You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘pandemic’ tag.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have reacted in similar fashion. “The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer” (Life Together)
By Jonathan Leeman (9Marks)
03.05.2021
Some will think this is insensitive, some will think it’s overdue, but I want to make sure it’s said: not physically gathering with the church hurts you spiritually. So, pandemic-weary Christian, work to gather again with your church, even if your church continues to offer a virtual option. Likewise, pandemic-weary pastor, gently encourage your pandemic-weary congregation to gather as soon as they can.
A WORD FOR MEMBERS
To Christians, let me admit, I don’t know your situation. I don’t know the laws you’re under or what health risks remain for you personally. Therefore, with a general-audience article like this one, I want to leave space for differing circumstances and consciences. Providential hindrances are real. If the flu keeps you home from work, you stay home and shouldn’t feel guilty. At the same time, you know that staying home from work, over time, hurts your job. So you get back to work as soon as you can.
Likewise, as you think through your own church-attendance situation, hopefully in conversation with your pastors, maybe you remain providentially hindered from attending. The Lord shows mercy and grace. He makes provision for the stranded, the soldier, the shut-in, and the high-risk senior saint.
But as you weigh out all the variables, I want to leave a pebble in your shoe. If you can’t attend, I want you to be a little frustrated that you can’t attend, lest you get comfortable. If you’re not frustrated, something’s wrong. The Lord has commanded us not to forsake the assembly (Heb. 10:25). And absence from the gathering does affect our spiritual state, even if we have a legitimate reason for not attending, like being sick or quarantined. Jesus designed Christianity and the progress of our discipleship to center around gatherings. The math is therefore simple: Gathering with the church is spiritually good for you. Not physically gathering with the church spiritually hurts you.
A WORD FOR PASTORS
To pastors, let me say, I’m raising the topic now—in the winter of 2021—because I’m hearing from some of you that a few of your members have grown complacent. You’re telling me that members aren’t attending when they probably could. They’re a little too comfortable with the virtual option.
Indeed, this is why some churches never offered the live-stream service in the first place. They didn’t want to risk encouraging an appetite for a much-less-healthy substitute.
Truckers protesting against Covid health rules continued Wednesday to occupy the capital Ottawa, despite the government’s declaration of the Emergencies Act Ed JONES AFP
On February 15, Bloomberg ran a story about the “freedom convoy” that seemed to illustrate Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.
Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran minister who was part of the German resistance to the Nazi Party and to Adolf Hitler’s rise. His book, The Cost of Discipleship, is a meditation on “The Sermon on the Mount” in which Bonhoeffer splits the Christian concept of grace in two.
On the one hand is “cheap grace,” which is “without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”
On the other hand, Bonhoeffer said, is “costly grace.” It “confronts us as a gracious call to follow Jesus, it comes as a word of forgiveness to the broken spirit and the contrite heart. It is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him.”
Indeed, resisting fascism by submitting “to the yoke of Christ” and following him cost him dearly. At age 39, the Nazis hanged him.
His theory of stupidity is featured in a letter written to friends a few years earlier. The letter, which is now known as “After Ten Years,” argues that evil like the Nazis isn’t the worst thing. Stupidity is.
“One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force,” he wrote. “Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless.”
Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.
Bloomberg reporters Jen Skerritt and Robert Tuttle were covering protests of the Canadian government’s requirement that truck drivers delivering freight across the US-Canadian border must be vaccinated.
Protests in Alberta and Manitoba, dubbed the “freedom convoy,” took the form of blockades of bridges and trucking routes, at odds with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s declaration of emergency powers.
Skerritt and Tuttle interviewed one trucker. His name is Jake Klassen. His two campers and semi were in the blockade. He said Trudeau’s emergency powers were an attempt to “take everything from us.”
Then there is this part:
Klassen said he hasn’t been able to visit his nine-year-old daughter in months. She is receiving palliative care at St. Amant, a care residence in Winnipeg, but due to restrictions that require visitors to be fully vaccinated, Klassen and his wife can’t see her.
“Yes, that’s absolutely stunning and sad,” said Victoria Barnett
Barnett was director of programs on ethics, religion and the Holocaust at the National Holocaust Museum. She’s the author of many books on interfaith history. She edited a 2017 translation of “After Ten Years.” I asked if Jake Klassen exemplifies Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity.
Maybe, but as part of a bigger phenomenon. “After Ten Years” was his attempt to understand the first 10 years of National Socialism and what had happened to his compatriots, his church, his country.
