The Church in Quarantine: How Pastors Responded to the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Impacts Their Decisions Made on Reopening and Rebuilding Their Communities

Abstract

This study intends to employ an ethnographic method to explore pastors’ pandemic experiences and reveal the individual stories and reflections behind the broad, well-known quarantine trends. Rather than a summary of all American church experience during the pandemic, this study seeks to capture the lives of pastors and churches as they attempted to navigate the health, safety, and spiritual care of their communities. Though individual stories contain specific contexts and conditions, together they reveal startling insights about the efficacy of digital programming and the apparent tradeoffs between accessibility, visibility, presence, and ministerial connection. In addition, this work also made clear the pandemic’s precarious effect on the mental health of church leaders and the lonely burden they shouldered while navigating this time. Because the pandemic represented such a significant struggle in the life of the modern church, leaders and staff have mostly avoided doing a careful analysis of what exactly happened over the last three years. My hope for this study is that a careful retrospective of the experiences and decisions made during the pandemic can help churches discern their mission for a future that has been inexorably altered by this period of exile.