November 20th, 2020

 

The Mission Leadership Team meet Wednesday evening to discuss a number of important issues.  One of the most important was a request by the local county health department to stop doing all in persons religious services until January 15th.  The Mission Leadership Team discussed this request and we decided to continue our services as they are.  The Macon county health department is the only one in Region 6 or Region 3 which cover most all counties in central Illinois to request the end of religious services.  All of these regions are seeing the same up tick in cases that test positive and in hospitalizations for COVID-19.  We believe that by continuing services as is we are safely protecting the people who attend from transmission of COVID-19.  All of Illinois is following the mitigations the Governor and the Illinois Department of Public Health has suggested.  These include limiting church meetings to less than 50 people or 25% of the church capacity.  For us that would be 53 people which means we could have up to 53 people in our building at the same time and they could still remain a safe social distance from one another.  To date the most we have had at a 10 am Sunday service is 25.  The 8 am service still has about 8 people in regular attendance.

 

We are equally aware than many of our people have chosen not come physically to church and we support them in their decision.  We also are looking into a contract with communications specialist to improve our live streaming of the 10 am service both in video and audio.  If that contract works out, we will begin December 6th with a new live streaming system.

 

So we will continue our present services at 8 am and 10 am.  We will however not have a Visit from St. Nicholas on December 6th.  That would violate the present guidelines from the Governor for mitigation.

 

Fr. Stormer and Mission Leadership Team.