Church building remains closed for now

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The Falcon Heights Church building will remain closed until specific safety benchmarks can be met in the church and the wider community.

Earlier this month, the Executive Board endorsed the report from a COVID-19 Short-Term Working Group that incorporates three principles:

  • Our responsibility as a Christian community to care for one another
  • Recognition of churches’ role as “superspreaders” of the pandemic
  • Adoption of new language that more accurately reflects our situation, i.e., replacing “reopening/resuming/back to normal” with “adapting/beginning/new normal.”

In line with those principles, “the Board will only consider opening or gathering when official approval and guidelines are issued along with dates for a staged reopening of Minnesota churches, robust community testing, contact tracing and vaccine availability.”

However, our church remains live and well, and we continue to seek new ways to carry out Christ’s ministry in our community and our world. If we can’t be in the building, we have outdoor spaces we can use and share with our neighbors. We will also continue to use and, we hope, expand our use of online platforms such as Zoom and Facebook Premiere. In fact, we want to encourage entrepreneurs in the congregation to initiate new online small-group gatherings and activities. The working group’s report includes a Google Docs spreadsheet for sharing ideas.