Dear FBCP Community,
I know many of you are curious what summer will look like at FBCP, especially the way we, as a congregation, will worship together while scattered and sheltered to various degrees. The leadership of FBCP would like to provide some clarity about the path ahead, while holding open the likelihood that plans will need to adjust as the situation with COVID-19 requires changes week to week. This letter has a lot of details, so take your time reading through it all. We want you to know what our plan is as well as all the considerations that are guiding our decision process. We also want you to know the values we are inviting you to hold, too, as we continue to seek what it means to be the church. All of this content will also be shared as an audio recording, so you have a choice of medium to engage it!
Let us address the big question you all have right away. In-person sanctuary worship will not resume for at least the duration of the summer. This decision is in line with health and medical guidance. Church gatherings are one of the most potent outbreak sites for COVID-19, so we feel a tremendous responsibility to adjust regular worship practices out of care for our vulnerable friends and front line health care workers. For now, our staff and leadership feel that the restrictive guidelines would cause more anxiety if we tried to open the building to worship as soon as possible. When we cannot touch one another, cannot sing, and cannot engage in the sacraments like communion or baptism, we risk undermining any possible social bonding with misunderstandings and increased anxiety. We will use these summer months to prepare our building to handle the many requirements of health and safety experts to ensure a safe worship environment. When we do begin meeting inside the sanctuary space again, our worship services initially will be very different from the services of the past. I’m sure each of you can understand the many safety practices that must be put into effect. This will be a complex and financially demanding process, so we want to take our time and get it right.
This is disappointing news, I know, prudence notwithstanding. We miss each other. We miss our building and our familiar Sunday rituals. I (John Jay) have done plenty of crying about how much loss and change we are all having to bear. So even as we believe this is the most responsible course of action, it still hurts. But the truth is that the experience we are all longing for would not be the reality waiting for us were we to return right now. The things we miss most on Sunday would still be absent under the restrictions and protocols that would have to be in place to worship safely. So, our plan is to find creative ways to meet our need for connection and community as best we can in other ways. With your trust and faith, we believe we can grow and thrive as the body of Christ. It is just going to look different.
So before we move on to the next set of practices we are planning, let’s all just sit with this news. Sanctuary worship will continue to be on hiatus through the summer. We pray that God would be with us in our loss, so that our pain does not shift to more dangerous emotions like anger or resentment.
Humans are experts at scapegoating our suffering onto some outside force. The trouble with the virus is how invisible it is, and how much it has disrupted what we can see. So in our pain, we get angry at what has been taken from us. And we wonder who to blame. During war-time, there is a clear enemy (whom we are commanded to love, not blame), but with the virus, we are beginning to war among ourselves. I am asking you to receive this news with a generous heart. We’ve outlined why we’ve made these decisions below and we’ve done our best to be prayerful and caring. We do want to hear different opinions and what you are feeling, but we need your help to hold this generous space for one another.
So what will we be doing? Glad you asked! Hint: it involves several possible ways to join together in person. Double hint: drive-in church, maybe.
Summer plans
Ongoing
We will continue creating our Liturgy For the Living Room as a collaborative community experience. These have been beautiful windows into parts of our church you might have not known before. We have been blessed by the various voices and wisdoms throughout our church and know you have, too. The way we use this liturgy will shift through the summer. More on that below.We will continue the daily encouragements and Connection Teams. Pastor John Jay will also increase his sharing on the daily audio so that we have as much transparency and guidance as possible from our staff. If you have wished you had more communication from the church, then the daily encouragement text group might be just the thing! To sign up for that, text the word “daily” to (626) 727-9498. Pastors Mary and Lindsay will focus on relational ministry initiatives for kids, including visits/activities outside following appropriate guidelines and leveraging technology in interactive ways.We will be releasing a regular Executive Report from the Board of Deacons and Pastoral Staff to inform you on the health of the church. This will include financial updates as well as the health of the pastoral staff and lay teams. We are creating a Covid Task Force that will advise the Board and staff with ongoing best practices and guidelines. Individuals on the team will include members of our community who have expertise in areas like medicine, risk management, mental health, and organizational leadership.
Month of June
Set up drive-in church equipment and test it out in preparation for a tentative July launch.
Pastor Gretchen is exploring some ways to host Liturgy listening groups. These would be outside with safety guidelines in place. This will start out small as we assess the viability of scaling it up.
Pastor Lindsay will start meeting with the youth in the green space regularly, similar to what used to happen on Sundays. Appropriate guidelines will be put into place and must be followed by all (distance, masks, etc.).
We are planning a version of Community Dinners but using outdoor backyards and physical distancing. Staff will handle details in conjunction with hosts. We will also use this event to stress test a more formal reorganization of small groups around a backyard physical distance model. With the ongoing changes to Sunday morning worship, we know there is a higher need for opportunities to connect with one another.