He’s trying to figure out why most Germans caved to Nazi ideology and why they became integral to what happened. The historian Klemens von Klemperer (himself a refugee) called the Third Reich a “consensual dictatorship” — which is a pretty good description.
Go into that a bit more please. How was it consensual?
His main point is that stupidity is a moral failure, not an intellectual one. He’s reflecting on the process by which people willfully become part of a larger movement or political group, etc. As they become increasingly involved, two things tend to happen:
- They become isolated (or they isolate themselves) from those who disagree with them or challenge them (and I would say also from news sources that would challenge their worldview) and
- They get a lot of reinforcement. One of the things that happened in 1933 after Hitler came to power was that Nazi Party organizations were founded for every demographic group – teachers, housewives, kids, etc. Everyone suddenly had a badge, a uniform, meetings to go to, new friends to meet etc. — and that was a big factor in creating a new sense of a larger German community serving a “grander” purpose (in the Nazi mindset).
A big part of that, of course, was identifying enemies and those who needed to be excluded — Jewish citizens, political opponents, critical journalists, etc. But that early formation of consensus made life much harder, even by the end of 1933, for people who didn’t agree with it.
What you’re describing is collectivism, no?
The self-understanding of the German Volk was a collective concept personified by the “Fuhrer.” That’s a big part of authoritarian or fascist regimes. Authoritarian leaders can do things without parliamentary approval, because they represent the “true” will of “the people.”
But that also created a dynamic in Nazi Germany in which there was this mass adoration – almost a mass hysteria – for the person of Adolf Hitler. There are paintings portraying him as a messianic figure.
Bonhoeffer said there is no defense against stupidity. But if it’s a moral failing, wouldn’t a defense be private and public morality?
Ideally, yes.
Bonhoeffer’s essay is an exploration of why that didn’t happen. (Elsewhere, he explores the lack of civil courage) But Nazi Germany is a disturbing case study in the failure of leaders, institutions (such as the church), etc., to stand up in an effective way to National Socialism.
The best and bravest people were either arrested early on or got out. But he’s pondering (and I think this is autobiographical) the failure of good decent people critical of the regime to be more effective.
That didn’t happen. (Along the way, one must acknowledge that many of them became complicit). But by staying in and working from inside the regime, they also failed to offer a clearer example of resistance.
That’s why by 1942 Bonhoeffer believes (as he writes here) that “only an act of liberation, not instruction, can overcome stupidity.”
The trucker above says he’s seeking liberation, too. Liberation from responsibility. How would Bonhoeffer persuade a man that he has agency and can visit his dying daughter by making the right choice?
One thing DB ignores is the psychology of all this. (He describes stupidity as a sociological problem). In Nazi Germany, we’re also looking at the pressures and dynamics within a fascist police state.
In other circumstances, however (eg, the truckers’ protests), this gets back to the peer pressures within a group that’s getting its information only from certain sources, in which there is a lot of pressure to conform to the will of the group (and a reward for doing so).
I’ve studied this in terms of the psychology of group behavior in Nazi Germany, but the literature on personality cults, mob behavior, etc., shows that the longer and more deeply a person gets involved in something like this, the less individual agency they perceive they have.
For Bonhoeffer personally — he wrote as a theologian and person of deep faith — that faith has the capacity to make someone see more clearly. But “After Ten Years” is a rather bleak assessment.
I’m reminded of something Michael Josephson said in 1989:
Success can be defined so many different ways but right now it is defined in a kind of how high is your position, how many people work for you, how high is your salary. When you get into that kind of yuppie version of success, you’re going to sacrifice things along the way. There’s not enough commitment to the ground rules of civil virtue.
A society focused on “success” (greed, selfishness) is a society in which a man won’t do the right thing to see his dying daughter and as a consequence, will make sacrifices he can’t reverse along the way.
He’s making an important point about what we value publicly and how that affects the individual’s ethics and sense of responsibility.
I’ve been very disturbed by some of the very callous reactions during the pandemic – eg, the minimization of the deaths in nursing homes, the rush to get back to normal when thousands of people are still getting sick and dying (and when large sectors of the population — children under the age of 6 — can’t yet be vaccinated).
But as I saw somewhere, the scale of the callousness has been on display for some time now in how we’ve dealt with school shootings, the high level of violence in our society and the much higher levels of violence experienced by people of color and the poor.
