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Coronavirus Contingency Plan Options – March 2020

March 12, 2020

Dear Pastors and Leaders of the Church of God in Colorado,

We are living through unprecedented events in our lifetimes.  Yet during any and all moments of time we have a sure and firm foundation (Matthew 7:24-27).  Thus, we do not live in fear but in faith in the risen and reigning Lord of all – Christ Jesus our Lord – who is Lord of all!

As our local, national, and global situation unfolds we are ones who know that an important part of our roles is to be a non-anxious presence in anxiety-ridden situations.  We can help reduce people’s levels of stress and worry by making wise, faith-based decisions and avoiding unwise, fear-based reactions.

An important question to lead us through these times is, “What does love compel us to do?”  Love compels us to care for one another and our neighbors well.  Love compels us to help keep our most at-risk people as safe as possible.  Love compels us to do all we can to care for and serve our neighbors.  For God is love (1 John 4:8 & 16) and love is the fulfillment of all things (Romans 13:8 & 10).

What follows are not rigid rules but general guidelines.  They were developed by my counter-part in Western Pennsylvania, Rev. Rebecca New-Edson, PhD.  She is one of the State Pastors of the Church of God I most admire and call upon for advice, perspective, and wisdom.  In response to the spread of the coronavirus she assembled a wise team of researchers and advisors so that together they could create a helpful outline of current contingency plan options in responding to COVID-19.  That information has been slightly adapted for our use here in Colorado.  I hope these options will be helpful to you as you devise your own responses as the situation changes and unfolds in the days ahead.

If I can be helpful please do not hesitate to contact me.

I am in your corner and am praying for you,

Steve Rennick

Colorado State Pastor

Church of God

(317) 373-1423

slrnco17@gmail.com

Level 1- If there are no known infections in your area

  • Keep events as scheduled and planned
  • Prevent Spread:
    • If you have any flu-like symptoms (fever, cough, sneezing, etc.) stay home
    • Refrain from handshaking and hugging at gatherings
    • Hand sanitizer at entry/exit doors and at all gatherings (youth, small groups, etc)
    • Disinfecting wipes in children’s areas (nursery and classrooms)
  • Serve:
    • Members gather contact info for senior friends and seniors in their neighborhood
    • Assemble team of volunteers to make deliveries to seniors
    • Assemble team of volunteers for pastoral care (calls and cards)
  • Prepare:
    • Guide our church and community families for basic preparation

Level 2- people in your area become infected but incidents are isolated

  • Gather for Sunday morning worship as scheduled
  • Prevent Spread:
    • Suspend serving the Lord’s Supper unless highly sanitary methods are adopted – such as servers using medical gloves and individually handing the elements to persons, thus not allowing persons to touch the tray or other elements
    • Cancel all Senior Adult events (as it has been established that seniors are most affected by virus)
    • Eliminate all handshaking and hugging at gatherings
    • Hand sanitizer at entry/exit doors and at all gatherings (youth, small groups, etc)
    • Disinfecting wipes in children’s areas (nursery and classrooms)
    • Minimize in person hospital/nursing home/home visitations
  • Serve:
    • Implement Seniors Care
      • members contact their senior adult friends/neighbors for wellness check
      • church coordinate getting groceries and Rx for seniors as needed (help seniors learn to use options such as Grocery Store Pickups and Amazon Market)
      • Deliver community food bank senior food boxes as needed
    • Implement team to call and send cards to quarantined/hospitalized persons
  • Prepare:
    • Prepare for online worship services
      • Worship team video record multiple songs
      • Develop plan for pastor to record weekly video messages
      • Develop plan to put video on Facebook and church website
    • Encourage basic family preparations listed in Level 1
    • Encourage people to set-up online giving

Level 3 – active community spread in your area

  • Prevent Spread:
    • Cancel all gatherings (worship services, small groups, meetings, etc)
    • Implement remote meetings (phone, email or online/video)
    • Suspend in person hospital/nursing home/home visitations
  • Serve:
    • Produce at least weekly online service via Facebook and website
    • Encourage online giving to keep ministries going
    • Continue implementing Seniors Care
    • Continue to use team to call and send cards to quarantined/hospitalized persons
  • Prepare:
    • Establish online worship services
    • Create telephone call prayer meetings (you can go online to register for a free conference call at www.freeconferencecall.com.)

