Socially distanced church: our priority and our problem

We love our church. It's not always the easiest to take three young children to church but I've written before that we believe that Sundays, meeting with the local body of Christ, are good for children. Even for third culture kids who can miss a lot of what is going on in the service, we believe there are benefits and blessings from church in a second language. Being with our local church fellowship on a Sunday to meet and worship God together is the priority of our week.

Our church has now been able to meet in person for the last two Sundays. Being back together in person is special even if not quite the same with masks, social distancing and a temperature check at the door. We've attended the last two weeks as a family, all of us except the baby dutifully masked. But we're now wrestling with the question of whether we take our children back this Sunday. 

The reality is that we don't have enough space in our church building for everyone to come and remain socially distant from each other. The members of one household (e.g. a family) obviously do not sit socially distanced, but with a relatively high percentage of our church family being individuals, we don't have enough space for even a third of the normal congregation to come.

Should we keep our children at home to literally create space for others to come? 

Last Sunday one of our students brought two friends to church. In all likelihood, it was probably their first time ever attending a church service, their first time hearing the Bible read and preached, their first time experiencing a group of Christians worshipping God together. Our current family circumstances means that one of us almost invariably misses the sermon because we're out with the baby and our other two children remain in the service but do not have the Turkish language ability to understand what is said. Is it better for one of us to stay at home with the children so we do not risk having to turn people away who have never heard the Gospel before?

This is a hard issue. We believe wholeheartedly that going to church as a family on a Sunday is the most important thing we do all week. Aside from the very real concern about protecting the reputation of the church in a Muslim society, we believe it is right to willingly obey the central and local government's rules about social distancing. While social distancing is required for our church services, there is not the physical space for everyone who wants to come. We are also foreigners who have come to serve the local Turkish church; each of us must look not only to our own interests but also to the interests of others (Phil 2:4) and that is doubly true when we have come as cross-cultural workers. We must put the interests of the church, and of Turks, above our own interests. But how do we do that while also looking to the interests of our children? Added to which, we have no idea of timescales. There's a reasonable probability that we'll need to be social distancing for the next several months, possibly to the end of 2020 or beyond. I'm typing this and recoiling at even having to countenance the idea of not taking our children to church for most of 2020.

We're praying for wisdom, talking to our pastor and thinking through different solutions currently. Do we set up a video relay in another part of the church building? Do we alternate with another family and take it in turns to come to church? What about my husband and I alternating who goes to church each week and whoever goes takes either the 5 year old or the 3 year old (who can sit on a lap and not take up extra space), leaving the others at home to join by Zoom? If as a church we need to start thinking medium term, do we need to start thinking about knocking through walls in the church building to create a bigger meeting room?

This is uncharted territory for us, and for others who will be thinking through similar issues. There are no ideal solutions right now, only making the best of a non-ideal situation. But God is not a distant god waiting to punish us for not availing ourselves of the means of grace that he set out. He is our loving Father who knows our hearts and our desire to be in church together each Sunday. He understands when we tell him that we really want to be meeting with our church family to worship him each Sunday but we just can't figure out a way for all of us to do that legally, safely and while loving our neighbours. He  has given us the Holy Spirit and gives us wisdom to think through the options and decide on what we think is the best way forward.

At the same time as thinking through all of this, I've been working on writing up the testimony of a good Turkish believer friend. She became a Christian as a teenager but due to significant family pressures and the need for parental permission for under-18s to go to church here, she was unable to go to church (with the exception of Christmas and Easter services) for three years. For some of that time she had no easy access to a Bible. She desperately wanted to go to church but couldn't and the Lord kept her throughout all of that time. Her experience reassures me of God's goodness. God has given us the local church as a means of grace for our good and growth as believers and being part of a community of local believers is a crucial part of what it means to be a Christian. But when we've done everything we can and it is just not possible for us to be at church together every week, we can trust in God's goodness and faithfulness to bless, sustain and strengthen us - and our children.

People are complicated

"Look, I've killed the monster!" he cries triumphantly, cape trailing behind him, stick sword in hand. My three year old and five year old's favourite role play game is some version of "goody vs baddy". Monsters vs superheroes. Knights vs dragons. If we watch a film, they want to know who the goody is and who the baddy is. In the darkest moments of a film (and we're talking Disney and Pixar here), they crave the reassurance that the goody will win in the end. We talk about the great story of good vs evil too. They point to the picture illustrating the story of Revelation in their children's Bible, of Jesus conquering the dragon, and they tell us "Jesus wins."

There's a developmental appropriateness to young children's desire to divide the world into goodies and baddies, to categorise them neatly as one or the other. Recent events have shown that adults are not immune either to the temptation to divide people into simple categories of 'goody' and 'baddy'. For instance, there has been a move to recategorise historical figures from 'goody' to 'baddy' with the toppling of statues; in the UK, protestors toppled the statue of slave trader philanthropist Edward Colston and threw it into the harbour. A statue of Winston Churchill has been boarded up ahead of planned protests; he is regarded by many as a great wartime leader. He also believed in racial hierarchies. 

Christians are not immune to these problems either. We fall in love with our spiritual heroes and then belatedly realise they too have feet of clay. Martin Luther and his anti-semitism. Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield and their ownership of slaves. John Wesley's marriage. William Carey's family life. It can get more personal too. Church leaders fall into sin. Christians we looked up to let us down. And with the tangle of thoughts and emotions that we're left with, it's easy to either turn a blind eye to someone's sin, rationalising it away, or to go to the other extreme and dismiss every good action or truthful word they've ever done or spoken.