Nuremberg: We Need ‘Plain, Honest, Straightforward Men’
Will Alexander|Posted: Jan 24, 2022 8:42 AM 
Source: AP Photo/Matt Rourke
I used to wonder how such a highly civilized nation like Germany could so monstrously scar the record of modern man with the butchery of the Holocaust, with much of it made possible by doctors who, years earlier, volunteered in droves to join the Nazi Party.
Gen. Dwight Eisenhower wrote after visiting the Ohrdruf Concentration Camp in April 1945: “I never dreamed that such cruelty, bestiality, and savagery could really exist in this world.” It was so overpowering as to “leave me a bit sick,” he wrote.
Gen. George Patton, certain that he’d become sick, refused to enter a room at Ohrdruf where the emaciated bodies of naked men were piled up – killed by starvation.
How could so many brilliant people became complicit either by their support or their silence to Hitler’s atrocities, I remember thinking. Professional people, like doctors and nurses, went from being healers to collaborators in Hitler’s “‘biocracy’ which ultimately murdered millions of innocent persons,” as Dr. Ashley K. Fernandes put it in his essay, Why Did So Many Doctors Become Nazis? They were willing participants in the “medicalization of death.”
Through it all, due to both hatred and fear, Germans remained silent.
“We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who railed against Hitler’s euthanasia (T4) program and Jewish genocide. “… [W]e have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretense; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; … What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men.”
Bonhoeffer, a man who fully “understood what he chose when he chose to resist” (Cost of Discipleship, 1937), was imprisoned, tortured, and hanged by Nazi SS Black Guards in 1945. But fortunate for us, they couldn’t kill his message.
After the befuddling speed at which America has deteriorated over the past year, I don’t wonder about this stuff anymore. No. Biden is not Hitler and America is not engaged, or ever will be, in some sick systematic genocide. The circumstance of that history has its own fingerprint.
But seeing how we’ve mimicked China’s Hitlerian way of dealing with the pandemic, it’s easier to understand how the most advanced nation in history can deteriorate into something unrecognizable. The most important lesson for us is not necessarily the Holocaust itself, but the warped social and political concoctions that caused otherwise decent human beings to create the Holocaust.
With all the disturbing ways that COVID has been used to wreck the country, the most terrifying, for me, has been how the medical profession, willingly or coerced, has collaborated in ignoring natural immunity and mandating an experimental vaccine to every man, woman, and child in America, without informed consent.
Some doctors are refusing to treat unvaccinated patients; nearly all refuse to prescribe safe drugs in early treatment; if drugs are prescribed, pharmacists refuse to dispense them; and still others who tell their patients with rare co-morbidities that the vaccination could be fatal, they’re too afraid to put it in writing as an exception to getting the vaccine.
It’s extremely bizarre.
It’s the first time in medical history, said Dr. Peter McCollough, that all the focus is on vaccinating healthy people, instead of treating the sick ones.
“The all-or-nothing, one-size-fits-all vaccine policies, … where people are coerced in a very heavy-handed way to take the vaccine don’t take into account some basic facts that we have known about COVID for a long time,” said Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, who was fired from his job as professor of psychiatry and director of the Medical Ethics Program at the University of California-Irvine School of Medicine.
Besides the CDC not acknowledging natural immunity, he said, healthy children with a near-zero mortality rate from COVID shouldn’t be treated in the same way as an 80-year-old with co-morbidities. But that’s exactly what’s happening and at the risk of doing more harm than good.
That kind of harm violates their right to informed consent and their right to informed refusal, a centerpiece of medical ethics going back to the Nuremberg Code. The Nuremberg Code was created after the infamous Nuremberg Trials to set the boundaries for how doctors practice human experimentation in medicine.
According to Dr. Robert Malone, who helped establish mRNA technology, we’ve long breached those boundaries.
“Our government is out of control on this [COVID response] and they are lawless,” he told Joe Rogan in that now-famous “Mass Formation Psychosis” podcast. “They completely disregard bioethics. They completely disregard the federal common rule. These mandates of an experimental vaccine are explicitly illegal. They are explicitly inconsistent with the Nuremberg Code. … They are flat-out illegal, and they don’t care.”
Are there animals in heaven?
By BILL TINSLEY
My aunt once asked me if there will be animals in heaven. Perhaps it’s a good question to ask during this season when pets have played such an important role in helping us survive COVID-19.
When many of us have had to distance from family, friends, co-workers and classmates, our pets have stepped up. Our pets become part of the family. If they’re that important on Earth, will there be animals in heaven?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the 20th century theologian and martyr, once counseled a 10-year-old boy whose German Shepherd died. The boy was distraught. He asked Bonhoeffer if his dog would be in heaven.
