are accompanied by aggression and anxiety. Christians should be preparing — urgently in some cases — but not panicking.

We should say, “Prepare for trouble.”

This is not the same as saying, “Worry about trouble,” or a violation of Jesus’ command in Matthew 6 not to give thought for tomorrow. Our model here is Jesus, who warned his disciples over and over that their worst case scenario was going to come true. “He began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected . . ., and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly” (Mark 8:31–32). Looking beyond his own fate, he also predicted the ultimate destruction of Jerusalem by Roman forces even as he wept over the city’s refusal to listen to his message of peace (Luke 19:41–43).

On the night before he faced the ultimate tragedy and disaster of Golgotha and the Cross, none of his disciples had any real idea what was coming in the days and years ahead (tradition says that all eleven original apostles died as martyrs). So even as he spoke words of comfort, Jesus made clear that his friends would suffer: “In the world you will have tribulation — but take heart, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).

There is no reason to expect COVID-19 to be the “end of the world” in any sense. Instead it falls in the large category of events that Jesus also prepared his disciples for, the “wars and rumors of wars” that would not mean the end of the world (Matthew 24:6).

And:

The Roman world was full of plagues. Epidemics regularly decimated cities and regions. Though ancient people did not understand the germ theory of disease, they knew enough to flee cities, if they had the means to do so.

The first Christians, who saw themselves as the household of God in their cities, did not flee the plagues. They stayed, and they served. In his book The Rise of Christianity, sociologist Rodney Stark develops a statistical argument that this commitment to providing meaningful care to people stricken by the plague was, all by itself, a major contributor to the growth of the church in the first centuries of the common era.

After you had recovered from the plague, after all, where would you want to worship? The pagan temple whose priests and elite benefactors had fled at the first sign of trouble? Or the household of the neighbor who had brought you food and water, care and concern, at great risk to themselves?

When this plague has passed, what will our neighbors remember of us? Will they remember that the Christians took immediate, decisive action to protect the vulnerable, even at great personal and organizational cost? Will they remember that, being prepared and free from panic, the households of their Christian neighbors were able to visit the needy (while protecting them by keeping appropriate social distance!), provide for their needs, and bring hope? Will they remember that, having ensured safety in all the ways we could, we still gathered to worship and praise God together, week after week, celebrating the resurrection — that even as we ceased doing inessential things, we made clear that serving and worshipping God was the greatest and most essential task of our lives?

Read it all. 

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