Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is a pastor and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He live in Iowa with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has pondering the mysteries of light.
I am a pastor. My wife is a pastor. A pandemic is an interesting time to lead a church. Over the last couple of months we have engaged in numerous conversations with other pastors and leaders. We have read a bunch of articles and blog posts regarding proper responses to COVID-19. We have listened to podcasts, tracked statistics, kept up with federal and state guidelines. And all the while we have wondered what a faithful, Christian response to this pandemic might look like. I don’t necessarily have any answers, but I do have some thoughts. My basic conviction is that the Church’s response needs to be far more robust than just reopening. How do we live out the gospel in this unique time?
Black and white thinking won’t get us very far. Responses to the pandemic need to be nuanced for different contexts and communities. Unfortunately, nuance isn’t one of our strongest societal attributes right now. As churches and leaders most of us will need to be able to plot a course somewhere between the response of New York City and the response of the conspiracy theorists. We need to take the situation seriously, but maybe not in the same way that New York and D.C. need to. For example, the suburb I live in has a population density that is about 14 times less than New York City, and is 36 times less than Manhattan. It is also about 30 times more dense than the Iowa average. We live in a world of nuances. Blanket answers won’t cut it.
Life is more than biology. The Bible is clear about this throughout its narrative. Health cannot simply be reduced to biological rubrics. We are social creatures made to be in (physical) contact with one another. One of the most startling sentences I read a couple years back came from the biblical scholar Terence Fretheim. In commenting on the text of Genesis 2:18-25 he notes first of all that “it is not good for the human to be alone” (v. 18) and then, as he follows the biblical narrative, he finds that, “God’s presence is not the solution to the problem of human aloneness.”* The answer is another human. Our response will need to factor not just the problem of human death, but also the more pervasive problem of human aloneness.
Mercy should be the focus. In the (progressive) Evangelical world that I live in there is a lot of talk of justice. This is great and much needed. But I fear that all too often justice and mercy get conflated. The pandemic has revealed and enhanced many of justice issues and systemic inequalities that exist in our culture. New ones have emerged through the handling and mishandling of this pandemic. As always, the church needs to find truth-filled, active responses to these. But perhaps right now, systemic justice should not be our primary focus. Maybe in this time of global discombobulation mercy should be our first response. People of all sorts are feeling a variety of acute needs. In the plagues of the past it was acts of mercy that set the church apart. The early Christians simply went to those in need and risked their own health and wellness to demonstrate Christ’s love and mercy to the hurting. What would it look like for us to recklessly and sacrificially respond to this pandemic with mercy towards all the ways different people are suffering? How will history remember the church’s response to this moment?
Safety is an idol. I can’t tell you how many times I have listened to or read a Christian leader calling for the church to be creative and innovative in this time while also insisting on being safe. Not only does prioritizing one’s own safety conflict with the call of a disciple, but it also simply does not lead to innovation. Allow me to quote the great Rabbi Edwin Friedman,
Anyone who has ever been part of an imaginatively gridlocked relationship system knows that mere learning will not, on its own, automatically change the way people see things or think. There must first be a shift in the emotional processes of that institution. Imagination and indeed even curiosity are at root emotional, not cognitive, phenomena. In order to imagine the unimaginable, people must be able to separate themselves from surrounding emotional processes before they can even being to see (or hear) things differently.**
That is to say that if safety is our main concern, then our efforts to be creative and innovative will all take place within a framework of fear. Fear and anxiety do not breed creativity. Safety does not lead to innovation. I’m not advocating for anarchy, or for spurning the guidelines that our governments offer us, but I am saying that if we are really going to use this pandemic as an opportunity to innovate and create, then we will first have to abandon our idol of safety. This should not be a surprise, it was C.S. Lewis who reminded us all that “God’s not safe, but he is good.”
It is my hope and prayer that in this time the church can find new ways to proclaim and live out the good news of Jesus Christ with creativity and joy. But from what I’ve seen so far, the framework of our conversation may need to change.
* Terence Fretheim, God and World in the Old Testament (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005), page 57.
** Edwin H. Friedman, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (New York: Seabury Books, 2007), page 31, emphasis added.