“Theologically speaking, I don’t see Jesus not walking into a leper colony. I don’t see him not engaging the sick and praying for them,” he said. He claimed inspiration from famous evangelists of the past, saying, “I don’t see where Oral Roberts or A. A. Allen or Aimee Semple McPherson or R.W. Schambach ever canceled a tent revival or a healing meeting because of tuberculosis or any other kind of outbreak.”
Other churches have taken a dramatically different approach. A representative for Metropolitan AME, a historic Black church in downtown Washington, told RNS the congregation doesn’t have to shift to online services — because it has not resumed meeting in person since March 2020, when the congregation first switched to virtual worship.
Similarly, Tutt noted that while many Westmoreland members celebrated a return to in-person worship earlier this year, the church has maintained an online component as part of a “hybrid” model. The result: a congregation that has found spiritual meaning in both physical and virtual spaces, he said, a dynamic he hopes will soften the blow of a sudden return to virtual worship.
“There’s a subset of congregations — and I would put Westmoreland in this list — who are like, ‘During the pandemic, we’ve learned how to connect online really well,’” he said. “We now have an online congregation that reaches across the country and around the world.”
He added: “People of this congregation — and so many other people of faith — have great reserves of patience, and creativity, and flexibility and grace. … What we’re reminding ourselves is that those reserves continue to be deep.”
As for the difficulty surrounding this season, Tutt said it reminds him of the Christmas story, where Jesus was born into “a very troubled world” with “a whole lot of problems.”
“Into that world of problems and complications and difficulty came this little baby — this God enfleshed creature, to live in the middle of those complications,” he said. “At those moments where I’m like, ‘Oh, this is terrible. I hate this,’ I have the privilege of pausing to remember: The story of God enfleshed is a story of God enfleshed in the middle of complications and difficulty and pain and confusion.”
This article originally appeared here.
