Lessons from Covid

by Rev Dr Ian Stackhouse, Senior Minister, Millmead, Guildford Baptist Church, Surrey.

‘Do not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing…’ Hebrews 10:25

Time is a strange thing. I feel sure I am not alone in thinking that the pandemic seems like an age ago. Indeed, the whole thing seems a bit unreal, as if it never happened. I guess one of the reasons it feels like that is because so much has transpired since: a war in Europe and a cost-of-living crisis to name perhaps the most immediate. More obvious than that, however, in trying to explain the feelings of disassociation, is the pandemic itself. For all the reality of the numbers of people who died, the experience of lockdown (as it was referred to) was so extraordinary, so unlike anything any of us had ever experienced, that I suppose it has taken on the nature of a very bad dream - one we might prefer to forget. This is most definitely my impression in the community I serve. Mention Covid and people groan. They prefer not to talk about it. But talk about it we must, not least because it is likely a global pandemic will visit us again, and if we haven’t reflected upon it, the same mechanisms for dealing with it will reappear.

For many people, of course, those mechanisms were perfectly reasonable. I notice that the debates in recent months about Covid have not been about the ethics of national lockdown but about whether we should have ‘locked down’ earlier than we did. For others, however, including myself, a reappearance of something like a lockdown would be disastrous for a whole number of reasons, perhaps the most egregious being the enormous and, in my estimation, unnecessary collateral damage it has brought upon our society. Those governments, including our own, that enacted these draconian measures argued that there was no alternative, which possibly in the early months was fair enough. But once it became clear what the nature of the virus was (which surely must be the key question in any future pandemic) then lockdown as a health policy appeared not just lazy, but somewhat sinister - never more so than in the closure of churches.

For those who voiced their concerns, as I did, and even wrote open letters to the broadsheets to publicly voice our antipathy to state control, we were criticised as reckless, which is strange because never at any point did we break any laws. Nor did anyone, as far as I am aware, contract Covid as a result of being in one of our meetings. What we were not prepared to do, however, was suspend our common sense, shut down our buildings completely (as many Anglican parishes did) and, most importantly, bow to the government’s use of fear tactics as a way of achieving compliance. If some call that recklessness, so be it (at the height of the pandemic, emotions were running high); I prefer to call it resistance, for the simple reason that when governments overreach their powers, in the way that I and others claim they did in those two years of the pandemic, and then let fear loose among the populace, then it is a Christian imperative to challenge it, if not stand completely against it. Indeed, when Covid passports were being considered for use in public buildings, I did wonder if we would need to actually defy the law. Nothing transpired of course. The idea was soon dropped as unworkable, so our loyalties were never put to the test. But I remember it as the first time, certainly in my time as a church minister, when the choice between obeying man or obeying God become very clear cut. For me, the prospect of passports for any building, let alone a church, represented a sinister attempt to coerce people into a vaccination policy that, notwithstanding its general effectiveness, would have challenged the very heart of individual freedom. In my opinion, it was a step towards tyranny (in that context, at least) and the reason I made my views known then, and write about it now, is because the very fact it was even considered is surely an indication of how quickly a society can embrace a kind of soft totalitarianism.

Readers may struggle with my use of that term, but it strikes me as appropriate not only in the context of health and safety but, more obviously, in the context of cultural ideology. To state the matter starkly: when it ceases to be possible to challenge the dominant narrative of the day without ending up cancelled, which was happening to a fair number of reputable scientists during Covid, then it’s time to start worrying. Things are quieter now. Our focus is elsewhere. But it behoves us as Christians think more deeply about these matters because, in the absence of a thorough-going review, we may find ourselves in a similar situation in the not-too-distant future. Covid was enough to demonstrate that the Christian community is not sufficiently aware of the battle lines. I agree that a pandemic is no time to be a hero, or even a martyr to a cause. But neither is it a time to bury one’s head in the sand. For me it wasn’t a sabbatical, as many church leaders described it, but a sobering reminder of how easy it is for the church to capitulate. Indeed, for the church to concede that gathering together (in the way that the writer to the Hebrews exhorts his congregation to gather together) amounts to nothing more than a leisure activity, which effectively is what we are saying when we allow ourselves to be placed alongside non-essential theatres, stadiums and bars, is an abdication of faith that, in my opinion, will take a very long time to recover from, if at all. Yes, there are other ways to gather; and it’s not all about Sunday worship. I am even prepared to acknowledge the opportunities that the pandemic opened up for the gospel. Why not? But given that the reason Christians, from the very beginning, have gathered on The Lord’s Day to celebrate the power of the resurrection, it was a revelation to me that so many in our own day so quickly, and so uncritically, hid behind the mantras of health and safety and settled for an on-line faith.

To be clear, we have a responsibility to care for the most vulnerable in our society. We also have a responsibility, however, to use our common sense and to ensure that the collateral damage of any public policy is not greater the problem we are trying to address. Speaking as a church leader, as well as a writer, these matters are not incidental to a life of faith, things we shouldn’t bother ourselves with, but, in the light of the good news of Jesus, absolutely critical.

July 2024

The views and opinions expressed above are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the Jubilee Centre or its trustees.