How the church has responded to disease throughout the centuries.
Church history is intertwined with plagues. Read about what healthcare looked like during the Roman Empire, how Christian communities responded to outbreaks like the Black Death by persecuting Jews, and how the modern church approached the AIDS crisis.
How the church has responded to disease throughout the centuries.
Church history is intertwined with plagues. Read about what healthcare looked like during the Roman Empire, how Christian communities responded to outbreaks like the Black Death by persecuting Jews, and how the modern church approached the AIDS crisis.
The ministry’s temporary setup will help alleviate the anticipated surge in COVID-19 patients in New York.
A series of white tents went up in New York’s Central Park this weekend as workers assembled a 68-bed emergency field hospital for people infected with the coronavirus.
The field hospital, which is expected to open today, will allow Mount Sinai Hospital on 98th Street and Fifth Avenue—just across the street from the park—additional surge capacity as New York City grapples with an overstretched hospital system.
Samaritan’s Purse also set up a field hospital in Cremona, Italy, in the hard-hit Lombardy region, where it has treated more than 100 people.
New York’s death toll from the coronavirus surpassed 965 on Monday—the most of any state. It had nearly 60,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19.
Samaritan’s Purse will staff the New York City hospital with 72 disaster response specialists from around the country, working as contractors for the organization. They include doctors, nurses, paramedics, lab technicians, and pharmacists, as well as a technical support crew.
“It’s not only that New York is overwhelmed and has a lack of patient beds,” said Kaitlyn Lahm, a spokesperson for Samaritan’s Purse, the evangelical humanitarian aid organization led by Franklin Graham. “It’s that staff are overworked. We will be fully self-sustained at the emergency field hospital.”
The field hospital will have up to 10 intensive care unit beds with ventilators.
Several trucks left the organization’s North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, warehouse Saturday morning and arrived in New York City that night. By Sunday, it had recruited dozens of New York City church volunteers to help set up the hospital. ...
Barna findings show the toll of the coronavirus crisis is setting in week over week.
As the US outlook around the coronavirus pandemic changes day by day, pastors are quickly adjusting their expectations about how the disruptions will impact their ministry.
Oregon pastor Tyler Braun explained that “on top of just navigating the right-now urgency of how to pivot”—the push to move services and giving and small groups online—pastors are grappling with the inevitable fallout on their members and community.
At New Harvest Church, where he leads worship and family ministries, Braun worries people will be forced to experience grief in isolation, lose out on finances, and face the coronavirus restrictions “well into the summer.”
A new survey by Barna Research found over the course of just a week, most church leaders went from thinking they’d be back to meeting as usual in late or March or April (52%), to projecting the changes would extend to May or longer (68%).
“There is this realism that’s setting in,” said David Kinnaman, Barna Group president.
But while most pastors are realistic, they’re also optimistic, according to Kinnaman. “One of the cool things about pastors we’ve learned over the years is that they are by job description and by disposition more upbeat, positive, hope-filled people,” he said. “So they are often pretty capable of putting a good face in a tough situation, and they, like other leaders, are going to face a lot of tough decisions in the coming weeks as the crisis continues.”
Though most had already called off normal activities at church, pastors also implemented swift changes in policies around smaller group meetings over the past several days.
The percentage who still allow the church building to be ...
Jesus' love knows no borders.
For today’s musical pairing, listen to “S.T.A.Y.” from Hanz Zimmer’s “Interstellar” soundtrack. Note that all the songs for this series have been gathered into a Spotify playlist here.
“The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’” (Romans 8:15)
“Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.” (Revelation 22:20)
Day 9. 775,306 confirmed cases, 37,083 deaths globally.
My youngest daughter was born on the other side of the world to a family I never met. Since her heart had not formed properly, she was left in a baby safe-house outside an orphanage and eventually found her way to people who produced the funding needed for life-saving surgery. Americans and Chinese, most of them followers of Jesus, helped her heal and grow.
She was three years old when her picture appeared on our Facebook feed. She needed a home and a “forever family.” My wife and I did not need to make a decision. We simply recognized our daughter.
Adoption is a mysterious thing. It’s not a resolution to form something new. It’s a realization that something beautiful was already formed, and we are only now beginning to realize it. My wife fought like a lioness to bring her home. “My child is stuck in another country,” she said. Our little girl called me Baba (“daddy”) when we spoke across computer screens. Although we started on opposite sides of the planet, separated by oceans and borders and languages and cultures, somehow she was a part of our family from the very beginning.
So we made our way around the world and found a little ...
The new stimulus bill includes churches and has implication for church staff. Please learn more before making any staff decisions.
We are in unprecedented times, and (for most of us) the health crisis is just weeks away. However, for all of us, the financial crisis is here.
There are roughly 350,000 churches in the United States. Most are small and have a single (often part time) staff member. Some employ thousands. However, Warren Bird of the Evangelical Council of Financial Accountability estimates that there are 1 million people on the payroll of US churches, the majority of whom are part-time, often working other jobs.
Thus, the Congress and the President included them in the most recent stimulus bill, The CARES Act (and the Paycheck Protection Program), as part of a plan to avoid sudden and vast unemployment.
While this is a fluid situation, we are committed to learning more about the CARES Act in the hours and days to come.
One particular trusted resource that we want to note is Richard Hammar’s overview posted at Christianity Today. Hammar, senior editor at Church Law and Tax, notes the following about the PPP (Paycheck Protection Program):
Misdemeanor charges set up legal battle over right to worship in a pandemic.
Florida officials have arrested a megachurch pastor who allegedly held two Sunday services with hundreds of people in violation of a safer-at-home order in place to limit the spread of the coronavirus.
Rodney Howard-Browne turned himself in to authorities in Hernando County where he lives on Monday afternoon, according to jail records. He was charged with unlawful assembly and violation of a public health emergency order. The two misdemeanors carry a possible maximum sentence of 60 days in jail and a $500 fine.
Hillsborough Coutry Sheriff Chad Chronister said his command staff met with leaders at The River at Tampa Bay Church about the danger they are putting themselves—and their congregation—in by not maintaining appropriate social distancing. The Sheriff's Office also placed a digital sign on the road near the church driveway that said “practice social distancing.” But Howard-Browne held the services anyway, according to sheriff’s office detectives.
“Shame on this pastor, their legal staff, and the leaders of this staff for forcing us to do our job. That's not what we wanted to do during a declared state of emergency,” Chronister said. “We are hopeful that this will be a wakeup call.”
Several churches across the country have boldly violated gathering restrictions and stay-at-home orders to continue in-person worship, but Howard-Browne at The River is the first to face punishment for doing so. Recent research shows 1 in 10 Americans say their house of worship is continuing to gather in person, according to data reported last weekend by Deseret News.
The church has said it sanitized the building, and the pastor said on Twitter that the church ...
