Nothing can make up for the loss — back to worship in a pandemic

"If I had... imagined the actual circumstances of September 13th, our church’s re-opening for in-person worship, I might have had a harder time getting through those initial weeks. Nowhere on my horizon did I imagine online registrations, carefully controlled seating arrangements, radically diminished and scattered numbers, not to mention such rigidly choreographed patterns of movement that a measuring tape would be our best friend for figuring out how to invite people to come up for Communion. I had no idea in those early days that the pandemic would still be raging, that so many of our people — for so many good reasons — would choose to remain at home. I couldn’t have conceived of all of the barriers — masks, physical distance, traffic flow, clean-up crews — that would mean that being able to even smile at my parishioners, let alone reach out and embrace them or even talk to them, would be made almost impossible."

Read Martha Tatarnic's article on ministrymatters, here