Dear Grace Covenant Church, the psalmist says in Psalm 122.1, I was glad when they said to me, let us go into the house of the Lord. That's exactly what we're going to do this Lord's Day. We are, after some seven weeks, going to reconvene in the house of God here at 2236 Salem Road. And we're going to join together, join our voices together, join our confession together, and join our hearts together as we lift them up to the Lord. As many of you know, this week Governor Northam announced that Virginia will begin phase one of reopening, and that includes houses of worship. And so we are going to gather together this Lord's Day. But there are a number of moving parts and details that we need to go over just to make sure everybody's on the same page for what that's going to look like. So instead of writing you a long email, I wanted to put together a quick video for you to check out so that you can prepare yourself for this Lord's Day. And the first thing I want to say is precisely that. Prepare yourself because things are not going to be normal. Don't get me wrong, our worship will be normal. We will be entering into worship, we will be singing hymns, we will be hearing from the Word of God, we will be confessing our sins, we will hear an assurance of pardon. All the elements of the liturgy are going to be there, but the circumstances in which we gather are going to be a little bit different. So I know that there's a spectrum within our congregation of disagreements and opinions on what the government's doing and how people should be going about responding to this pandemic. But let me just remind you and ask you to keep in mind, when we come together on the Lord's Day, we're not coming together for the point of sharing doubtful disputations, as Paul says in Romans 14. We're coming together to worship. And we're not coming together to make much of this age, we're coming together to make much of the age to come. And we do that as we enter into worship together. So I invite you, this Lord's Day, to come, prepare your hearts, and be ready to worship. The second thing I want to say, kind of piggybacking on what I just said, is that this is a Christian liberty issue. And I said that last week. Some of you weren't here at the service to hear it, but I want to reiterate this. These are very uncertain and unconventional times. For anyone who thinks in purely idyllic terms, and as a result says, well, we should just gather no matter what, exactly how we were before, with all due respect, you're not living in reality. Okay? Reality is where we are now. What you see, what you hear, what's going on, this is where we're at. Agree or disagree, these are the circumstances in which we live. And instead of complaining about it, we should seek to make the most of it. That being said... If you are concerned about your safety, if you are concerned that in coming to worship service on Sunday, whether you are in your car in the parking lot or in the building, that you might contract a virus, feel free not to come. It will grieve our hearts not to see you, but we want you to know that you have the liberty to make that decision, and we want you to know that as the leadership We encourage your decision, so don't feel like you're being judged. You can listen to the sermon online, you can worship together with your family, but this is a Christian liberty issue. We can't promise you that there's not going to be any risk involved. There is a little bit of risk, but that being said, we are taking the proper precautions as laid out by the state and federal government. and trying to make your worship experience as safe as possible. Please consider staying home or listening to the service in the parking lot if you are in one of those high-risk categories. If you have respiratory issues, if you are sick, if you have a fever, if you've recently traveled outside of the country or even outside of the state in the last 14 days, consider staying at home or even worshiping in your car in the parking lot. Now the third thing I want to say is we will begin meeting in the building, as I said, this Lord's Day for worship, in the morning service. The evening service is temporarily suspended. We are currently working through the logistics of how we would make that happen. I don't know when it's going to come back, but we're trying to get that back as soon as possible. Right now we're focusing all of our efforts on the morning service. So morning service, will resume at 10 a.m. on Sunday morning. Keep in mind, we are going to keep the windows in the sanctuary open. I looked at the weather for Sunday. It looks like it's going to be pleasant weather. We want those windows open so that we can get a cross breeze and circulate the air more efficiently. So the weather should be pleasant, but if you are prone to getting cold in a room with open windows, please bring a sweater or jacket so that you don't get too cold. I mean, after all, this is Virginia Beach. We have no idea what's going to happen on Sunday. We will be taking an offering in our worship time on Sunday morning. The deacons will be coming around with large plastic bowls for you to drop your offering in. They will not be passing it around. They will be bringing it around. So you'll never have to touch it. And they're going to be bringing it around with latex gloves and masks on. All you got to do is drop it in. If you're uncomfortable with that, you can bring your offering before service and put it in the bowl. The bowl should be on the communion table, either right in front of the pulpit or on the stage. And if it's not there, you can just give it to a deacon. Or even after service, you can give it to a deacon. When Communion Sunday comes, we will be taking communion with the prepackaged communion juice and wafer cups that we used in the drive-in service. Upon walking into the building, a deacon will be there on Communion Sunday and will give you that cup so that when the time in the service for taking communion comes, we're all ready to go and we can just commune together. Fourth thing I want to say is that there are going to be six seating options for our morning time of worship. Number one, you could come and sit in the building, but here's where it gets a little involved. The governor has said that we can be at 50% capacity of the occupancy number in our sanctuary. That means that we can have 91 people in the sanctuary itself. That's 50% of normal capacity. Now, in addition to that 50% capacity, the family units have to be