How is your church handling COVID operations?

[BibleViz]

I'm a member of a fairly large church that's part of the Southern Baptist Convention. Right now, there are in-person services but you have to register in advance to control capacity. Masks are not required, everything has to be cleaned between services, and the kids building is closed (families all sit together in the service). Sunday school classes will re-open as soon as they have the machines necessary to clean all the classrooms between services on Sunday mornings. There's some discussion about moving classes to mid-week meetings instead of Sundays.

What is your church doing? Are people spread out in home-based small groups? How have schedules and operations changed? What are your re-opening criteria and procedures?

 

[Particular]

My church sets distancing guidelines in the sanctuary and provides overflow rooms as well as a radio broadcast in the parking lot. We also stream the service online. Members who wish to sing are required to wear a mask while singing. Our musicians and vocalists are reduced in number and spread across the stage. We seek to abide by the government regulations that God has ordained for us.
What is interesting is that we are getting members from other churches whose leadership has stopped meeting on Sundays. People want to meet together with believers. I share that sentiment. We do so with care and intention for best practices as outlined by our government.

 

[Squire Robertsson]

My home church is probably more computer literate than many other IFB churches. So, we've transitioned to virtual "live stream" Sunday morning and Wednesday evening services. Tonight, we will have fellowship via zoom. Last week we had a live stream 5-Day Bible camp. We also have virtual children's, teens and adult Bible studies. on Sunday mornings.

 

[Salty]

WE have had services for several weeks now. We are very small. WE moved some pews around - that way - non-familes are at least 2 meters apart.
Some do wear masks.. We have only had on child - but we do have Sunday school for her.

 

[JonC]

We have every other pew closed.

 

[percho]

We have every other pew closed.

Same and we wear mask

 

[Deacon]

In the past we have had outdoor baptisms twice a year in a open amphitheater grove on our campus.
The church now uses it for our weekly services. At first masks were optional, currently they are mandatory outdoors if social distancing is not being observed. From what I’ve seen, too many people are taking this causally and not masking or distancing.
As a higher risk person, and as a medical person with a higher risk of getting Covid, my wife and I have not been attending but have been joining via the internet.
Each Wednesday evening the pastors have a discussion about topics at hand. I’d love for that to continue even if things return to normal.
Pastors prayer occurs on FB each Sunday evening.

Rob

 

[xlsdraw]

We never closed a single service.

We have been live streaming for many years:
Adult Sunday School
Sunday Morning Worship
Sunday Night Worship
Wednesday Night Worship


Since Covid-19:

We started doing additional cleaning
Put out hand sanitizer in multiple locations
For a while, stopped hand shaking
For a while, stopped running the buses


My spiritual inspiration, from the start, was to simply trust the Lord and pray it away. My Pastor's spiritual inspiration, from the start, was that he didn't have the authority to close the Lord's house. So he didn't. He's in his 50th year pastoring the church.

We have not had a single known case of Covid-19 come out of our church.

We resumed running the buses.

We are holding summer camp this week.


Here's what else we found:

We have had several adults, all older than 50, experience hospitalization for a variety of things. None of which were Covid-19 related. However, during their hospital stay, a few eventually tested positive for Covid-19. None experienced symptoms of Covid-19.

My own mother, who is a Christian but not a member of our church, and is 87 years old and chronically ill with several things. She went into the hospital one month ago. She's still there. She was very weak when she went in and was diagnosed with another UTI which has been getting her a couple times a year now for several years. But this time, she was also diagnosed with E.coli also. Her first week was in intensive care. Then she developed a mild case of pneumonia as well. The pneumonia passed quickly. All the while she had been testing negative for Covid-19. But 12 days ago, as they were trying to line up a rehab center to discharge her to, she had a positive Covid-19 test. And then another and another. Finally Sunday she had her first negative Covid-19 result and is due to be rested today. If again negative, she'll be eligible to be sent to rehab. During this period of being Covid-19 positive, she showed no symptoms of Covid-19. The brief pneumonia came and went prior to testing positive.

 

[OnlyaSinner]

We've divided pews in half (with tape, not a chainsaw) and opened halves in alternate rows. Families with older children or no children sit upstairs while those with young children are downstairs, where the service is seen/heard thru closed circuit TV. We also have an "artist-in-residence" whose sketches aid the younger set in understanding the message. Bathroom facilities on both floors. Masks are recommended, especially for those who wish to sing. It's a small church - in the six Sundays since resuming in-person services we've averaged 35 upstairs, probably about twenty downstairs. Services continue to be recorded, with the edited (for tongue-tangling and such) version available early in the week, as a number of regular attendees (pre-COVID) have significant health issues.

