OLDS - Although the Olds First Baptist Church community is disappointed that in-person services have once again been markedly reduced, members are supportive of efforts to bring down COVID-19 numbers for everyone’s sake, says lead pastor Brent Reilly.
Under new COVID restrictions announced last week, faith services are limited to in-person attendance of 15 people.
In order to have enough people on hand to run their online services, Olds First Baptist will not be conducting in-person services for the time being, he said.
“We are basically going back to what we were doing at the beginning of the lockdown, which is recording the service and putting it up online for folks to watch,” Reilly said. “Fifteen (people) is basically our production group, our musicians and speakers and so on.”
Not being able to meet in person is hard on the church community in a number of ways, not the least being its impact on togetherness, he said.
“Fellowship is a crucial part of our spiritual lives and I think it is that way right across the Christian spectrum,” he said. “One of the key words that we work with is fellowship. Worship is important, but fellowship is certainly important.
"And that is simply being together, whether it is singing together or praying together or whether it sharing concerns with one another or speaking encouraging words to one another.”
The church community is of course looking to the Bible for guidance during the pandemic, he said.
“The Bible clearly says, in Romans chapter 13, that we are to be subject to the governing authorities because the governing authorities have been instituted by God,” he said. “So we are working with that and we are being obedient to that.
"If the government asked us to do something that is contrary to what the Bible tells us to do, we would have to respectfully disobey. The government has not commanded us to do something the Bible forbids and it hasn’t forbidden us from doing something the Bible commands.”
The new restrictions impact not only regular faith services, but also funerals and weddings. No more than 10 people are permitted to attend funeral and wedding services, including guests and participants, and wedding and funeral receptions are not permitted.
“Fortunately we don’t have any (funerals) in the immediate offing so it won’t affect us right now; if funerals arise it will,” he said. “We’ve been finding that a lot of people are deferring funerals until some future day.
“We’ve got some weddings in the summer but nothing in the immediate offing. We are hoping that by the time they come around the restrictions will be eased.”
COVID-19 has actually hit the Olds First Baptist Church community quite hard, he said.
“I actually just recovered from it a couple weeks ago,” he said. “We have four pastors on staff and three of us have had it. We actually voluntarily stopped our in-person services for the last two Sundays of April, so we just came back to in-person last Sunday and now we are shut down again.”
Everyone is hopeful that the current restrictions will be lifted soon and church life will be able to get back to normal, he said.
