The reports keep coming of people who refuse to stop holding live services and refuse to socially distance, even in places where this COVID-19 virus is spreading very quickly. Some churches are even encouraging people to bring visitors, laying on hands, and even busing large numbers of people in.
What they are doing is wrong. What they’re doing, these churches that are insisting on assembling and not practicing social distancing and saying God will protect them, is a whole lot like the snake handlers they’d probably spurn as backward, uneducated, unbiblical, or fanatical.
So… if you wouldn’t go to a snake handling church and possibly pick up a rattler to show your faith, don’t feel you have a lack of faith for not going and potentially exposing yourself to this virus, either. Both are equally crazy, and both equally deadly. One’s just more shocking because a 4′ rattler is bigger and scarier looking than a virus to most people. Still, both pack quite a bite.
Stay home. Be safe. In this time, if you want to prove your faith, prove it by trusting that God will take care of you even if you can’t go to church. There are other ways to assemble. So prove your love for everyone else by not putting others at risk. God is love, not a building, anyway.
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Author: Through Grace
I was raised in a somewhat unhealthy church group within the Nondenominational Christian Church. After graduating high school, I began attending a United Pentecostal Church (UPC). I've been a member of four UPC churches and visited many others. Of the four of which I was a member, I was "encouraged" not to leave the first and then later sent to the second; attended the second where an usher repeatedly attempted to touch me and the pastor told me I should not care about the standards of the organization and was wrong to do so; ran to a third at that point, which threw me out after a couple years; and walked out of a fourth. For these transfers and because I refused to gossip about my former churches, some called me a "wandering star, a cloud without water" (Jude 1:12).
I love the fact that when the blind man was healed, questioned by the Pharisees and temple rulers, and expelled from the temple, Jesus went and sought him out. He very rarely did this once someone was healed, but for this man, he did. I believe God has a special place in his heart for those who are abused, wrongfully accused, or condemned by religious leadership. I believe He loves those who are wronged by churchianity--yes, churchianity, not Christianity, because those who do these wrongs follow a church, not Christ.
1 John 4:7-8
7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
9 In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.
10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.
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