Bonhoeffer said, “I quickly made up my mind and said to him: ‘Look, God created human beings and also animals, and I’m sure he also loves animals. And I believe that with God it is such that all who loved each other on Earth — genuinely loved each other — will remain together with God …”
God’s love for all creatures in his creation is abundantly clear. After he had divided the light from darkness, He filled the Earth with living things: fish, birds, and beasts (in that order). “God saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:24-25) before man ever walked the Earth.
After sin entered the world, mankind sank deeper into selfishness, deceit, violence, murder and rebellion. When God’s judgment could be postponed no longer, he sent a catastrophic flood. But God showed his love for man and beast by providing a means of escape through Noah’s ark.
God instructed Noah, “You are to bring into the ark two of all living creatures, male and female, to keep them alive with you. Two of every kind of bird, of every kind of animal and of every kind of creature that moves along the ground will come to you to be kept alive. You are to take every kind of food that is to be eaten and store it away as food for you and for them.” (Genesis 6:19-21).
Looking forward to the day when the Messiah’s Kingdom would replace our world, Isaiah wrote: “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. … They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:6-9).
If God so loved us that he blessed us with the companionship and service of animals on Earth, would he withhold his love from us in heaven by depriving us of these creatures who shared our mortal joys and sorrows?
Fhttps://www.galvnews.com/faith/free/article_ad80d102-f948-503f-88f8-31f1a8fe7da6.htmlor the rest of the post…
As America and other parts of the world have begun to open again for in-person services, many churches and organizations keep falling into a trap we first identified a year ago.
The mistake? It’s far too easy to step back into the past the moment you step back into your church building.
The biggest mistake most leaders made comes from the emotional rush to get back into a facility, see everyone again, and assemble their teams and get back to ‘normal’. Trust me, I miss it. With COVID surging again in Canada, we haven’t had in-building services for over a year.
That said, it’s just too easy to embrace a model of ministry designed to reach a world that no longer exists.
As many church leaders who have reopened for in-person gatherings have discovered, getting back to 2019 attendance has proved challenging.
That’s because crisis is an accelerator and many of the trends that were already at play before the pandemic were sped up. Chief among them: the rise of post-Christian culture and decentralization. (Here are 8 trends to keep watching in 2021.)
As hard as the last year has been, you’ve learned so much in this disruption that to simply re-embrace what was will destroy what can be.
So what’s the danger as you gear up for full, post-pandemic services in your facility?
Simple.
Thinking that when you walk back into your building things will be just fine. In other words, you don’t really need to change anymore.
Which is the fastest path to irrelevance.
Things have changed. Radically.
The world has changed. Radically.
Getting back to where you were doesn’t actually move you forward.
By way of reminder, here are 5 things that you’ll miss if you step back into the past when you step back into your building.
1. Your Innovation Curve Will Come To An Abrupt Stop
The coronavirus disruption forced you to change.
I realize that kind of change and the damage the virus has caused has been deeply painful. It has been for every leader in 100 different ways.
But the crisis has shown us that while some churches struggled deeply, others started thriving. In fact, the disruption has shown us three basic leadership approaches: frozen leaders, hesitant leaders, and agile leaders. (See which one best describes you here).
Crisis is also the cradle for innovation.
Most leaders pivoted. Most set up online services, got a Zoom account, figured out how to live stream on YouTube, started shooting more personal videos and got way more active online.
And many leaders saw their online engagement soar, sputter and then settle in.
You figured it out.
But walking back into your building can kill your innovation curve if you let it.
It will feel great to see some people again, and to get back on the familiar platform, and see the team, and connect.
And before you know it, you’ll stop innovating. Especially in your online ministry and in distributed gatherings.
Look…I get it. Change is hard. I’m tired too. But don’t waste this moment. Don’t waste the progress you’ve started.
Don’t let a sudden lack of creativity around methods limit your mission.
Crisis is a cradle for innovation. And the future belongs to the innovators.
2. You’ll Stop Pivoting
Closely related to innovation is pivoting.
Almost everyone pivoted since the crisis, and those who didn’t have already disappeared or are on their way out.
But pivoting is probably here to stay for a while (see point 4). If you study the history of change and progress, you quickly realize the future almost always belongs to agile leaders who adapt and change.
Stop for a moment and write down everything good that’s come out of the pivoting you’ve done since the disruption started.
Now think through how many of that traction never would have happened had you not pivoted.
The moment you walk back into the past and into comfort, you lose all that.
