It has been a little while since I’ve given you all an update on the Synod’s response to COVID-19. 

The Synod office (housed in with the Episcopal Diocese of Spokane) will remain closed as long as the Diocese is closed. Following a conversation with Bishop Rehberg, we are in agreement that this will be in Phase 4 at the earliest—possibly later than that if the numbers are still going up. Once again, the Phase process is closely connected to economic realities—not necessarily the realities of the case numbers in a given county, so we will be looking to those numbers to make our final decisions. Because NWIM is a tenant of the Episcopal Diocese of Spokane, we will respect their boundaries around the health and well being of our employees. 

The Synod staff continues to take travel cautiously. I live in Benton County, where the number of new cases per week is skyrocketing. Because of this, I will not be traveling anywhere for the foreseeable future. I do not want to be the individual that introduces or re-introduces COVID to an area that has been lightly impacted by the virus. In deciding whether or not travel is an acceptable risk, a synod staff member will be taking into account the numbers of new cases in the area they are traveling FROM as well as the number of new cases in the area they have been asked to travel TO—and given the size of our synod, possibly number of new cases along the travel route. No synod staff member is planning to fly at this time. Given these realities, we ask that you ask for a staff member to be physically present ONLY in cases of emergency, and after exhausting all other options. 

Some of our congregations are resuming in-person worship with recommended protocols in place. Please keep in mind that what is an acceptable level of risk in one county may not be possible in others. There won’t be a triumphal return to worship in one fell swoop. I continue to encourage leadership to monitor county health numbers. The benchmark you are looking for is DECREASING cases of COVID-19 for a minimum of 2 weeks. I want to stress that until a vaccine is developed, or 60-70% of the population has had COVID-19: we are not talking about gathering safely. Without a vaccine or herd immunity the best we can hope for is the lowest level of acceptable risk. Please encourage people to stop talking about “safe” and instead make the shift to “lowest level of acceptable risk” because until we’ve met certain benchmarks OR have a vaccine: worship will continue to be a risky behavior. Perhaps a risk we are willing to take, perhaps not. 

Also be aware that we will not pick up where we left off in March. There will be no hymns, limited communion, social distancing, no fellowship, and some people may be turned away from worship because the service is at their new “COVID Capacity”. Please also keep in mind that the people most likely to attend worship are those who are in the high risk category for contracting  and dying from COVID-19. What we miss about being in worship together will likely not be what we come back to. Please be aware of that if you are advocating for a return to in-person worship. 

Some of our pastors fall into the boundaries of the population most at risk for this virus—over 60, overweight, diabetic, cardiac issues, high blood pressure, etc. Please take your pastors view of acceptable risk into account as well as you make any plans to resume in-person worship. 

Many of our churches continue to worship “remotely”—via prerecordings, Zoom, Facebook live or other means. I encourage these congregations to continue this as long as possible. If this is your congregation, please know that your leadership has taken many aspects into account and feels that the risk of gathering in-person continues to be too high—even if you disagree, please take a moment and thank them for caring for others. 

We continue to maintain a robust COVID-19 resource page on our synod website, www.nwimsynod.org. There you will find a list of how different congregations are offering worship; assessment tools to help discern whether or not the risk of resuming in-person worship is low enough to consider; several different documents based on CDC & Federal guidelines, etc. This resource will be available until we have a vaccine or herd immunity. 

Synod staff are more than willing to work with your congregational leadership around questions of a low-risk resumption of in-person worship. Sometimes this is a hard conversation to have as a congregational group and having a “neutral” party can make it easier. Full disclosure: I’m only neutral as far as you making wise choices goes. If you want to engage in high-risk behavior, I will become “un-neutral” very quickly! 😊 Sometimes, even if the conversation itself isn’t difficult, it’s still nice to have someone from outside to bounce ideas off of. Please take advantage of our partnership in this way. Ordained leaders have spent a lot of time learning how to do video worship in the best way they can. Synod staff have spent that time learning about COVID, its transmission, how to lower the risk of transmission specifically around worship activities, etc. We have amassed a good amount of information in a fairly short amount of time—and we’re happy to share it with you as a guide in the days and weeks to come. 

Many of our pastors have been working very hard since Lent with little time away. Now as we are edging into summer and (what would have been) the end of the church program year, many pastors are contacting me wondering how they can get their allotted vacation days in to rest and recover. Their primary concern is how to bring in pulpit supply. My answer is always the same: find a church (in the cluster, in the synod, in a completely different synod) and publish the link to THAT worship service for vacation Sundays. For the first time in my career, pulpit supply doesn’t have to be an issue because people can attend a worship service literally anywhere right now! How fun is that?! Here’s how I’d go about doing it:

• Contact one (or more) congregations that you’d like to give your people a chance to visit on your vacation Sunday. Make sure that adding your congregation to theirs won’t overwhelm their technology. 

• Ask the pastor or deacon to acknowledge that folks from Second Lutheran Church in Smithville, ID are joining them for worship & welcome them. 

• Let the pastors know that you will be happy to return the favor for them. 

• Turn this into a congregational field trip! Offer a handful of different options for people to attend & then ask them to report back on what they learned. What did they like? What did they think worked well? What would they like to try?  What would it be like to encourage your congregation to attend an AME church? Or a cathedral worship? What if they could Zoom into the church they grew up in in North Dakota? Does your congregation have a history of male-only pastoral leadership? Send them somewhere to hear a female preacher! What about a bilingual worship experience? 

While events around Black Lives Matter have taken up a lot of the attention in the most recent weeks, we are still living in a pandemic. It’s not over just because we’ve decided we can’t take it anymore. I continue to implore you to be safe, don’t engage in unnecessarily risky behavior, thank your leadership (ordained and lay) for their commitment to the congregation, and (because I’m a mom): make good choices! If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me or another member of the synod staff. 

Bishop Kristen