BROOKINGS – “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Those words of Jesus of Nazareth, in the Gospel of Matthew (18:20, KJV), could be magnified and summed up in one word: community.
For any Christian church, a congregation coming together to worship as a community is of the highest priority. With the coming of the COVID-19 pandemic, gathering as community became a challenge for Brookings churches. It may prove to be an ongoing challenge.
Recently, several Brookings pastors spoke with The Brookings Register about how they and their congregations met the challenge, where they are today and how they may have to continue to deal with a virus that may always be here.
In the beginning
March 2020 could be used as a marker for awareness of the arrival of COVID-19. Brookings pastors and their congregants took notice. Attendance began to drop.
“There was so little knowledge about it. Nobody knew for sure. Everybody was being cautious,” the Rev. Terrence Anderson, pastor of St. Thomas More Catholic Parish, said.
Bishop Donald DeGrood, Sioux Falls Diocese, told his parishes “to have no more public Masses.” He also urged smaller gatherings for weddings and up to 10 people for baptisms.
In mid-March, the bishop essentially “cut off” in-person attendance and worship at the diocese’ churches. A few weeks later, people could return but they were relieved – via a “dispensation” – from the obligation to attend Sunday Mass. Anderson then began having an extra weekend Mass. “We roped off every other pew,” he explained. “That allowed for the congregation “to spread out,” which allowed for social distancing. Additionally, the Mass was “televised to the social hall, so people could spread out there, too, if they didn’t want to be in the church.”
“It was somewhere in May that we could allow people to start coming back,” Anderson recalled. “But it wasn’t obligatory.”
Come August, “the bishop brought the obligation back,” Anderson said. “We were the first diocese (in the United States) to do that. I think there are some dioceses out there that haven’t made it obligatory yet.”
“(The bishop) could forsee the negative impact of what was happening to people, not being able to come together to worship,” Anderson explained. “That’s one of our primary duties: to worship God together in community. This was taking that away. He could see the harm that was being caused.”
With the bringing back of the basic Catholic obligation to attend Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation, parishioners began to come back; however, attendance still has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, when a total of 1,300 parishioners attended four Masses over a weekend. Attendance has climbed back to more than 1,000.
Some people have told Anderson they won’t come back until the pandemic is over; however, he believes COVID will never be totally gone.
“And they’ve gotten used to not coming to church,” he added. “It’s so easy to not come when you’ve gotten in the habit of not coming.”
As to what lies ahead, “I think we’ll always have some people with masks on in the future. I think we’ll always have the virus; it’ll mutate. It’ll always be around. It’ll be something like the flu, like a regular cold.”
‘Sheep check’ keeps flock together
“We found ourselves having to scramble,” said the Rev. Josh Robertson, senior pastor at Bethel Baptist Church, speaking for himself and church elders, as COVID came to town and lot of shutting happened down in Brookings. “How do we still put some sort of content before our people that we can be engaging with together even though apart?” Robertson asked.
“We had never done any sort of visual recording of our services or live-streaming. For a number of weeks, we recorded a service on Saturday mornings, did very light editing and then had it put up on YouTube for people to watch.”
Some activities, such as Sunday school and prayer gatherings, used Zoom.
“At least in that format, we could see each others’ faces and hear each others’ voices,” the pastor said.
Later would come in-person ways to come back together: “social distancing, taping off some pews in the sanctuary for a long time, months of masks,” Robertson said. “I think that helped us make decisions that were wise, beneficial and needed.”
“It was a slow process, easing back in-person services and continuing the live-stream going for as an option,” he added, “until about a month after the vaccine became readily available.”
Since fall 2021 things have been “pretty normal,” back to the way they were pre-COVID.
And the vast majority of the church members, almost everyone, came back to the way things were pre-pandemic. “We’ve seen regular visitors again,” the pastor added.
“God has been very gracious to us,” Robertson said. “We tried really hard to keep in connection with the regular members of the congregation.
“The elders have what we call ‘sheep check’: which is where we make phone calls or use email or text to every regular attender at least once a month. I think that really helped people come back.’’
College students also came back, 40 to 50 on a Sunday.
The pastor also saw God’s graciousness in the congregation’s financial support of the church.
“One of our better giving years than what we’ve had in a number of years,” he said.
Robertson sees his church and its congregation having shown “a wisdom in doing what needed to be done.”
One element that he saw evidenced during the pandemic was “how much we need to be with people. We were created by God to be with people. We need our brothers and sisters in Christ encouraging us and helping us grow in our faith. We need to worship together, to hear God’s word together.”
“As a society, we’ve learned better how to think of COVID and how to process it.”
Looking to the future, he doesn’t “see any long-term going back to things that we had done previously, measures that we used to cope with COVID.”
During the pandemic, the pastor said the church still had the “opportunity to share the hope of Christ, the good news of the Gospel.”
“A lot of things in life we can’t control,” he added. “COVID has shown that to us. … Christ has come to enter into this messy life, to give us hope, to save us from sin. COVID and the circumstances of life can’t change that.”
No operating out of fear
“We’re still not back at the number we were before the pandemic,” said the Rev. Steve Norby, lead pastor at GracePoint Wesleyan Church.
In pre-pandemic days, GracePoint Sunday services could bring in a total of 1,800 people to its three services. But Norby is not a numbers man: “It’s just so hard to count; it is what it is.”
Despite the decline of in-person attendance, financial contributions have remained strong.
“We thank God for that,” Norby added. “It’s surprising; it’s amazing. We thank our folks here for their commitment. That shows the maturity of the people who worship here.”
The pastor sees the strength of his church in “its community aspect, getting together and having that mutual encouragement, that fellowship; that’s incredibly important.” To continue that community aspect during the pandemic demanded some adaptation.
“We made a lot of our online stuff to be interactive, to go back and forth,” Norby said. “We had – and still do have – hosts that would do our Facebook and YouTube. They can talk back and forth, if they want. But that’s a real challenge.”
Norby sees the “overall impact of the pandemic having a lingering effect. I think I began to realize right at the get-go that this is not going to be a three-month thing and we’re done, based on what was going on worldwide.
“I think it will linger. That’s unfortunate. It’s affecting our lives, any way we think of it. And here it is; we’re two years into it.”
Use of masks may be increasing little by little in the wake of new variants, such as omicron that keep coming and coming, and are no longer a “foreign thing to us,” Norby noted. Tie some of that aspect of mask use to culture.
“You think about it, the Asian cultures have had to deal with some of these things in the past,” he explained. “They’re more readily adaptable to this kind of thing; we’re not in our culture. This is new stuff.”
In time the reaction to such protective measures as mask wearing might become “more normalized.”
As to the overall approach taken to the pandemic by GracePoint, Norby said, “A big message is that we’re not going to operate out of fear. We can be smart, and we should be very aware of others and their wellbeing, too. A lot of this has to do with loving your brother and that sort of thing.
“Our faith is bigger than these things. Having said that, God has given us a mind to see what lies ahead and make provisions for it.”
A little bit of faith and reason?
“That’s what we try to do,” Norby said.
Contact John Kubal at jkubal@brookingsregister.com.