So if that’s all the growing you want to do for a while, stop pivoting.
If you want to keep pivoting, here’s how to do it quickly and well to move your mission forward.
3. You’ll See Online As An Add-On, Not The Future
As you settle into old patterns, all your energy will go back into in-person ministry.
And don’t get me wrong, a lot of energy, passion, prayer, and effort belong in in-person ministry. The gathered church is here to stay.
Eventually, you’ll look up and realize you haven’t posted much to Instagram or Facebook recently, and that your team is so busy they haven’t really followed up on comments online or checked out who’s new.
Online church will become an add-on again, something you tag onto the most tech-savvy person’s job description hoping he or she will get to if they have the time (which they seldom do).
And you’ll completely miss the future.
And in the same way remote work will become the new normal for many people in the wider economy, online church might become a default option for many people.
By Russell Moore -March 4, 2021
After half a million of our fellow Americans have died to the COVID-19 pandemic, the country seems almost right on the verge of hope. Vaccines were developed with record-setting speed, and have proven both safe and effective. After the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been on the field now for a while, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just authorized a third—by pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson. This vaccine has made news—both in terms of the images of trucks headed for parcel distribution hubs for delivery and, less noticed, a denunciation from the Catholic Archdiocese of New Orleans, later joined by the Catholic bishops nationwide, arguing that Catholics, when possible, should take one of the first two vaccines but not the Johnson & Johnson version because, they argue, it is linked to cloned stem cells derived from abortions that took place decades ago.
The bishops’ recommendation was not quite as fiery as many headlines reported. They did not argue that taking the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was morally sinful or that no one should take it, just that Catholics should choose the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines over Johnson & Johnson, when such a choice is possible. The Vatican has already announced that COVID-19 vaccines are not only morally acceptable but to be commended in the fight against this dread disease.
Some have wondered, seeing these headlines, whether taking a COVID-19 vaccine would cause them to be involved, somehow, in abortion or embryonic stem-cell research or in any way the taking of a human life.
Asking the Right Questions
The intuitions behind this question are good and sound. The question assumes a foundational biblical truth that is often pushed aside in these times: namely, that a Christian may not do evil that good may come out of it (Rom. 12:21). In a day when “lesser of two evils” ethics and “whataboutism” have upended Christian witness, with Christians affirming much that they previously denied in order to justify remaining loyal to their temporal tribes, we should be thankful, at least, when the right questions are asked.
The issue is the use of cell lines, which were originally derived from abortions, in either the development stage (Moderna and Pfizer) or production stage (Johnson & Johnson) of the vaccines. It is important to note that although the cell lines potentially originated from abortions, no cells remain from the original fetal tissue in these cloned cells, and the cell lines no longer contain fetal tissue or body parts.
We should always work to prevent authorization or funding of embryonic research derived from abortions—both because of reverence for the body and because such research incentivizes further attempts to see vulnerable human life as a means to an end. That’s why I’ve worked with coalitions of Roman Catholics and others to do away with such research and, in more recent days, in petitioning the FDA to ensure ethical means of vaccine production. This kind of advocacy has led to several positive developments, such as an unethically-produced polio vaccine being replaced by those without such concerns and the National Institutes of Health approving a new study that will develop ethical cell lines for future use to avoid these ethical conflicts.
The Ethics of the Johnson & Johnson Vaccine
Still, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is already developed. Does taking it involve moral cooperation with abortion?
Most people asking me this question aren’t asking me if they should violate their conscientious objection to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. To them, I would turn to Romans 14:23 and say, with the bishops, seek out one of the other vaccines. But most people asking me this question don’t have conscience objections to taking the Johnson & Johnson, but wonder if they should have such objections. Short answer: no.
Opposing unethical means of research does not mean that people must shun medical treatments that are discovered through these means.
A Few Analogies
Consider a few analogies. Catholic philosopher Christopher Tollefsen, making the case for the ethical rightness of taking the vaccine, argues, rightly, that discerning such questions requires asking whether one—in doing any act—is participating in or cooperating with evil. If we are cooperating in an evil, we cannot do the act—no matter the “greater good.” He argues, though, that, even if a vaccine were to come about through some illicit means, one taking the vaccine is not thereby endorsing or empowering those illicit means.
Five Ways the Post-Place Church Will Look Different after COVID
The concept of “place” has changed dramatically during COVID.
Perhaps it is more accurate to say the COVID accelerated the trends that were already underway. “Place” is different.
