IN OUR CONGREGATIONS
Creating “on-ramps” of connection
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t is hard to believe that we’ve been living within the Covid-19 pandemic for over a year now. In March of 2020, all of our congregations needed to pivot to a new direction when we could not meet in-person anymore. To continue with the basketball analogy (I mean, we live in Indiana after all!) we have had to get really good at pivoting within the everchanging Covid landscape. Over this past year, it has been very important for us at Hope Moravian to create as many “on-ramps” as possible for people to connect with our congregation and to connect with God. We always wanted more options, not less, to fit the variety of preferences among our members. In many of our congregations, the ways our people have both viewed Covid, and adapted to it, have been diverse in scope. There is quite a spectrum on when churches in our provinces decided to go back to in-person worship, or if they are still fully online as of this writing. I think it must be said that there is no
May 2021
right or wrong here, but that each congregation has needed to prayerfully consider what they would and would not do as an act of their faith. Also, within our Moravian theology, our Covid-related decision-making definitely falls within the “non-essentials, liberty” section! When we started meeting again for in-person worship, we decided to meet in our Moravian Outreach Center. It is an open gym space where we could space out chairs for proper distancing and have them in clusters for individuals and families that were quarantined together. Our sanctuary was not quite as big and we realized that our pews were not nearly as movable! One of the main on-ramps we initiated was starting a second service. We were a one-service church, yet we knew we could accommodate more people safely if we had two worship times. We adopted a 9:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. service schedule. While at first those services were exactly the same, we decided to make (Continued on next page)
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