ADDITIONALLY:

Serve
“Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the household of faith.” (Ephesians 6:10).  These unprecedented times also provide us unprecedented opportunities to “do good to all people” while we give particular attention to “those who belong to the household of faith.”  Let us fulfill the law as Jesus teaches us by loving God and our neighbors as we love ourselves.  May the Church of God in all of our communities be the people and the place that cares well for one another and for our neighbors.  This is the best time for us to demonstrate in attitude and action, in word and deed, the love of God for all people.

Prevent Spread (based on the early-March 2020 direction of the CDC and US Surgeon General):

Hand washing; Thoroughly washing hands for 20 seconds with soap and water is one of the best way to prevent coronavirus spread.  Wash hands after social interactions, after being in a public space (worship service, store, restaurant, etc), after going to the bathroom, before eating, and after blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing.

Carrier vs symptoms: You may be a contagious carrier of the coronavirus for 14 days prior to having any flu-like symptoms.  It is imperative that anyone having symptoms immediately self-quarantine and alert others with whom you’d had contact in the last 2 weeks that you have symptoms of the coronavirus.

Hand Sanitizer:  When hand washing is not possible, hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol can be used.  It may be difficult to find it in your local stores or online.  Many online recipes are available, but caution should be used to ensure that the final mixture is not contaminated and contains at least 60% alcohol.  Additionally, many of the ingredients needed to make your own sanitizer have become scarce and difficult to purchase.

Masks:  The CDC and Surgeon General have repeatedly stated that wearing masks will not prevent you from getting the coronavirus.  But the mask can help infected people from spreading it to other people in their home by preventing droplets from being spread from the infected person’s mouth/nose.

Quarantine:  Whether the quarantine is because you have symptoms or because you have been exposed to someone with symptoms, be prepared for at least a 14 day quarantine:

  • 90 day Rx- as most prescriptions are imported, it may become difficult to get certain medications.  By having a 90 day supply (available by getting a 90 day Rx from your Dr) you can minimize the possibility of running out of medications.
  • 14 days food for you and your pets
  • Cleaning products and toiletries (including toilet paper, paper towels, tissues, and cleaners or diluted bleach water).  A CDC approved list of cleaners  can be found here: https://www.americanchemistry.com/Novel-Coronavirus-Fighting-Products-List.pdf
  • Soap for hand-washing
  • Masks for use if person in home becomes infected
  • Laundry detergent
  • Thermometer to check for fever (one of the primary signs of coronavirus)
  • Over the counter flu medications to treat symptoms

Prepare:

Producing Online Service– Most of us have never taken a video editing/production class.  But there may be someone in your church or family who would be able to take the raw footage of songs recorded by your worship team (during level 2) and messages recorded by you and put together a meaningful time of worship that you can put on your church Facebook page or website.  The following link suggests some low-cost equipment that might make your recordings done with your smart phone a higher production quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLhZleVFp2k&ck_subscriber_id=231663873

Online giving– If not already set up, there are many options available for online giving.  If you use a Church Management System (Planning Center Online, Elexio, Servant Keeper, etc), you probably have online and/or text to give options available through that system that might be the best way to get started with electronic giving.  Here are a list of other possible options: https://www.capterra.com/church-management-software/

Additional Information:

https://www.consumerreports.org/coronavirus/covid-19-what-you-might-need-if-youre-quarantined-at-home/

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/organizations/guidance-community-faith-organizations.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fcoronavirus%2F2019-ncov%2Fcommunity%2Fguidance-community-faith-organizations.html

http://bmicmarketingcenter.dmplocal.com/main/index.php?action=viewsenthtml&id=29685&ids=3301264dd2f090b3fc04388315cc4b54bb2cb8e6&viewers_email=mmiller@americanchurchgroup.com%20{owner=mmiller@americanchurchgroup.com}&utm_campaign=

Again, all of these are not rigid rules but general guidelines to prompt your thinking and decision-making in your context.  I am praying for you and for your church families.  These unfolding circumstances provide us unparalleled opportunities to be the Good News of Jesus as we live with hope and act in love.

