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After a Year of Pandemic: How Faith Leaders Ministered With Grief, Solace, Resilience

Rev. Jim Bass, center, Senior Pastor of Friendswood United Methodist Church, talks with a member of the congregation before service Sunday, March 7, 2021, in Friendswood, Texas. Amid the grief and anxiety of the coronavirus pandemic, faith leaders showed resilience and found reasons for hope as they re-imagined their mission. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)

Bishop Paul Egensteiner, who oversees Saint Peter’s and other New York City-area congregations of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, said the emotional toll on pastors has been heavy.

“They couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t take vacation,” he said. “It’s been a great strain — trying to figure out how we’re going to keep people connected, how we’re going to do worship and hospital visits.”

Imam Ahmed Ali of IQRA Masjid Community & Tradition, a mosque and community center in Brooklyn, sprang into action in late March after a funeral home called asking for his help to retrieve from hospitals the bodies of people who died of COVID-19 and give them burial rites. Ali was scared of the fast-spreading virus, like others, but he felt a calling to serve God and his religious duty.

He began putting in volunteer shifts of up to 20 hours transporting bodies, putting them in freezers in the funeral home, washing and enshrouding them in white cloth and taking them to cemeteries for burial.

Typically he performs the janazah, or funeral, prayer only a few times a year. At the height of the crisis in New York City, he was doing as many as 20 in a single day, and over about three months, he oversaw or took part in nearly 300 burials in all.

“It was a really challenging time, and it was a great loss for every community,” Ali said. “I pray that we don’t have to see that kind of pandemic again.”

Friendswood United Methodist Church, in the suburbs of Houston, has been spared a heavy death toll.

But one active member of the 900-strong congregation who did die of COVID-19 was “a pillar of the church” who served on many of its boards and committees and won friends for his good humor and generosity, said Jim Bass, the pastor.

“He was 74 but no underlying health conditions that we knew of,” Bass said. “When he became sick, for us in the congregation it really hit home.”

ADJUSTMENTS

Like thousands of houses of worship nationwide, Valley Beth Shalom shifted swiftly to online services.

Farkas and his team also launched what they called a “war on isolation,” including a new over-the-phone buddy system to connect isolated people starved of human contact. Volunteers selected congregation members whom they called at least once a week, and friendships sprang up between 20-somethings and octogenarians.

With no in-person worship, Farkas encouraged community events respecting health guidelines. For the recent Purim holiday, the congregation staged a drive-through carnival in the parking lot with about 160 families taking part.

“We’ve learned a bunch,” Farkas said, “but if I had to pick one thing, it’s that we didn’t give up.”

Friendswood Methodist spent more than $20,000 on video equipment last year to provide online worship. In-person services have now resumed, with a quarter of pre-pandemic attendance. Bass said there’s enough room in the 1,100-seat sanctuary for adequate social distancing; he encourages worshippers to sing hymns quietly to themselves through their masks.

For Esther Roman, a chaplain at New York’s Mount Sinai Morningside hospital, the pandemic has entailed ministering to one grieving family after another.

She recalled sitting 6 feet from one devastated woman, tears rolling down her masked face as she posed an anguished question to Roman: Why did God let her otherwise healthy, vibrant mother die? The chaplain couldn’t comfort the woman as she would have done pre-pandemic: by holding and squeezing her hand.

“It was one of those moments that I resent the inability to offer support in the many ways that I used to be able to,” Roman said. “I had to try to have my words do the embracing.”

She and others have had to learn to transmit love or support via digital screens and through face shields and masks.

“We all rose to the challenge,” Roman said. “We were drafted into this war.”

SILVER LININGS

Even as the pandemic was subsiding in New York City in January, Saint Peter’s suffered a new trauma: Severe flood damage from a ruptured municipal water main.

The Midtown Manhattan parish is known for its Jazz Vespers program, and the badly damaged items included treasured musical instruments and archives of several jazz greats. It further complicated plans to resume in-person worship, for which there is still no date set.

Yet the congregation’s president, Christopher Vergara, said the community has grown closer with increased attendance to online services.

“We created a community network so people could check in with others to see how they’re doing,” Vergara said. “We’ve created a lot of small online groups — knitting, history, the arts.”

“The flood was a bad thing, but we’ve really clung to each other,” he added. “We’ve gone from surviving to thriving.”

Friendswood Methodist also was badly damaged by flooding — in its case, when multiple pipes froze and then burst amid the recent severe storm in Texas.

Bass was astounded when more than 50 congregants responded to his emergency appeal for help, hurrying to the unlit church with push brooms and squeegees and working to clear the water.

“We say the church isn’t the building, it’s people. And it is true,” Bass said. “This has really reminded people of the importance of community.”

Christopher Johnson, an assistant pastor of Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church, said his Houston congregation was already suffering from lost social interaction, vanished jobs and food insecurity when it was dealt a new blow in May by the death of his boyhood friend George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis.

Johnson remembered Floyd as a respected community member who helped host a party at the church with free AIDS testing when Houston hosted the Super Bowl in 2017.

Johnson said Floyd’s death, which sparked nationwide protests and awakening on racial injustice, had a special impact in part because it occurred amid a pandemic wreaking a disproportionate toll on African Americans.

“People had to take a pause, and it is in that pause that we realized that the world had changed,” Johnson said.

Johnson said his church responded to the pandemic by working with local leaders to provide personal protective equipment and COVID-19 testing for the community. They used radio shows to discuss health disparities, vaccinations and the recent lifting of a statewide mask mandate.

The pandemic, Johnson said, “has called us to rethink and re-imagine what our philosophy of ministering really is in the age of COVID.”

Associated Press religion coverage receives support from the Lilly Endowment through The Conversation U.S. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

This article by Luis Andres Henao, David Crary, and Mariam Fam originally appeared here.