Think about it. For centuries, the home has been a place for family and retreat. Now it has become our theater with streaming video services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, YouTube TV, Disney +, and many more. Home has become our stadium and athletic arena. We have become accustomed to viewing sporting events rather than attending them. And for some, home has become our fitness center, since we elected to buy a Peleton bike rather than keep our gym membership. And, of course, the home has become an office for millions.
Think about offices. They were the daytime domain of employees. Many of those employees are now at home, in coffee shops, and in workshare places.
Think about theaters. COVID closed many. Some are barely hanging on. The viewing place of tens of millions has moved home.
We are in a post-place world. “Place” has been redefined and reimagined.
So, what are the implications for churches? Is the world of in-person services going away? Are small groups becoming small Zoom groups?
Though we can’t know with certainty, we can see some profound implications for the place called church. Here are five of them:
- The church will become a destination place for many for gathering. Call it a contrarian view, but I am seeing more signs of this reality. While digital worship will still be very important, there is a pent-up desire by many for some type of regular healthy gathering. Churches can satisfy this desire, but there is a presumption that the church is healthy. Unhealthy churches will decline faster. Healthy churches will grow faster. Most churches, at least initially, will have fewer people gathering. Those on the periphery, such as the cultural Christians, will not return. The median decline of churches once in the post-pandemic phase will be around 20 percent.
- Because the home will be prominent in the post-place world, neighborhood churches will become more important. Home is the entertainment center, the physical workout place, the office, and the athletic arena or stadium. Home will be at the center of places. Those who live in the homes will look to local venues of close proximity. The neighborhood church has the opportunity to be a big factor in the post-place world.
- Churches have the opportunity to be a post-place option for those in their community. Most churches have an abundance of space. Really, most churches have too much space. The churches that are creative in the post-place world will find Great Commission ways to reach their communities by making their facilities available to them.
- Fewer small groups will meet in church facilities in the post-place world. This trend has been exacerbated by COVID. For a long season, many churches built large educational facilities for their on-campus groups. It was not a bad thing. We saw much better assimilation metrics with on-campus groups versus off-campus groups. But the existing trend to move groups to homes, coffee shops, and other non-church places has accelerated during COVID.
How will Christians do “Life Together” after the pandemic?
OPINION BILL LEONARD, SENIOR COLUMNIST
A research paper recently submitted in my Introduction to Christian History course at the School of Divinity, Wake Forest University, begins with these words:
The words took my breath away, not only because of their insightful assessment of Christianity past and present, but also because they were written by an individual pursuing a call to Christian ministry, eyes wide open about the American ecclesiastical future. No doubt a portent of Bonhoeffer moments yet to come.
If you’re counting, this is the sixth and final installment in a series focused on certain “Bonhoeffer moments,” a demand for gospel courage and action arising amid our collective national angst, generated by a life-destroying pandemic, long-festering, near irreconcilable, religio-cultural, political, and racial fissures exacerbated by a presidential election, the ticking timebomb of climate chaos, and a discordant social media ethos so pervasive and siloed as to make truth increasingly elusive.
I’ve long believed that Christians, especially now in the land of the free and the home of ever-increasing death threats, face moments when the gospel of Jesus asks more than we could have anticipated when God’s good grace initially overtook us, enacted in infant baptism and confirmation, or when we made a “public profession of faith,” wading into cold running rivers or heated fiberglass baptistries to hear the name of God spoken over us.
No, the USA is not National Socialist Germany in 1943 when Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned and ultimately executed for his anti-Nazi dissent. But neither was Germany in 1935 when Bonhoeffer became director of the underground training-school-cum-seminary in Finkenwalde, Germany, initiating his original Bonhoeffer moments. Some 85 years later, the words of that Wake Forest seminarian sent me running to Letters and Papers from Prison, and this 1943 missive from Bonhoeffer to his friend Eberhard Bethge:
What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience — and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as “religious” do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by “religious.”
Phrases like “religionless time,” or “religionless Christianity” describe some of Bonhoeffer’s most intriguing and controversial theology, ideas later coopted by certain Death of God theologians, or various conservative Christians who denounced it as a sellout to secularism. More probably, it was Bonhoeffer’s assertion that the devastation of World War II and the capitulation of the Nazi-enabling German Evangelical Church had undermined the gospel so blatantly by its faulty witness that a “religionless Christianity” was all that remained.
For Bonhoeffer, such power-oriented connivance between church and state, historically initiated by the Roman emperor Constantine in 313, set in motion an unholy alliance that transformed Christianity from “the belief of the oppressed to a tool to oppress,” as the Wake Forest student described it. It sold its soul for a mess of state-sanctified pottage, forgetting or ignoring “who Christ really is.”