May God guide you as you lead in your context and minister to others in an overflow of Christ’s compassion, mercy, and love.

What Would People Think?

by Pastor Nabil Safi

“What would people think?” is a common response I often got in the past and still get today, when I have conversations about senior leadership with women from the Middle East. The fear of being judged has crippled women in general to be thriving in the community at large and in particular inside the local church. The fact that a woman lives in a lopsided society that promotes males over females makes it very difficult for her to navigate the conflicting values of equality and personal achievement versus honor‐shame and community’s best interest. Consequently, when faced with an invitation to lead, her immediate response is: What would people think?

As I explored the topic of women in ministry on a global scale, I learned that it is a global struggle manifested in different degrees of severity depending on the culture’s openness to embrace the Theology of equality. For this article, I want to shed the light on the Middle East and focus on the story of the Church of God (COG) in that region and in particular the country of Lebanon.

Why Lebanon? Simply, because I was born and grew up in this country and I want share my personal experience and observations. Another reason is that the work of the COG in Lebanon was started by women missionaries in the early 1900s. In addition to that, in the early 1920s, the first three women to be ordained in the Middle East were from the COG in Lebanon. One might think that this is a big win for the church in Lebanon at that time. This is true except that the church did not follow through to transform this win into a paradigm shift and establish the new normal for the generations to follow. Since then, we do not know of any ordained women in the country, and in this same country now I hear the words “What would people think if I became a pastor/senior leader?” Those words break my heart because the church is missing a lot of opportunities.

As I reflect on this story, I am not discouraged; instead I still see great potential in the COG Lebanon because it is a fertile soil to become a pioneer once again. I say that because this coming October, the first woman will be ordained in the Presbyterian Church in Lebanon, and will be serving in a city where Islam is the dominant influence. I had the chance to contact her, and I sensed a lot of hope in her vision for the city. The COG is a movement and we will continue to explore new ways to build the Kingdom. Almost a hundred years ago the COG in Lebanon was a trailblazer to prepare the path for another denomination to have their first female ordained pastor. I wonder what God has in store for the COG in Lebanon!

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Finally, I believe that God has positioned the global COG in a place to begin living the prophecy in Joel 2:29. We neither need to debate nor to prove whether ‘women in ministry’ is a biblically sound teaching or not; rather we ought to start boldly practicing and celebrating what God has ordained. My response to the women leaders I am having conversations with about their role in ministry is: Let us not focus on what people think, let us obey what God says.

How did we fall so far? Mention women in leadership in the Church of God, or more pointedly, women in senior leadership and you will hear the same response from pastors and congregants, “Nothing wrong with women in leadership. Nothing wrong with women as lead pastors. But that won’t work here.” 

Since the beginning of our movement, women were affirmed in their leadership gifts. For generations in the Church of God, the church affirmed and called women as senior pastors, evangelists, missionaries, and national leaders. Since the early days of the movement, women in key leadership positions have blessed the church with their gifts. I grew up in a Church of God that had Slovak roots in Johnstown, PA. 

In the early days of the church, women sat on one side and men on the other. Because of its eastern European heritage, men were the unquestioned authority in the home. You would think that because of the influence of eastern European culture, the church would be very resistant to women in leadership but the opposite was true. Through the years, the church invited numerous female evangelists to hold revivals. As a child, I remember a female African-American chalk artist who did an incredible week-long revival at our church. Amazingly it wasn’t even on their radar to resist female leadership in the church. At our Slovak camp meeting in Hubbard, Ohio, Sister Lillie McCutcheon was a rock star. She was the featured evangelist at Hubbard many times. What could it have been that caused people steeped in the patriarchal eastern European culture to open their arms to female leadership? I will try to answer that question through the lens of my grandfather, Karl Matas, who was a pastor and leader in the Slovak Church of God. The question of female leadership in the church was never an issue for my grandfather for two reasons. 