June 22-26: Pastor Mary and a team of local church leaders will offer Lightseekers Camp, a virtual summer camp option for kids entering 1st-5th grade in the Los Angeles region.
Month of July
July 5: Launch first drive-in church service in the Holly Garage, using a modified version of the Liturgy for the Living Room (Liturgy For the Parking Lot?). This would include an FM transmitter setup to send the signal simultaneously to everyone present. Pastors would be able to offer certain live elements, like a welcome, prayer and a blessing. Liturgy would be a mixture of prerecorded parts and live elements. We believe that gathering in our vehicles is a good balance of togetherness and physical considerations. Many of us are not used to interacting with lots of people after such a long time apart, and this drive-in model will give everyone a chance to slowly adjust to being back together and stay safe. We hope that listening through our radios simultaneously will create connections we have all been missing. Plus we can sing and not risk spreading the virus! There is a lot of logistical work on this idea, so we want to hold these plans lightly.
Week of July 12: Begin rolling out new home church groups based on backyard get together learning. Encourage people to meet twice a month in person outdoors.
Pastors Mary and Lindsay will offer additional summer camp options for kids that will include online and in-person opportunities based on updated safety and health recommendations.
Month of August
August 2: Return to the drive-in model having worked out issues from month one.
August 25: Board Meeting to reevaluate this model in light of changes to the virus and community transmission. Prayerfully, we will have a clearer understanding of the spread of the virus and where we are in our preparation for re-opening in-person services.
That is all of the “what/how” we know at this time. Now we want to share some of the values that guided these decisions and that we hope you will step into with us.
Shared Understandings and Values
Constant Prayer
We will do all things in the strength, power and assurance of Christ. We will not exist in fear, including the fear of judgment for prudent and patient decisions. We will ground all of our actions in prayer. We mean this. We will not talk about prayer, but actively engage God in discernment for how to be the Church of Christ in this moment.
Community as a body.
We will prioritize the community over any individual. Because we are a multi-generational and multiracial congregation, and because our church body includes people with various kinds of heightened risk factors, we need to advise for the good of the whole, not for the wishes of any subset of the congregation. We believe it will be important when we resume in-person worship to come back together in the fullness of our church body as much as possible. Therefore, we do not envision recommending any strategy that would deliberately create winners and losers in a reopening scheme.
Consider the health and well-being (physical and emotional) of all members.
We must recognize that we are balancing lots of tensions, including how the importance of physical distancing conflicts with the need for social connection. So we will continue to structure opportunities for communal support while accepting that the previous forms of our gatherings are on hiatus.
Medical and scientific guidance.
We will follow the science and medical community guidance, sifting that signal from the noise of politics. We will interpret this guidance with generosity, always placing our neighbor above ourselves. And we will also consider the needs and desires of those in our community who are at the front lines of health care. They have told us that our church's efforts to slow the spread of this disease has a material benefit on the stress and risk of their work. So we sacrifice in big and small ways with gladness for our brothers and sisters who must risk more than many of us.
Churches are not like businesses.
Most businesses that are reopening with success can serve customers in one-on-one or very small group settings, thus limiting the risk of exposure. Churches do not operate that way. We are about group functions and large-scale gatherings, where the known risk of accidentally spreading infection is exponentially higher. We are relational in our work, not transactional, and this makes a fundamental difference in how and when we can reopen.
We will embrace the wilderness.
Scripture has much to say about wilderness seasons when disruption and loss bring to light the things we have left untended in our lives. So, we want to make good use of this season to grow in ways only possible in such disruption. We believe God has things yet to teach us, and we want to be open to them. This may take the form of public lament, expanding our understanding of who belongs in our fellowship, creating new spiritual practices in our homes, and even simple things like polishing pews while they are not in use. Another way to say this: we will stay curious about what God is showing us, even and especially when things are difficult and unknown.
We will foster a spirit of generosity.
We want to increase our love in this moment; therefore, we must extend a generous spirit to one another. That looks like honest dialogue rooted in trust, assuming the best in one another. Your staff and board are eager to serve and lead you through this time of crisis. We will pray and encourage one another, even and especially when necessary changes are painful.
That is a lot of information for today friends. We know some of you will have questions, so we are available to have a conversation and offer clarity where possible. You can email our team by using the form found at the bottom of this page [insert link in email version]. This will allow our staff and Board to reach back out and keep the dialogue going. We are here for you! We will continue to find exciting, helpful, and hopeful ways to be God’s people, no matter the circumstances. We are compelled to find new ways to worship and care for one another, and we have all we need to stay in the light of God’s love.
Less without you,
Pastor John Jay
P.S. A special thanks to churches and colleagues around the country who shared their processes and practices with us. Much of this language is evidence of a large community of churches spread around the country and world. We are in this thing together.
