“COVID has been harder on us,” she said of African Americans. “Black people know people who’ve died. Black people know people who are sick now.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in early September that Black Americans are twice as likely to die from COVID-19 as white Americans, a finding that was also reported by the National Urban League in its 2020 “State of Black America” report.
Those kinds of statistics — and the emergence of new virus variants — contribute to the cautious approach on the part of some ministers, their reopening task forces and the people they have surveyed who are currently not in the pews.
“I wanted to open in September, and I met with our people and they weren’t ready to come back,” said the Rev. W. Franklyn Richardson, pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, New York, noting questions about the need for a booster shot added to the already mounting concerns about variants. He stopped considering a November opening and pushed plans back two more months.
Richardson, who also is the chair of the Conference of National Black Churches, said he’s aware of larger churches that are not planning to open until the start of 2021. And while some churches have seen increasing numbers of attendees online, other churches in the seven CNBC-affiliated denominations have had to close because their leaders did not have the finances or the skillsets to pivot to the new technology needed to survive.
Richardson said smaller churches that are continuing to offer services online find that when they do open for in-person worship, they get substantial attendance initially, followed by a steep decline. He said he is not aware of any Black church that has more than 40 percent of its pre-pandemic in-person attendance.
“The issue is that, yes, you can open the church, but if the atmosphere, the climate, is not conducive for people to come back, you just open the door and they won’t be there.”
Earlier this year the hesitancy of African Americans to return to worship — especially when they could keep watching and giving online — was evident in some pandemic-related research.
The Pew Research Center observed the slow return to in-person worship among historically Black Protestant congregations in a March survey, its most recent data available on the topic.