First, my grandfather LOVED the Church of God. It was the church that reached out to him as a young immigrant coming to America alone after World War I. He was saved through the efforts of the Church of God. He believed in the Church of God. He owed his salvation to Jesus and to the gospel preached by the Church of God. So if the doctrine of the Church of God affirmed women in leadership, that was good enough for him. Secondly and more poignantly—for Karl Matas—the Church of God welcomed him when others did not. My grandfather faced his share of prejudice when he came to America to work in the steel mills of Johnstown. He was derided, called names and made fun of, but he knew he mattered to the Church of God. The Church of God was the group that cared enough to plant Slovak-speaking churches to reach him and others like him. Years later, the Church of God affirmed his calling to ministry. The Church of God didn’t marginalize him because he was different, they welcomed him. So maybe that’s the more telling reason he so easily dismissed any temptation to resist female leadership because the church that welcomed him with the message “you can be anything that God called you to be” also gave that same gift to women. 

For Karl Matas, the Church of God broke down barriers; it welcomed and affirmed everyone that was washed in the blood. Because of that, his cultural heritage was never an issue when it came to women in ministry. Before he came to America, he never met a black person. Yet one of his favorite places to worship was with his brothers and sisters at the National Association camp meeting at West Middlesex, PA. For my grandfather, the Church of God was a movement that broke down walls, removed barriers and welcomed everyone. It was a place where a person—regardless of ethnicity, race or gender—could become what God called them to be.

But something happened in my lifetime. For the last 30 to 45 years, the doors that once welcomed women into leadership roles in the church have been closing. Women increasingly are relegated to traditional roles in children’s ministry and administration. The word “traditional” is ironic because we have moved far away from our tradition of affirming women in leadership. 

“Not in my neighborhood” is a subtle but powerful phrase that is often used to effect bigotry and prejudice. “There might not be anything wrong with [fill in the blank], I just don’t want them in my neighborhood.” It is our way to feel good. We don’t have to acknowledge our prejudice, having those people in our neighborhood won’t work here. When it comes to women in ministry, far too many churches in our movement have a “not in my neighborhood” mentality. That way, we don’t have to deny or contradict an essential doctrine of our movement; we take a false utilitarian stance and state “nothing wrong with women in ministry or women as lead pastors, but it won’t work in this church.” Sadly, when it comes to women in leadership—especially in a lead pastor role—a vast majority of our churches take a “not in my neighborhood” stance.

I can only imagine the emotional trauma this causes gifted women in our movement. If the movement affirms women in leadership, yet no church will even talk to them about open leadership positions, they are tempted to think “something must be wrong with me.”

How did we get here and what do we do about it?

Reformed theology is pervasive in popular Christian blogs and with young well-known celebrity pastors. Many of the Christian bloggers that I follow are reformed and they make it a point to drive home their complementarian beliefs. They address the role of men and women on a regular consistent basis. Yet there is relative silence among pastors and leaders who hold a different view—that God doesn’t give spiritual gifts based on gender. Our doctrine comes right out of Scripture, yet we are silent. We need to speak up. We need to preach and teach that God doesn’t limit the gift of leadership only to those who have an XY chromosome. It has been said that the church will never rise higher than the pulpit. The reason why so many in our congregations hold a negative view of women in leadership is because the only voices they hear are from those in the reformed tradition. It is imperative that we speak loudly, firmly and clearly. We as pastors and leaders need to teach our people because if we don’t someone else will.

Karl Matas fell in love with the Church of God because it welcomed him, it affirmed him as a leader. He gave his life to a movement that broke down manmade barriers and divisive walls. In our increasingly polarized nation, may we once again be the people who welcome, who affirm, who break down manmade walls of prejudice and discrimination. The world desperately needs what we once had to offer. May we find the strength and courage to offer it again.