Ss. Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church in downtown Jamestown sits vacant on Good Friday like many other churches across the country. P-J photo by Cameron Hurst

Solace.

It’s something that a community of faith attempts to find in a time of crisis, typically together, according to the Rev. Luke Fodor of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Jamestown.

“It’s also precisely something we can’t do at this moment,” he said, regarding restrictions on churches across the country to help contain the outbreak of COVID-19.

“There’s the struggle: How do we find ways of articulating the struggle and finding ways of making a connection?” he added. “We’re in a moment where nothing is business as usual and if you’re trying to be business as usual, you’re failing. This is a moment of extreme change. It’s a challenging moment, but all challenges also present opportunities.”

Religious leaders like Fodor have each had their own struggles in adjusting to life amidst a nationwide pause as a result of the novel coronavirus, especially with the Lenten and Easter season’s culmination on Sunday.

“I’d say I’ve probably been working harder than I ever have before,” said the Rev. Adam Rohler, pastor at First Covenant Church in Jamestown. “The amount of innovations we’ve had to come up with in trying to keep people together as a community when we’re not allowed to be face-to-face has been really difficult.”

“The nature of the faith is communal,” the Rev. Dennis Mende, pastor of Holy Apostles Parish, said. “It’s lived when we gather together. When we are unable to gather together, we look for other things.”

“Particularly, it’s challenging for churches that are much more sacramental that have been dealing with outward, physical signs of inward and spiritual grace,” Fodor said. “This is harder for us because that’s what we’re geared toward, that’s what our people are used to coming to church to receive the body and blood of Christ. The physical connection. When that’s denied them, it’s a little bit challenging.”

Rohler and Fodor both have used technology to bridge the communication gap with their respective congregations.

“Our bishop has said you really can’t gather and all of our buildings are closed and we’re unable to even live stream from the building,” Fodor said. ” I thought that if I can’t live stream anyway, I’ll just edit together a video. What that has allowed us to, as opposed to what other churches are doing, what we’ve done has been creating an opportunity to allow people to become collaborative in their process.”

The result was a virtual Palm Sunday service that premiered on Facebook and featured church members acting out and reading the Passion of Christ.

“I asked each of them to send me an iPhone video reading,” he said, noting that about 20 people participated. “One of our parishioners is an attorney and he has a farm here that he’s at for the weekends. His husband is a professor of classics, so I asked him to play Pontius Pilate and he dressed in a purple robe. It’s been fun to get a peek at people’s lives.”

Rohler meanwhile has worked to provide drive-in services to his congregation with a low-power FM station providing the service to those in their vehicles.

“They can still see each other and wave at each other and honk horns,” he said. “We’ve also gone online like other places have and we use Zoom all the time to have meetings. Beyond that, we’re just trying to come up with ways to continue keeping people’s hopes alive, people’s spirits alive.”

Members of the Holy Apostles Parish choir, meanwhile, have worked to also provide the music typically heard over the pipe organ at Ss. Peter and Paul Church via their Facebook page.

“Good Friday is always special for me, because of our noonday presentation of the Seven Last Words (a cantata by Theodore DuBois),” Mende said. “That is a service that I am able to go to and attend. I don’t have to preside. I can just be ministered to by the choir that’s doing that presentation. Not having that this year is a tremendous void.”

But, with pews empty week to week, the financial future of churches all over the country, who typically rely on a weekly Sunday collection, remains unclear.

“This will have a long-term effect,” he said. “In the short term, we’re OK. Some people do pre-pay their pledges for the whole year and so, as far as the cash flow goes in the current moment, we’re OK. However, there will be real implications long term. But, the main communication that we’ve had with our parishioners has been that we’re more concerned with them than ourselves at this moment.”

Mende, too, said that his parish remains in a stable financial condition.

“We are totally blessed at Holy Apostles, because from the very start of when we were unable to gather for Sunday mass, people have been sending in their weekly contributions, dropping them off at the rectory office,” he said. “We have had a substantial collection each week, just from the goodness of the people sending in those contributions.”

Rohler, meanwhile, noted that his church has applied for the Payroll Protection Loan available through the CARES Act, which aims to provide loans to small businesses. That includes non-profits and churches.

“That’ll help if we can get that,” he said. “At the same time, people are scared, people are laid off and don’t have income coming in right now and so that effects giving to the church, too. We’re just making people aware that we want to keep going.”

Mende also explained that funerals and baptisms have also been affected.

“In one case we just had a simple burial service outside at the cemetery and it was just the local immediate family,” he said. “It leaves people at loose ends. That really is very upsetting at a time where the family would want to come together.”

“It’s interesting because I think that we are in a collective grief as a community,” Rohler said of the reaction to the virus. “We’re mourning the loss of what our normal was and it was taken away rather quickly. … The challenge is to let people grieve in their own way … There’s no normal way to grieve and everybody does it differently. As a pastor, I’m trying to be very sensitive to that as people are feeling the loss of their normal lives.”

“There is also an advantage to recognizing from a distance what it is that we normally have and what we normally take for granted,” Mende said. “There can be a value in that and an appreciation of the act of a simple gathering together. We just take that for granted. Now we can’t. Now, we have an opportunity to look at that and reflect on it from a distance.”

And though churches across the world may be empty on Sunday, Mende and Fodor implored those who typically worship to consider the similarities between that of this Easter Sunday and the original Easter Sunday.

“This is quite the appropriate moment for us to think about the Easter mystery because this is the moment in which we’re in,” Fodor said. “This moment of fear and anxiety and darkness, looking for deliverance and we’ll encounter it kind of as the first disciples did: with an empty tomb or in this case empty churches. It’s a way for us to honor that empty space that is there.”

“Those are all things that could give us hope,” Mende said. “It’s a very dark time now. Good Friday originally was a very dark time, but even after experiencing his death after they had all scattered, they gradually came back together again. Recalling that, that can give us hope: there will be a time where we can come back together again.”