Living With An Endemic

 By David de Bruyn - Posted at Churches Without Chests:

Part 1

Covid has not only killed millions of people and left many debilitated, it has also been a pandemic of disunity in the church. The last eighteen months or so has been an epidemic of church division: elders and pastors resigning from churches where they had served for ten or fifteen years, long time members leaving churches and going elsewhere, some churches reduced from thriving assemblies to “virtual churches” with empty buildings. Covid has revealed sides of our fellow Christians that we did not know existed, and close friends have become virtual strangers nearly overnight. Those we thought were spiritual giants have turned out to be paralysed by fear of germs; some we thought were shy and retiring have surprised us with their bravery and resolve.

One thing is becoming clearer: Covid is here to stay. Many people are no longer referring to Covid as a pandemic, but as an endemic. A pandemic is a disease that spreads rapidly, but the worst of it is over in two years. An endemic is a disease that becomes part of life for the foreseeable future.

There are some signs that Covid is not going away within the next year. Some countries with very high vaccination rates are continuing to see fairly high infection rates, and continued hospitalisations. Herd immunity has been reached in those countries, but the disease is still there. The vaccines do seem to reduce hospitalisations and deaths, but perhaps not in the way some had hoped for. If the current or future vaccines succeed in defanging Covid and making it a background flu disease, we will all rejoice; but if they do not, it does us no good to live in a state of suspense for when life will supposedly become normal again. You cannot perpetually live in a state of emergency if circumstances are no longer an emergency. So how do we live if Covid-19 is now an endemic, the new normal?

I suggest four vital principles for the church to live by, the first of which I’ll deal with in this post and the next.

Read more here...

• Read Part 2 here.

• Read Part 3 here.

• Read Part 4 here.

• Read Part 5 here.