The Washington Post - 21.03.2020

B2 EZ rE THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAy, MARCH 21 , 2020

religion

and Prevention recommendations. “I can’t absolve people over the phone or through Zoom or over Skype,” Holmer said. He said that Jesus never would have used such technology, even if it had been around in the first century. “Jesus could have stayed up in heaven and just made some phone calls,” Holmer said. “To be with us, to dwell with us, is the reason he ordained bishops and they ordained priests. It’s the reason he gave us his body and blood in the Eucharist, so he could be with us.... I f we can’t d o that, it’s a big ache. It’s a big ache in the heart.” That lack of physical contact with the sacraments and with their priests has been hard on many Catholics who are social distancing — every diocese in the country has now suspended public mass. But some clergy are looking for upsides. L esser, the Atlanta rabbi, said he might have time to tune in not just for the reconstructionist synagogue services that he will be leading for his community but also some Buddhist communities that he has been interested in checking out. Campbell encouraged people searching for connection during an isolating time to sample widely from the abundance of spiritual streams. “for people who are curi- ous, they’ll have the ability to observe and participate in a much broader range of religious gatherings than they might on a typical weekend,” s he said. And they just might return to their telework monday with next- level conference call skills, too. [email protected] [email protected]

had taped photos of members in the pews so he wouldn’t struggle as much to preach to empty benches. During Thursday afternoon’s Baha’i prayer service, which was held over Skype and hosted in living rooms and bedrooms across the District, with a few friends tuning in from farther cities and countries, worshipers took turns leading songs and prayers while others muted their mics. “remember at all times and at all places that God is faithful, and do not doubt this. Be patient even though great calamities may come upon thee,” one woman sang, strumming a guitar. In the tiny boxes filling the screen, her fellow faithful moved their lips along with her. The scene resembled that taking place in congregations of every faith across the city, as community members yearned to see one another’s f aces and hear their voices while missing their weekly time together. Your priest is live- streaming the rosary from his bedroom? Your pastor is preach- ing while his kids climb up his chair? All normal, now. But while many clergy scram- bled to put their worship experience all online, others contem- plated ways to keep in-person tra- ditions alive in the weeks to come. for the rev. Scott Holmer at St. Edward the Confessor Catholic Church in Bowie, along with a handful of other Catholic priests across the country, the answer was drive-through confession. He set up cones in the church parking lot and sat down in a chair. Each person wanting to confess stayed in the car, with Holmer s ix feet outside their window, in keeping with Centers for Disease Control

heart of confession? What is the heart of gathering for prayer? Which elements of it are things w e can adapt and still hold on to something that feels meaning- ful?” Campbell and rabbi Joshua Lesser, of Atlanta’s Congregation Bet Haverim, started a facebook group for clergy across the country to share ideas for virtual min- istry. more than 5,000 people joined within days. “A whole new liturgy is being created. People are writing prayers,” L esser said. Lesser might implement one of the ideas gleaned from the facebook group with his youth group teens — showing a movie on Net - flix’s new platform for remotely watching together. Clergy are of- fering virtual classes on every sub- ject they can come up with. They’re live-streaming art proj- ects and challah baking lessons. In Springfield, ohio, Central Christian Church had never live- streamed a service before. As last week came to an end, the staff realized it needed to rapidly change how it does things. The team decided the rev. Carl ruby would record his service Sat- urday and staff would post it S un- day on YouTube for church goers — a bout 150 on a typical week — t o watch online at t heir normal worship time. Congregants could come to the church to pick up prepackaged Communion w afers. “Everything we do changed in an instant,” r uby said. After his first sermon to an empty sanctuary last week, ruby walked into the sanctuary Thurs- day to prepare for this weekend, and found a surprise: His admin- istrative assistant, Julie Prater,

