Coronavirus and the Leadership of the Christian Church A Sacred Trust Broken

INTRODUCTION, CHAPTER ONE, AND CONCLUSION

Regardless whether the current governmental decrees restricting, and even prohibiting, public worship by the church are viewed as warranted or unnecessary, all must agree that the decrees have impinged upon, if they have not forbidden altogether, the most important activity to which humans are called: the public worship of God, by the citizens of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus. All Christians, therefore, ought to consider with utmost care the message of this book, that the Christian church is duty-bound, in perfect right, to disregard and disobey the illicit orders of the civil government restricting and even forbidding the public worship of God by the entire congregation on the Lord’s Day. Uncritically to yield to the decrees of the state in the matter of public worship is indefensible. “We must obey God…” This book calls the hitherto compliant churches, including the most orthodox and conservative, which presently are not worshipping God, to repentance (sorrow over past disobedience) and conversion (change of behavior).
---Prof. David J. Engelsma
Protestant Reformed Seminary in Grand Rapids, MI

Chapter One, entitled “Ecclesiásticus Interrúptio or Why has the Church Cancelled Biblical Worship?” is written by Ernest Springer. In this opening chapter, the author presents a most serious subject—that of closing the House of God due to the coronavirus. It will analyze whether those in the Evangelical and Reformed community who did so were standing upon sound principles. While discoursing upon the matter of cessation of the public gathering of God’s people for Lord’s Day worship, the author will address a position largely focused on human consideration, convenience, and cooperation, while missing direct and clear Biblical support. It shall be affirmed that Christians should be guided by the Scriptures in all of faith and life, and that Reformed and Presbyterian believers want to be directed and governed by the Standards the Church professes to follow. Yet this chapter will also admit that neither seems to have been faithfully employed in the cessation of public worship activity, which has left the flock of Christ’s Church with the feeling that they are not being shepherded and guided, but rather corralled and caged. This is a strange irony where the sheep of the Church are found pleading with their shepherds in defense of public gathering for worship in God’s House!

God’s mandate for weekly public Sabbath worship is not something to be trifled with or relegated to a position of lesser significance. Observing the Lord’s Day in worship is no gray area or some matter of adiaphora (a thing indifferent). It is not simply the inconsequential matters of liberty for setting the time, length, or location of worship, understood as,
circumstances concerning the worship of God, and government of the church, common to human actions and societies (WCF 1:6, emphasis added). Rather it is the very act of choosing to follow the command to worship—the nature of which is the core essence of shepherding and gathering the sheep in fellowship to the praise of His glorious Grace, not the separation and scattering of the flock! Its unique and special nature of visible and collective communing with the risen Savior openly demonstrates the distinction and contrast from the common activities and formalities of the entrenched human life and culture separate from God and that worships itself. I would submit that the closure is to the spiritual detriment of the flock, the loss of true fellowship, and a means of Grace that is clearly not what is intended by our Lord.

Church leadership quickly closed their church buildings, effectively locking the people out of God’s house. Through their enacted directives that pejoratively might be called a “stay-away-from-church” position (for that was both the desire and reality of their actions), an uncertain and nebulous parenthesis was introduced absent any studied Scriptural warrant.

When it comes to the disorder and confusion of our culture, our community, and the citizens surrounding us, we see that America is a society that is fearful and especially fears death, for apart from the saving work of Christ, they have no hope. Regrettably, the Church today appears to think and act too much like the world, showing the same lack of faith. Are we just weak and erring Christians, or does the church institute act like the world because that is where their heart is? Have we allowed the world to influence the Church rather than being salt and light to humanity? Are our hearts set upon those things above or are we fixated upon the creature comforts of the earth? These are penetrating questions, to be sure, but it suggests the desire for superfluity, protection, ease of obligation, a yield to medicine over Scripture, and escape from what is likely the judgment of God both up-on the world and the modern Church today.

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