We might also take groups of people and automatically assign them to be goodies or baddies. Cops. Protesters. Politicians. Civil servants. Journalists. Bankers. Climate change activists. Climate change deniers. Creationists. Evolutionists. Social workers. Home schoolers. Baptists. Anglicans. J K Rowling. The list goes on.

The world would be a simpler place if we could just think of everyone as either a goody or a baddy.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously wrote, "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." In the same vein (but not quite as literary high-brow), British comedy actor John Cleese recently tweeted a clip of his from 30 years ago in which he says, "the great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies, and all the goodness in the whole world is in you." 

Both Solzhenitsyn and Cleese are echoing the truth that people are complicated. As image bearers of God, every one of us is able to do good. As people who have rejected God and trampled on his law, every one of us does evil. That is not to say that we are all equal in our degree of goodness or evilness. The line that divides good and evil does not cleave every human heart equally in two. But the history of humanity is a history of complex people. Heroes have flaws. Villains are capable of good deeds. David who killed Goliath was the same David who took another man's wife and had her husband murdered. A towering theologian can hold appalling views (and not just be excused as a 'child of his time').

The line dividing good and evil cuts through my heart too. As I look back at Christians of the past and wonder how they could have got some things so very right and other things so terribly wrong, I wonder what a Christian living in fifty, one hundred, two hundred years time would say if they could look back at my life. If they nodded their heads in agreement with my reformed, Baptist theology, what words and actions of mine would cause them to wince? On what issues would they ask how could someone who held to those Biblical principles end up so far from the mark in that particular way?

As our children get older, we're slowly teaching them that while good and evil are real and clear categories, labeling people as good or evil isn't quite so clear cut as they'd like to believe. We're reminding them that in the ultimate good vs evil story, we're the baddies and the only goody is Jesus. And yet we're also baddies who image God and so we can still reflect God's goodness, albeit in a distorted way. 

And so this is my plea to the adults: resist the caricatures. Recognise that people are complicated. Good and evil swirls together in each of our hearts. It's not that good and evil don't matter. I'm not saying that you should never describe someone as evil. I'm not saying that we should never apply church discipline, call out false teachers or judge that a leader is unfit for church or public office.

But we need to be nuanced in our thinking. It's a whole lot easier to view the world through a lens that views individuals (or groups of individuals) as simply goodies or baddies. But good and evil are too important to simply take the easy option. We must be honest about both the failings of people we admire and the good deeds of those we don't. We need to praise the good and we also need to be unequivocal about the bad. We need to be people of truth and integrity.

Post script: the following articles have been helpful for me in educating myself and sharpening my thinking on this issue, particularly regarding Christian heroes.

"Jonathan Edwards, Slavery, and the Theology of African-Americans", Thabiti Anyabwile

"Luther's Jewish Problem", Bernard Howard

"Some thoughts about statues..." Michael Ots

"When Our Heroes Don't Live Up to Their Theology", Thomas Kidd

"How I Process The Moral Failures of My Historical Heroes", John Piper

Smartphones and a simple change

It doesn't grab your attention. It was pretty cheap. The children like to play with it so it's been dropped on the floor a couple of times already; if you shake it, you can hear an ominous rattle of some loose parts inside.

A basic digital clock has been hands down my best purchase of the last year. 

I've been using a mobile phone as my digital clock and alarm since I was a teenager. I'd fumble for it in the night when I woke to check the time. It was often the last thing I checked at night and the first thing I looked at it in the morning. 

It had some good uses. Sometimes I used the last few minutes before I slept to catch up on my Bible memorisation. Sometimes I started the audio Bible app as soon I woke and let the Word of God flow over me for the first few minutes of my day. But far too often I checked my messages and emails first, followed by the news, followed sometimes by social media or random Internet browsing. 

I've read a lot in these last couple of years about smartphones and how they are changing us and the distraction they can be. I've read how getting rid of a smartphone temporarily or permanently, can be helpful and considered that option, but the reality is that I need my smartphone (or, more precisely, Whatsapp) for life here and for communication with those in my home country. Then I stumbled across this article on wrong reasons to check your phone in the morning and it resonated with me.

So I took the simple option and bought a digital alarm clock. I developed a new habit of leaving my phone in another room at night. My digital clock tells me the time. It wakes me up in a morning if I need it to (although with three children under the age of 5, that feature is rarely needed right now). And it does nothing else. I no longer start my day by looking at my phone and then get sucked into messages, emails, news or social media. 

And the crazy thing is that I've only gained with this change. If I have a few moments to myself before I need to get up in a morning, I get to use them in more spiritually profitable and mentally healthy ways. There have been no negative consequences from delaying checking my messages for an hour or two after I wake and only positive effects from framing my day with the most important things, thinking first of God and then the people he has literally put in front of me.

I'm not saying I've got it all sorted. Sometimes I get up early with the baby and grab my phone as soon as I get into the kitchen. Occasionally I forget to leave my phone in a different room. There are also times where, for ministry or family reasons, I need to be able to be contacted in the middle of the night. In those times, I keep my phone in the bedroom, all notifications muted except for incoming calls, and well out of arm's reach.

Buying a digital alarm clock sounds incredibly simple. It is incredibly simple! In fact it's so simple that it seems a little ridiculous to be writing a blog post about it. But it turns out simple changes can be some of the most effective.