 

[Deacon]

I think this is interesting enough to post here. This is part of a letter sent to my church’s attenders recently. It’s an advantage / disadvantage assessment regarding indoor and outdoor services for our church under the current State health restrictions.
Meeting Indoors:

• Currently the state mandates that when indoors we must wear masks. That means even our children down to age 2.

• Indoors we must limit attendance to 50% capacity of the main room and those people must be socially distanced when seated.

• For the foreseeable future we will not have any children's ministry provided. That means our children are sitting with us in the service. That means our services have a 'few' more distractions in them!

• To try to make sure all who want to come to services indoors have a place to sit, we would need to establish a registration system. What this means is to attend church on Sunday, you would need to register how many seats you need and which service you would attend. If you forgot to register, you wouldn't be allowed to attend, unless we devised some sort of "stand by" status on a first come, first serve basis. The seating would be set up for those who registered, two seats here, four seats there six feet apart. And so on.

• Did you notice I said, "which service would you attend?" Yeah, we would need to do two services, like 9 and 11 am with enough time in between to sanitize the place.

• Due to the registration system, it would make it awkward for guests. Most just show up on a Sunday. We don't know how they would take to registering for church. But it would be a serious cringe moment to have a guest show up and tell them there is not a seat for them or that we have a "walk-in" section in a different room.

• Indoors eliminates guessing what the weather is going to be and making those last minute decisions.

• Indoors means you don't have to put on sunscreen before you attend church because you are enjoying air conditioning.

• Moving indoors will require perhaps twice as many volunteers. And it would require some of them to be a "church bouncer" -- "No, I'm sorry your name is not on the list for this service. I know you say you registered, but we don't have enough seats."

• Even as I am typing this, a pastor friend texted me and said that their indoor registrations are SLOW coming in. Two other churches are reporting that attendance has dropped when they moved indoors or was less than they believed it would be.

Now all those things I listed above will eventually be our reality if the state does not change the current COVID requirements.

Meeting outdoors:

• We stay at one service, limiting the stress on our volunteer base.

• We "enjoy" our children being with us. I honestly never hear anything from our children when I'm preaching. I know you might hear things out there where you are sitting (in the shade!) but it seems more manageable outdoors.

• The vast amount of feedback we've gotten is that people are enjoying being outdoors. I haven't had anyone ask,"When do we get to meet indoors?"

• We have systems in place for the outdoor service that are working. Our set up crews, our greeters, our ushers, the Welcome Center, communion distribution, Children’s ministry materials distribution -- all that is working well.

• I personally feel that we are able to accomodate the various levels of personal safety outdoors better. If you want to, you can sit really far away from others. You probably won't have that luxury indoors. You can sit in your car. You definitely can't do that indoors!! You can choose to wear a mask or not to wear a mask. You don't have that choice indoors.

• It's going to get hot as we move into July and August. There's no getting around that. If you are a person that can't stand the heat, we get that and encourage you to feel free to stay at home and enjoy the live stream.

• We still won't be providing children's ministry outdoors. Instead, we'll continue the children's object lessons every week.

• We avoid those awkward moments with guests outdoors. There is plenty of room!

• It does rain outdoors. On those Sundays when weather turns against us, the sound and tech crews along with the worship team and the other folks upfront will do everything indoors while you watch the live stream at home. BTW, we've added a texting service that allows us to text you before you leave the house to let you know if there is a change in the service. We'll also email everyone as well as post the change on our social media and web site.

As you can see, whether it's indoors or outdoors there are drawbacks to either one. As I said earlier, our goal is to minister to as many people in person as effectively as we can. We think we can do that outdoors better than indoors.

 

[BibleViz]

I've observed something interesting from the responses so far. All of them are centered around how to meet in the existing facilities or stream online. Is anyone getting more creative than that?

Lately we've been attending a small church that broke up into houses when lock-downs came to our city. The pastor goes to different houses a few days of the week, including two on Sunday. That way we keep the number of people limited based on state guidelines but can do it freely without worrying about additional burdens. It's a lot of work for the pastor, which he is glad to do, and it has been a great experience.

His reasoning for this approach is that online services tend to leave out elderly people and kids who don't know how to access streaming video or don't have the devices necessary for that. Kids can adapt to it easily but have more trouble staying engaged. In home-based meetings we have the kids in a room doing crafts and kid-friendly lessons while we sing together in a living room followed by the pastor's sermon.