As 2020 turns to 2021, and before Christians in America start blaming secularism for the burgeoning religious disengagement of the so-called “nones,” we’d best ask how our religio-political alliances have stoked a “religionless Christianity” of persons claiming to be “spiritual but not religious,” many deserting our churches like the plague.
In a recent Washington Post essay, columnist Michael Gerson echoes this concern, writing: “When prominent Christians affirm absurd political lies with religious fervor, nonbelievers have every reason to think: ‘Maybe Christians are prone to swallowing absurd religious lies as well. Maybe they are simply credulous about everything.’”
On our way to and through 2021 and beyond, dare we confront Bonhoeffer’s question for ourselves. Do we know “what Christianity really is?” It’s an interrogative worth confronting even — no, especially — if we think we already know the answer.
We might ask that question within the broader American culture. Are we defining and living out Christianity in ways that lead individuals to distance themselves from Christian churches?
We might ask it in our churches. Have we supposed that those who attend our various congregations know “what Christianity really is?” How can we be so sure, particularly in COVID America when Christian community is essentially virtual?
Whatever else, we must ask it of ourselves. In, or for, our own lives, “what is Christianity really?” Where will our renewed response to that question take us in the days and years ahead? Is our initial entry into Christian faith a simple transaction that settles everything in this world and the next, no muss, no fuss, or is that only a beginning?
Reflecting on the long-term impact of the Bubonic Plague (1346-1353) sweeping across Europe and ravaging his native Florence, the poet Petrarch wrote: “O happy posterity, who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable.”
In a 2005 History Today essay, “The Black Death: the Greatest Catastrophe Ever,” Olé J. Benedictow estimated that “the Black Death killed 50 million people in the 14th century, or 60 percent of Europe’s entire population.”
Bill Leonard
He cites one chronicler who observed: “All the citizens did little else except to carry dead bodies to be buried … . At every church they dug deep pits down to the water-table; and thus those who were poor who died during the night were bundled up and thrown into the pit.”
Some 700 years later, a November 2020 story in The Guardian offers a hauntingly parallel report from El Paso, the Texas epicenter of the coronavirus, and confirms more than 800 deaths since March, with 400 more currently being investigated. Recently, city leaders increased the use of mobile morgues from six to 10, acknowledging that hospitals and their medical staffs are “overwhelmed.”
The paper references a near hour-long Facebook posting in which Lawanna Rivers, a visiting nurse, emotionally describes the situation: “The only way that those patients was coming out of that pit was in a body bag,” referring to the COVID unit where she was working. She concluded: “I am not OK from an emotional mental standpoint.”
As 2020 draws to a close, the number of COVID cases stands at 60 million globally, with more than 1.5 million deaths. The United States reports more than 12 million cases, with more than 263,000 COVID-related deaths, the largest numbers for any country worldwide. William Barber, director of the Poor People’s Campaign, recently observed that while the U.S. has only 4% of the world’s population, it claims 20% of COVID-related deaths.
Such overwhelmingly high statistics can numb our collective psyche, unless we’ve had the virus ourselves, or lost friends and family because of it. Yet we are not numb to the reality of lost jobs, closed schools, online worship, unceasing political antagonism, rising hate crimes and daily inconveniences.
While the news of approaching vaccines is promising, we are not strangers to the plaintive words of Jeremiah 8:20, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” Coronavirus exhaustion permeates the globe.
That reality came home to me in a recent pastoral prayer offered during Sunday worship by Glenn Pettiford, assistant pastor at First Baptist Church, Highland Avenue, our home congregation for 23 years in Winston-Salem. The service was “virtual,” yet Pettiford’s prayer was anything but. It reached across our collective hearts into the marrow of our bones.
Like a voice in the postmodern wilderness he cried out: “Lord, some of us have lost our minds. Some of us don’t believe we need to wear a mask. Some of us don’t believe we need to social distance. Some people have more faith in their handguns than they do in their own health practices. … Lord, I’m not mad at my brothers and sisters, I’m just tired of this mess. (Some people are) complaining about children not being able to go back to school, but at the same time being more concerned about going to a football game or a bar than making it safe for the young ones. Save us all, if you will, I ask in Jesus’ name. Please Lord, your children are dying. Lord, we’re not giving up; we can’t give up, you’ve been so good to us. We can’t give up. We’ve got to keep going.”
