Local Religious Leaders Adapt Congregations to Coronavirus, and Answer the Question: How Does God Allow It?

“You got everything OK? Soap and towels and everything?” he yells to a homeless man who had walked into the Church of the Rock in Bunnell. “Good. Stay safe, brother.”

“We’re still doing everything we can do to help the needy,” Bellino said when he returned to the phone. “It’s definitely gotten harder.

“I’ll say this,” Bellino added with a laugh, “I’ve never seen anyone weep over a bag of disinfectant or a roll of toilet paper before this week, but now I have.”

Bellino is one of millions of religious leaders from all over the world confronting the coronavirus pandemic over the past month, and he and his fellow servants are tackling the problem head-on from two fronts: How to logistically handle trying to keep a congregation or group of worshipers connected to the physical worship location when most everyone is sheltered-in-place, and also wrestling with the theological question of how a deity could allow a pandemic like Covid-19 to so ravage its creation.

First, from the day-to-day challenge of trying to keep a flock connected to each other, local Flagler-area leaders like Bellino and Rabbi Rose Eberle of Temple Beth Shalom in Palm Coast said they’ve learned new skills and reached out the best they can.

“We’ve been using the Zoom platform since March 21, and for the 75 congregants we have, it’s been surprisingly easy,” Eberle said. “We have a mostly elderly congregation and they’ve really taken to it well. Some of our younger people were actually the ones who struggled.”

Eberle said her message in her sermons hasn’t changed drastically because of the pandemic, even during the holiday of Passover.

“Mostly the message has continued to be, the things you do to protect others from yourself is as worthy, in these times, as giving other care to them,” Eberle said. “Whether it’s washing your hands all the time, wearing a mask out in public, staying away from others if you feel sick, that’s all incredibly important and valuable, and consistent with Jewish teachings.”

The difficulty for Eberle has been that spring is a very busy time for Jews to worship each year, with Purim, Shuvout, and Passover, and there’s something at her synagogue nearly every day for two months. Now, of course, all of that has been halted.

“We did a virtual Seder and I’ve reached out to as many of our congregants as I can,” Eberle said. “There are people on our roster who I’ve never seen before, and all of a sudden I’m hearing from them and seeing them a lot more.”

For Bellino, his congregation’s small size (around 100 parishioners) has actually meant they haven’t had to completely stop in-person services.

While Bible study classes have been cancelled, Bellino said approximately 20 people per week have been coming to the church on Sundays.

“We’re spreading everyone out throughout the sanctuary, and we’re sanitizing everything, and we try not to share a microphone,” Bellino said. “And we’re doing our usual openings on Saturday for the homeless to take a shower and have a meal, and we’ve even had a few prayer meetings with about five or six people.”

Bellino said he and the church staff are strongly encouraging anyone who isn’t comfortable with coming to the service live to stay home.

And, from a purely financial standpoint, he admits contributions have “dropped tremendously, but understandably.”

Ashraf Shaikh, a board member at the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida in Jacksonville, said the pandemic has been particularly challenging given Muslims’ requirement to pray five times per day.

“We have decided we have to keep the Islamic Center closed for now, but it’s very difficult because everyone understands we’re still obligated to pray, but they’re used to coming here several times a day,” Shaikh said. “It’s been a very difficult decision, one we’ve never had to make, but we’ve had to explain to people that we just can’t have a group of people inside the center right now, it’s too dangerous.”

Shaikh said that with Ramadan set to begin on April 23, it will be particularly difficult to have the Center closed. It attracts up to 400 worshipers for a weekend feast.

Shaikh said the imam, Hafez Muhammad Bilal Malik, has been doing nightly 9 p.m. Facebook lectures to try to keep the community together.

At Pastor Terry Wines’ First United Methodist Church in Bunnell,  live stream worship on Facebook has also been the way to keep connected. Wines said they began services with six people in the church, but now are down to 1-2 individuals. But the livestream isn’t reaching a majority of First United’s congregation, Wines said, so they’ve had to take a few extreme measures.

“More than half our people aren’t on the Internet, so we’ve been recording our services, and then transferring them onto DVD’s, and mailing those out to our congregants,” Wines said. “It’s a bit of a long process but we’re trying it.”

Wines said that his church is still offering a virtual Communion each week. “We tell people they can have a piece of bread, and a cup of juice, and at the time of the service, I will consecrate the service,” Wines said.

Other normal church services have had to be suspended: The food pantry that First United runs had to be shut down, not because of a lack of food, but a lack of volunteers who were fearful of contracting the virus.

“We’ve been doing to-go meals for the past month, and The Sheltering Tree, the non-profit working out of our church, has been doing bag lunches,” Wines said. “The community has been great but clearly this is something we’ve never been through before.”

Beyond the logistical day-to-day challenges, each of the religious leaders said they’ve been wrestling with how to talk to worshipers about the inexplicable nature of this plague–any plague, really–being cast upon the people of the world, what’s referred to as theodicy. Put simply, how do clerics explain God’s allowance of calamities on such a scale?

Historically clerics have tended to preempt the question by blaming pandemics and wars going back to the Black Death of the 14th century or the flu of 1918 on divine retribution for human failings. Abraham Lincoln himself, in his second Inaugural Address, called the Civil War God’s punishment for slavery. Clerics and politicians have so far largely refrained from ascribing Covid-19 to divine retribution, perhaps because of the disease’s universality: it is sparing no one, no religion, no ethnicity and no place, likely including mythical places like the Garden of Eden. Politicians have been the target of plenty of blame, but deities so far have been largely spared.

To a person, local religious leaders said, not many of their congregants have railed against a higher being.

“Look, we didn’t blame God for the Holocaust, we’re not going to blame God for Covid-19,” Rabbi Eberle said. “There are viruses in the universe, populations will go up and down. This (virus) is not an indictment from God, or a punishment from God. Once we ate from the silly tree, we have to deal with what happened to us.” (The “silly tree,” alternately known as the Tree of Knowledge, is a reference to Adam and Eve in Genesis eating from the one tree God forbade them to eat from, leading to their “fall.”)

Wines said his message has been similar, and that he’s not seeing “a lot of anger at faith with our people. Their frustration is just what they can’t do in their daily lives.”

“What I’ve been saying, my basic philosophy, is that God does not cause these things, and we’re reminding people that God is in the recovery. He’s there walking with us. Through mass shootings, 9/11, hurricanes, tornadoes, there is this constant bad stuff that’s going to happen, but it’s God who walks with us through this process.

“The other thing I’ve been noticing,” Wines added, “is that this pause in life is a good chance for us to have a deep discussion with God, especially around Easter time now.”

Shaikh said Muslims that he knows also have not been angry at the fates.

“We believe that there is a creator, and that we need to fix our behavior when things go wrong,” he said. “Lots of people get hurt and have bad things happen to them, and many of them might be the most righteous people. We do not have the type of understanding for why that might be, but God has a reason. Because nothing happens without a reason.”

Bellino echoed what Eberle said, hearkening back to Adam and Eve.

“Sin,” he said, “entered the world because of a rejection of God, with Adam. Death entered the world when sin did. The sinful world has cancer, and other awful things in the world. God allows it because he allows free will and choice. And I think most people understand that.”

By some readings of course, Adam never rejected God but merely lived up to his promise, becoming his own man–as Eve became her own woman ahead of him–leading the rather jealous God of the Old Testament to retaliate. But echoed by clerics and congregants, many responses to this pandemic seem inspired by the more compassionate God of the New Testament, or what Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, had called “the better angels of our nature.”