On Churches not Going back to Business as Usual after the Covid-19 Pandemic

As the pandemic seems to be easing in the US (or at least responses to it), and everyone wants to get back to normal ASAP, I think churches are particularly vulnerable to the danger of returning to business as usual. I have long loved this quote from Annie Dillard and find it powerfully relevant right now, not just with regards to the pandemic but also with how the malignant polarization of US society has infected the churches.

Annie Dillard: “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. ” Teaching a Stone to Talk

My thinking about the Church in the US, which is what brought to mind the Annie Dillard quote, is that the pandemic has given us a chance to pause and look at how we have made church life too comfortable, and now we have an opportunity to open ourselves to God's power in our shared life as communities of faith. As I reflect on my own journey with Jesus and his Church, I feel I have been drawn out to where I can never return.

The pandemic is only one of several factors and forces at work in our time that I believe call for a deep spiritual awakening. This didn't start in 2020, but last year saw what seems to be an unprecedented convergence of political, racial, violence, environmental, and other issues. It reminds me of the time in which Eberhard Arnold and others recognized at the early emergence of the Nazi movement in Germany that business as usual Christianity was not adequate for the challenge. Out of that was born the Bruderhof in Anabaptist tradition. In that same time frame in both Lutheran and Reformed settings the same realization that business as usual Christianity wasn't up to the challenge, and from their efforts, the Confessing Church and its monumental Theological Declaration of Barman emerged. I am not suggesting too many direct parallels between the Nazi era and our time, but I am convinced that business as usual Christianity is not adequate for our challenges, and the interruption of the pandemic gives us an opportunity to tap into the dramatically transforming power of God and escape business as usual Christianity. For quite a long time I have been suggesting the Church in the US would benefit from a heart searching encounter with the Barman Declaration.