In those moments, the pastor’s prayer became for me an imprecatory psalm, a lamentation bursting with passion and compassion, demanding, “How long, O Lord, how long,” while imploring, “O Lord, do not turn your face from us!”
For me, it seemed another Bonhoeffer moment, a challenge poured out in real time and reflecting two crucial elements of Bonhoeffer’s life and thought: a stark choice between cheap and costly grace amid a determined “will for the future.”
In his classic 1937 work, The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer denounced cheap grace as “grace without price; grace without cost!” This mistaken spirituality incorrectly insists that “the account has been paid in advance; and, because it has been paid, everything can be had for nothing.” It means “grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares.” (A cheapjack is “a peddler of inferior goods.”)
Costly grace, by contrast, “is the gospel which must be sought again and again, the gift which must be asked for, the door at which a (person) must knock.”
“Such grace,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ.” In German, the title of this seminal volume is simply Nachfolge, “following.”
Costly grace and the moral catastrophes of his times put Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the test, resulting in his execution at the hands of the Nazis in 1945, a grace from which he never retreated, and by which he kept going, ever with an eye to the future.
DECEMBER 11, 2020 | CHRISTOPHER ASH
Our newsfeeds are full of encouraging results in trials of potential vaccines for COVID-19. I need to start this countercultural article by saying I really hope we get an effective vaccine. I hope we get it soon. I hope it can be rolled out, not only in my own country, but all over the world.
The upsides are clear and rich. Most obviously, it will save lives. Life is a good thing; saving lives is a desirable aim. It may also offer some relief for the many enduring mental-health problems due to lockdowns and COVID restrictions, a way of escape for those suffering the hidden miseries of domestic abuse, the chance of restored education for millions of schoolchildren and college students, and a better prospect of jobs for so many whose work hopes have been blighted. How we long for these miseries to be alleviated. I feel especially for the young people who are paying—and probably will continue to pay—so much of the cost of all this suffering.
It will be such a joy to again be able to meet freely with brothers and sisters in Christ, to sing God’s praises together, and to do all the “one another” things the New Testament encourages. Such a joy. A secular society cannot begin to understand the depth of the grief that our current restrictions cause to our souls. If a vaccine enables all this to restart: hallelujah!
And then there is the ability to see precious family, to spend time with friends, to restart hospitality in our homes. So of course we all long for a successful vaccine, and soon.
As I’ve meditated about this, it seems that the Bible warns of three dangers that might accompany a successful vaccine—and therefore three spiritual warnings. These, I suspect, are not so obvious. They’re certainly not in our newsfeeds.
1. We may not let God’s kindness lead us to repentance.
A pandemic is, I take it, yet another warning from God that there is a judgment to come, that we live in a world by which the pure, holy, and righteous God is rightly angered. That doesn’t mean getting a horrible disease is always personal punishment for a particular sin; Jesus firmly corrected those who thought it was (e.g., John 9:1–3). But it is a warning to all of us that, unless we repent, we too will perish (Luke 13:1–4). The terrible refrain in the book of Revelation (e.g., Rev. 16:9, 11) of people suffering anticipations of final judgment but not repenting ought to warn us to repent. That God does not immediately punish all our sins is a kindness that ought to lead us to repentance (Rom. 2:4). A pandemic is, to use C. S. Lewis’s memorable phrase, a “severe mercy,” because it warns us of worse to come and therefore of the urgent need to turn to God.
Writing of a disaster in Sicily in the 18th century, the Christian poet William Cowper reflected:
God may choose his mark,
May punish, if he please, the less, to warn
The more malignant. If he spared not them,
Tremble and be amazed at thine escape,
Far guiltier England, lest he spare not thee!
In my country, I see little sign of a society moved by COVID-19 to a penitent fear of God. I see little sign of it in the churches. And, worst of all, I find little of this in my own self-righteous, complacent heart. As I write this, I say to myself: Christopher, you need daily to repent of your sins and flee afresh to Christ for mercy. My first reaction, all too often—and I say this to my shame—is to grumble, to criticize governments, to wallow in self-pity. May God have mercy and move me, and move our churches, and move our nations, to a deep and widespread repentance.
2. It may feed our pride so that we neglect to thank God.
How extraordinarily clever are the scientists in the pharmaceutical industry! The skill, ingenuity, hard work, perseverance, and mind-boggling brilliance of those who develop a vaccine is a matter of wonder and amazement. It is an extraordinary thing to watch the whole process as it develops with such speed and—as it seems at the moment—likely success.
bonhoefferblog 
Recent Comments