Government, Pandemics, and the Church

The current situation of a national health crisis combined with government mandates about public meetings have created an interesting situation. In recent days, the issue has been complicated and exacerbated by racial tension and rioting in the wake of the George Floyd death.

Most of the basic facts are known, so I won’t rehearse those here. What I would like to do it lay out a brief outline of issues related to this situation as it relates to the church.

Most states issued some sort of shutdown orders that included churches. Churches typically took one of three responses, two of which look very similar. Some churches continued to meet in defiance of the orders. Some churches stopped public meetings out of concern for public safety and community testimony. Some churches stopped public meetings in order to comply with government orders.

What should the church have done? Was this a time for civil disobedience? Should the church have “honored the king” and submitted to the governing authority in line with 1 Peter 2 and Romans 13? Or should the church have obeyed God rather than man in line with Acts 5?

Among those who claimed we should obey the government, the most often stated reason was that the government was not asking us to disobey God. Thus, civil disobedience (obeying God rather than man) was not a legitimate option. Furthermore, it was argued that the orders were “generally applicable,” meaning that churches were not being singled out; everyone was under the same order.

I confess that that neither argument makes sense to me. For the first, God has commanded the church to meet. The government commanded the church not to meet. There is, to me at least, a very clear demand by the government to not do what God has commanded us to do. I am not here appealing to Hebrews 10:25 and not forsaking the assembling. A temporary absence from church for health reasons is not forsaking. We should actually encourage that so as to limit the spread of disease. If you had a church member who vomited all night on Saturday night, you would encourage that member to stay home on Sunday. You would not consider that forsaking. I rather appeal to the whole pattern of the NT, including the very name “church” which means assembly. You are not the church unless you “church” (to partake of a now frequent and sometimes disturbing practice of verbing a noun). So when the government said, “Do not meet,” they were commanding disobedience to God.

As for the second argument of general applicability, there are two points of consideration. First, biblical commands to meet are never, to my knowledge, based on whether they apply to everyone. I don’t see anywhere that God says, “Don’t meet if no one else is.” Second, the US constitution carves out a right for religious freedom that it does not carve out for others. While the courts have generally upheld “generally applicable” as a reasonable restriction, such a view seems to render the First Amendment protections for religious expression meaningless. I think the framers included it so as to single out religious expression (and freedom of the press and assembly). In other words, the only reason for the First Amendment is to prevent general applicability from being a reason to forbid worship, peaceful assembly, or expression. 

As I mentioned above, the recent protests have complicated and exacerbated the issue by showing that churches aren’t being treated the same as others. Protests were allowed but churches were not? Large groups of people could assemble in close quarters and without masks in many cases but churches could not? Both are protected by the First Amendment. In Michigan, my state, the governor (wisely, in my view) from the beginning included a paragraph that her order was not to be construed as taking away freedoms guaranteed by the constitution. In other words, it never really applied to churches. She further clarified that churches would not be subject to penalty, meaning it was nothing more than good advice. It was never legally binding on the church.

So what should we have done?

I am of those in the second category. We did stop meeting. We had a livestream each Sunday that we tried not to make a regular service and we had a livestream teaching on Wednesday evening. We did this because of public safety and community reputation. I talked to people in the medical field, front line workers in hotspot hospitals, who told me, “Larry, you have to stop meeting. This is serious and this is dangerous.” So we did. I talked to pastor friends who said, “Larry can you imagine what happens when your church shows up in the news as a place where the virus was caught? You can’t risk that.” So we stopped meeting.

So what of the government orders? Does Romans 13 and 1 Peter 2 apply here? My short answer is No, because the orders were forbidding what God commands. My conscience leads me to conclude that we must obey God rather than man. 

I would submit that most of my pastor friends who stopped meeting because of the governor’s orders, did not stop because of governmental authority primarily. These same people would freely and gladly reject that authority if meeting was forbidden for a different reason. They stopped meeting because they thought the order was reasonable and correct. In other words, they stopped because they agreed, not because they thought the government had authority over the church. As soon as the reason for banning meetings was something they did not find convincing, they would have resisted it.

What if the government's orders had been different? What if the government had said, "Churches can meet in groups of 50 or fewer (or 25 or 100 or some percentage of capacity)"? I would say we should honor that order and live under it because we are not commanded to meet in groups of a certain size. 

Of course the danger here is to meeting as a subset of the congregation is not really the church. Multi-site churches are actually different churches. Multi-service churches are actually different churches. I don't have a problem with either. But let's call them what they are. A church is an assembly, a group of people who assemble. If you don't assemble, you are not a church. 

Another danger in this is that it set a precedent. The government declares an emergency and the church just rolled over and said, “Okay.” Again, I think churches should have stopped meeting for a time. But I think they should have done so for different reasons than governmental authority.

The government has no authority to forbid what God commands. Pastors and churches do have the responsibility to be wise, to do things right and honorable in the sight of all men, to love their people and their communities. And sometimes that means not meeting so that a dangerous virus is not spread.

Lastly, I would appeal for grace to those who see it differently. Do not condemn those who believed they should start meeting before you think you should. Do not judge those who believe they should continue the shutdown. To their own master they stand or fall. God has not revealed a date for reopening. So do not play God over those who see it differently.