To the Members and Friends of First Church in Boston--
I hope you're having a good beginning of the week, after a splendidly lovely Sunday, and I send you, as always, my care and hope that you are doing well. I had no idea when I preached a kind of "State of the Church" sermon yesterday, that the very next day Governor Baker's guidelines for religious institutions' phased reopening would be issued --so I wanted quickly to offer a sense of if and how they affect us in the near future.
Two important considerations (and see the link if you're interested in seeing Ma. state guidelines)--first, staff and lay leaders had already made the decision to look at summer services as a time to experiment, to learn new ways of outreach, and as always, use the summer for interesting, creative services a little less formal than in the regular church year. Secondly, this being so, we were not going to make any formal decisions about holding in-person services in our sanctuary at least until late summer when we have a greater sense of the safety issues-meanwhile we will have a lively mixture of services on-line using Zoom and Facebook live streaming (as we have been doing) and WERS, and use these next couple of months to carefully think, plan, and learn more about how we can safely have in-person services. We were always going to move cautiously, with members' safety our foremost concern.
What I did not bank on was that the Governor's guidelines today might so quickly move this conversation forward. Although the new guidelines say that churches can hold services up to 40% stated safe capacity. we have never imagined that we should go past 70 per service safely in these circumstances (which includes, in the guidelines, staff). But, as I say, we are not ready to open like this, and there needs to be a lot more conversation among your lay leaders before even dreaming of re-opening. At present, it takes six people to do a live-streaming service, and even then, it feels like a worthy, but unnerving, process every Sunday.
The UUA is suggesting we not have in-person services until next May, and although that advice is offered to give churches a lot of leeway in deciding how to move forward, I have always sensed we would try, safely and creatively, to find ways to meet long before that. The Governor's new guidelines will help to focus our thinking going forward.
We will assess all this not on a day's notice, or even a month--your lay leaders will be looking at these hard questions season by season, paying close attention to what the facts on the ground tell us. We do want to be an active, lively church--but we need to be responsible and safe--that's the loving thing to do.
