No church on Sunday is coronavirus's cruelest closure so far
Before the dramatic closures of the past few days, religious leaders had wrestled first with adjustments to make worship more hygienic.
The decision was agonizing for many religious leaders.
This isn't the first time these conversations have been had. 9Marks, an evangelical ministry for training pastors, this week published a history of how churches responded in 1918 when the government shut down public gatherings because of the Spanish Flu. The piece quoted a letter to the editor to the Evening Star - a Washington newspaper - by a D.C. pastor.
"Nothing has so contributed to that state of panic which has gripped this community as the fact that the normal religious life of our city has been disorganized," the letter read, according to the 9Marks piece. City commissioners had used only "materialistic grounds" to argue for the closure. "That prayer had any efficacy in the physical world was an...