VIrtuAl worsHIp from B1

Worship goes on, with a virtual assist

BY SARAH PULLIAM BAILEY

on Sunday, Alabama’s largest
church stopped its in-person
worship services. By Tuesday, it
started hosting drive-through
coronavirus tests in one of its
parking lots.
In the span of just two days,
doctors in Birmingham tested
977 people from across the state
by using the parking lot and
volunteers from Church of the
Highlands, according to robert
record, who is helping lead the
effort. The drive-through effort at
one of America’s l argest churches
is part of a larger nationwide
push for more information about
coronavirus as more testing loca-
tions began to pop up this week.
The number of confirmed cas-
es for coronavirus in Alabama as
of Tuesday was 39. Twenty-one
were in Jefferson County, where
Church of the Highlands is locat-
ed, according to AL.com.
on Tuesday, the testing at the
church confirmed eight positive
coronavirus cases, record said.
With testing still in short supply
but in high demand, patients
must have symptoms to be test-
ed.
“We navigate how sick they
are,” he said. “one of our goals is
that people not go into a doctor’s
office and not go i nto a hospital i f
they don’t have to.”
During the tests, doctors
speaks with patients through
cellphones and evaluate them
through their car windows. on
Tuesday, he said, two people
seemed to be in respiratory dis-
tress and were sent to the hospi-
tal; one was put on a respirator
there.
A patient does not roll down
the window until the last 30
seconds, when someone in pro-
tective gear swabs them. Those
with health care are billed
through their insurance; others
do not have to pay for the test.
“You show up, you’ll be treated
like the most affluent person in
the world,” record said. “In the
next few weeks, we’ll find out
how to pay for it later.”
Church of the Highlands,
which usually averages 50,000
people for weekend services, is a
prominent congregation in one
of the most religious states in the
nation. Its lead pastor, Chris
Hodges, has been in touch with
the governor of the state, accord-
ing to record. The church, he
said, was able to pull off the
testing because it started a health
clinic in 2009 that sees m ore than
18,000 patients a year.
record, who leads the now-in-
dependent clinic and is on the
church’s staff, said that last fri-
day he thought that some pa-

tients had coronavirus symp- to ms, but he had no way of testing them. on Saturday, his friend Ty Thomas of Assurance Scientific Laboratories contacted him, saying that he wanted to conduct tests the lab had been developing since January. on Sunday, they met with church leaders, and on Tuesday, they tested 347 patients. The testing Tuesday mostly went smoothly, record said, ex- cept that the volume of cars in line clogged up a key highway next to a hospital. Leaders moved the operation to another campus Wednesday. As p eople sit in the parking lot, they can tune into an fm radio station for updates and call a number for prayer. In the first hour of testing, they received 321 call-ins, said Layne Schranz, a Church of the Highlands associ- ate pastor. “People were chaotic in their lives and busy. Now they’re sitting still. It’s scary to wait,” Schranz said. “In unstable times, people want to hold onto a stable God.” People seeking to be tested are given strict instructions to keep their windows rolled up and are told that no public restrooms are available. Patients take a picture of their paperwork. once they clinic receive t he test results from the lab, the clinic notifies the patient and the Alabama Depart- ment of Public Health. Schranz said they are taking it day by day but plan to keep testing while t here is demand. He said that other church leaders around the country have reached out to find out if their parking lot could similarly be used for testing. “You have to have the medical

side, and you have to have the laboratory side,” he said. “With- out those, having a large parking lot is no use.” The megachurch has 22 cam- puses and is part of the Associa- tion of related Churches, a non- denominational church-planting network. It has a Pentecostal style of worship and is known across the state as a church that “gets stuff done,” s aid Collin Han- sen, a Birmingham-based editori- al director for an evangelical network called the Gospel Coali- tion. “We have a lot more trust in our churches than in our govern- ment,” Hansen said of Alabami- ans. “These are the folks who show up wearing t he bright green T-shirt and clean up your neigh- borhood.” Greg Garrison, a religion re- porter for the Birmingham News and AL.com who first reported on the testing, said the effort involved 20 staff members from the church, more than 100 volunteers, three people from the testing lab and 10 staff members from the clinic. “I’m sure there are a lot of people who are uncomfortable with the state’s largest church being in such a prominent role. The fact of the matter is, they’re in a good position to do this,” he said. “It’s like polling. It’s a gov- ernment thing, it’s a civic thing, but sometimes it’s most practical to do this at churches.” Garrison said it is probably t he most ambitious outreach in doing mass numbers of test in the Birmingham area. “People are scared and want to get tested,” he said. “A t this point, I think people are glad that somebody is doing it.” [email protected]

Megachurch helps test nearly 1,000

people for coronavirus in two days

CHurCH oF THE HIgHLANds Church of the Highlands, Alabama’s largest megachurch, hosts a testing drive-through at one of its parking lots on tuesday.

JoNATHAN NEwToN/THE wAsHINgToN PosT the rev. scott Holmer of st. Edward the Confessor Catholic Church in Bowie takes drive-through confessions in the church lot, distant enough to adhere to CDC recommendations.

