I swear I was honestly shocked that people were standing with guns in front of hair salons before they were standing in front of churches.
Most of Christianity is not made up of pacifists and since they can reconcile themselves with serving in the military and going to war I honestly thought they would side with the constitution and their right to worship as they saw fit.
I thought about this a bit, but there were a few things I personally noticed:
Most churches I am involved with were able to quickly alter their service structure to accommodate the rules put in place. So we never had a real cessation of services. Some churches went to virtual online sermons, some like ours continued to meet, but did so in the parking lot with people still in their cars distances apart. Many of the pastors (myself included) posted sermons and videos online or on our church social media sites.
Also, most of the more conservative churches that I know of personally are in areas where the local LEO weren’t going to be policing them anyway. Whether it’s because they thought the rules were silly, or they knew they were messing with the exact type of constitutionalist that would shoot back.
There is also the matter of church leadership being involved. The church I am part of refused to close, and me and the head pastor were willing to be arrested if the LEO had an issue with our “altered service arrangements”. But we also recognized that the vast majority of our members would follow our lead. So we had to keep them in mind. At first, when we >really< didn’t know if the KungFlu was going to be as bad as they said it could be, none of us wanted to risk the lives of our members. So we were willing to postpone a few things until we knew more. Then, when things seemed to be flattening out we recognized that we were still achieving the mission of the church (preaching the gospel, serving the community, and providing a place of fellowship), so there was no need to further endanger our parishioners by forcing the LEOs hands.
I will, however, say that this patience is growing thinner week by week.
Now, compare this to a business: if they don’t open, they don’t eat. Their central mission is profit, they cannot achieve that while closed. A church, whose central mission is saving souls and serving the community can.
And finally, as weakly mentioned above in a “pick and choose” manner, there is biblical directives to respect the law of the land as long as it doesn’t directly go against Gods word or grossly impact the goals of the church. Which again leads to the “patience was/is growing thin” as more and more churches are realizing that it is becoming less about safety and more about state control.
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