All pastors and their congregations should take advantage of this free resource on what churches need to do in this coronavirus epidemic. It's by Lyman Stone, an LCMS missionary to Hong Kong who worked with churches in their COVID-19 and SARS pandemics. His advice is scientific, practical, and theological, with suggestions for ministry even when corporate worship is shut down.
I would like to invite you to our church; that is, to our online service. If your congregation has had to cancel worship services because of the coronavirus and isn't able to offer an alternative, you are welcome to join us. This can also introduce you to the liturgies of Lutheran worship--not the full Divine Service with Communion, of course, but Matins and Vespers, with outstanding sermons.
In "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions," John Donne reflects on the course of his sickness from a typhus epidemic, creating a dazzling masterpiece of English prose and Christian meditation.
In his advice about dealing with plagues, Luther counsels against over-reactions and false piety. He also recommends "self-quarantining."
As we face the coronavirus, the Bible has much to say about plagues and pestilences. These are presented as signs of God's wrath, but they are also expressive of the Gospel. When Aaron and David interpose themselves between the plague and the people, they are foreshadowing Christ.
In the course of his "Confession," in which St. Patrick recounts his life as a slave and a missionary, he gives a statement of his faith, a profound and eloquent expression of the Christology and Trinitarianism of the Nicene Creed.
The coronavirus outbreak has been called "the first postmodern pandemic", though the author didn't say what is particularly postmodern about it. But he is right. The disease, with the panic it has caused, is unsettling our postmodernist worldview.
An account of a young man who found his childhood evangelicalism too shallow. He moved to progressive Christianity, but found that even more shallow. Finally, he discovered deep Christianity.
The divorce rate has dropped dramatically since its high point in the 1980s and, particularly, since the "Great Recession" of 2008. But so has the marriage rate of the middle class.
Those who criticize us Lutherans for being "too Catholic" often hold "Catholic" beliefs themselves. Contemporary worship, as practiced by many evangelicals and Pentecostals, works from the assumption that Christian content can be conveyed by any style. This is similar, a writer has pointed out, to the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, which likewise splits substance and form away from each other, rather than bringing them together.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In