BY MICHELLE BOORSTEIN

To t he police officers who came
to the porch of his Baton rouge
church to order it closed, to the
White House liaison who called
him, to people slamming him
across social media, Pastor To ny
Spell has a response: What about
Planned Parenthood? What
about Ta rget?
“We feel we are being persecut-
ed for the faith by being told to
close our doors,” said Spell, who
told The Washington Post on
Thursday that his Life Ta bernacle
Church was visited by officers
from the local Central Police De-
partment on Tuesday night, when
more than 300 people were wor-
shiping.
The officers said the National
Guard would be coming to their
next service, this Sunday, if the
church did not comply with the
governor’s ban on gatherings of
more than 50 people, Spell said
he was told.
“There is a real virus, but we’re
not closing Planned Parenthood,
where babies are being mur-
dered," he said. “If they close
those doors today, w e’d save more
lives than will be taken by the
coronavirus.”
Spell said he received a call
Wednesday from To ny Perkins,
head of the conservative Chris-
tian advocacy group family re-
search Council, who Perkins said
was representing the White

House. “He said, ‘We’re not asking you to close, we don’t want you to close, but how can we help you?’ ” Perkins and Spell talked about options including having people stand six feet apart, or meeting outside, the pastor said. “I said: ‘I’m going to meet. We’re going to have church.’ He said: ‘okay.’ ” It was not immediately possi- ble to talk to Perkins. The Central Police did not immediately com- ment, but its facebook page cited the ban and said, “We will re- spond to gatherings larger than 50 people.” Spell quoted scripture that calls for gathering — Hebrews 10:25, matthew 18:20. “We’re a Pentecostal denomination, and when we gather and pray, the Holy Ghost comes in the midst. There are healings, signs, wonders, some things done together in the church that can’t be done in a live stream,” he said. Even as most places of Ameri- can worship begrudgingly have been shutting down over the past week, there are the last holdouts — the places where clergy and believers insist their communal task is too indispensable to be halted, or too protected by God to produce suffering. or where they wonder whether the virus might being overstated. or if, in 2020 America, people have lost respect for religion. or perhaps they sim- ply cannot fathom their days without coming together to pray.

Even if every other business was shut down, said Nicole Bry- ant, 33, a home-schooling mother of five who was at Spell’s church Tuesday night when the police came, shouldn’t the church be exempted? “There was a time in our history when I feel like we had that religious freedom — everything

could have been closed, but people need to worship, religion was top-of-the-line because that was the original reason for [the founders] coming here,” she said Thursday. “The beauty of Ameri- ca is you can live your life based on what you prioritize as neces- sary, and we should be able to do

the same.” It is not that she thinks church members are immune to the virus, but God will get them through whatever happens. They try to be smart, she said, sitting at some distance. But the spiritual power that is produced when they are together, “there isn’t anything comparable to that.”

on Tuesday, the head of 770 Eastern Parkway — the world headquarters of the Chabad- Lubavitch movement — brushed off calls for the building in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to be closed. Dozens of cases of the virus had been identified in the region’s ultra-orthodox communities.

“770 will be open until mo- siach,” r abbi Zalman Lipsker ear- ly Tuesday told CoLlive.com, using the Yiddish word for messiah. CoLlive is a news site covering the world’s Chabad-Lubavitch community. By that night, 770 was closed for the first time in its history. It held a final, crowded prayer service where worshipers danced and prayed late into the night. Worry and fear about places that refused to close prompted Aron Wieder, an orthodox law- maker in rockland County, N.Y., to create a video Tuesday directed to his community. In Yiddish, with an American flag behind him, Wieder passionately be- sieged people to stay away from public places. There are hun- dreds of synagogues in rockland County, he said. “Stay home!” he shouted into the camera, gesturing dramatically with his hands. “We need God’s grace to survive this diffi- cult time! God expects you to look out for yourself.” Wieder said he spoke to a rabbi who is a Holocaust survivor who did not want to close. “He was literally crying. He said, ‘I never believed I’d survive and then have to close my synagogue.’ ” Another rabbi said his building has always been open 24 hours and does not even have locks. There are certain prayers that require a quorum of 10 — includ-

ing the prayer for the dead, which mourners are supposed to say every day for a year. Jewish law also calls for hearing the To rah read directly from the scroll, not a book. But Wieder said he believes the resistance to close among the ultra-orthodox was a kind of emotional shock — that the virus must be dramatically deadly or this core of their lives would not be impacted. “for an orthodox Jew who has been praying all his life in a synagogue, two or three times a day, if he can’t go, part of them- selves is being cut off. It’s almost like the end of the world.” on Thursday, synagogues were closed across neighborhoods with large ultra-orthodox Jewish populations, including rockland County and Crown Heights. Groups of 10 men — called a minyan — m et i n open courtyards and backyards in various Jewish communities to meet those religious requirements. In Islam, there are prayers that are not to be said alone. The janaza, or funeral prayer, does not require more than one person, but the belief in some schools of Islam is that the more people praying it the better, as more forgiveness for the de- ceased can be granted. on social media some shared images of muslims gathering in very small groups for such prayers. [email protected]

Feeling a need to gather, La. church won’t close its doors over c oronavirus

“We’re a Pentecostal denomination, and

when we gather and pray, the Holy Ghost

comes in the midst. There are healings,

signs, wonders, some things done together

in the church that can’t be done in a live

stream.” Pastor Tony Spell, Life Tabernacle Church

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The Washington Post - 21.03.2020

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