This Week from Mitch

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

If COVID has taught us anything, it is that our life is filled with pivots. The Delta variant of COVID-19 is once again forcing our church to pivot. This latest pivot comes in the form of our Jazz Mass. After speaking to the choir last night, we have decided to postpone it, moving it to a later date. At this time I do not know when. The reason for the postponement is primarily safety. The Jazz Mass typically brings in 400-plus people for our 10:30 a.m. service. While I do not think it would do that during COVID, I have to ask myself how safe is it for 225 or 250 people to show up? The Jazz Mass could easily attract these sorts of numbers.

The safety of the choir — who are all members of our church — also needs to be considered. During the Jazz Mass, they typically sit in the front four pews, packed tightly together. Dick Goodwin's wonderful band sits directly in front of them, facing them. There is no room for physical distancing. Wind instruments are played, singing is extra loud. Every CDC instruction for gatherings that I have seen advises against such a setup.

Finally, while we could livestream the service, our new setup is not fully complete. While Scott has been working diligently to use what we have, we are still waiting on key audio components. Put simply, in a few months we will be able to livestream a jazz band, but quite frankly we are not there yet.

Please know this decision was not reached lightly. All sorts of ideas from doing it outside to hosting the service with a limited capacity seating system or on a ticket system were tossed around. The Jazz Mass has always been a communitywide event. Doing the service with half of the community and only part of our choir did not feel right. To host the service with the full community simply is not safe.

So what do we intend to pivot to? You will hear more details early next week, but on Sept. 12, we would still like you all to come to meet Alex Cato our new director of youth and children's ministries. We are working on plans to have a mixture of an indoor and outdoor service. After the service, weather permitting, we will have activities, food, and fun planned. It will not be on the scale of our Jazz Mass, which after Christmas and Easter is our third-largest Sunday of the year, but it will be something fun, safe, worship-filled and holy.

In Christ,

Mitch+