socially distanced by six feet. So here's what we're asking you to do. The deacons are going to have the sanctuary set up in clusters. So there will be two to three seats, two to three chairs in clusters that will be distance by six feet from the other chairs. What we're going to ask you to do is to come in with your family, find a place to sit down. If you need more chairs than what is there, go grab a chair or ask the deacons to help you get a chair. The deacons will be there to assist you. If you don't need three chairs and there's three chairs, take one away so that somebody else can use it, and then sit down and prepare your heart for worship. Now, once you find that spot, your cluster, what we're going to ask is that for the coming Sundays, as long as we have to have this modified form of worship, you continue to sit in that spot Sunday after Sunday. That way, when we come in on Sunday morning, we don't have to go through this rigmarole of adjusting seats. Now, we're still going to have to adjust it. We're going to have visitors, and there's going to be some people that aren't there. But come in, find your seat, and add or take away a seat as necessary. Now, if you want to come and sit in the sanctuary, and you want to make sure that you have that spot, we would encourage you to try to come early, 15 to 20 minutes early, so that you can secure that spot in the sanctuary. If we run out of room in the sanctuary, you may listen to the service in your car in the parking lot. We are going to continue to broadcast the service on FM 89.7. We're going to do something a little bit differently this Sunday and the coming Sundays. We are going to broadcast it to one side of the church, meaning there's one side of the church that's going to get better reception, and that is when you're coming down the driveway of the church, turn left park on the left side of the church where that row of HVAC units are, okay? And if you forget, there's going to be a deacon there guiding and directing traffic. Tune your car radio to 89.7 and you will hear the service. A third place where you can sit, if you're not going to sit in the parking lot or there's no more room in the sanctuaries, you can sit in the adult classroom next to my office right here in the corner by the bathrooms. We will have seats set up and we will have a radio broadcasting the service on 89.7. Another place you could sit is in the cry room. If you have children and you like to take them in the cry room, you're welcome to do that. Another place you can go and sit is the nursery. Now on that note, I want to make it very clear, we will not have nursery service available. What we mean by that very simply is we're not going to have nursery workers in the nursery checking your children in and checking them out, but the nursery itself will be open and available for parents to take their children in if they need to take them out of the sanctuary. What nursery workers will be doing is they will be disinfecting nursery items before and after the service. They're not going to be doing it during the service, but they will be doing it before and after the service. So you can rest assured that if your kid's playing with a toy in the nursery, it'll be as clean as possible. The final place that you could sit, if none of those other places are available, is in the hallway. We're going to have chairs distanced by six feet, and you could sit in the hallway. There's a speaker in the hallway that will broadcast the service, and you can hear every detail. Okay? One more option that we will add is if you are a nursing mother and you need to nurse your child, please go in the church library. The window on that door is blotted out so nobody can see in. And I think most of our moms know that that's the place where they can go. But just want to remind you, you can take your child in there if you need to nurse him or her. What about masks? We are encouraging you to wear a mask, but we're not requiring you to wear a mask, okay? And what that means is, once again, coming back to Christian Liberty, you need to make that call. And if you are more on the fearful side about whether or not you should come, you just need to take into consideration that there will probably be people here that don't have masks on. Now, if you have a mask on, you should be fine. but we're not requiring that people wear masks. The front and rear doors of the church will be open before service, so that you can walk right in, you don't need to open the handle, and you can just come right in, find a place to sit, and begin to worship. We will also have a brother and sister station at the bathrooms. The bathroom doors will be closed for propriety's sake, but we will be disinfecting those door handles every time somebody uses them. We are going to send out the bulletin for the liturgy on Sunday to the listserv, and then there will also be a link on the website itself for the bulletin. So you have a few options. If you want a paper bulletin, that's something that is important to you, we encourage you to print out your bulletin at home and bring it to service. You can look at it on your tablet or your iPhone. Or if you forget all of those things and you're just doing everything you can to get there at 10 o'clock on Sunday morning, we will have a handful of paper bulletins available. for the taking, if you want those. Now, pretty much all of our liturgy, anything that you are going to need to see, whether it's the responsive reading, or lyrics for songs, or whatever, are all going to be projected on the screen. Also, they'll be on the bulletin if you need to see them there. But if you are one of the few people in our congregation who likes to use the hymnal during our time of worship, Go ahead and take a hymnal home. If you touch it, just take it home and keep it for an indefinite period of time. Every time you come to worship service, okay? But if you touch it, we will ask that you just take it. That's fine. If you take a pew Bible or a hymnal, just take it home. Otherwise, all the words for the songs and the responsive reading will be on the overhead. We look forward to seeing you all this Lord's Day as we corporately come together to worship the Triune God. I know that I've had the opportunity to see some of you during this time, but I have not seen most of you. And I am very much looking forward to seeing you. I know the elders and the deacons are as well. So if you have any questions, anything that I've left out, any question that I have not addressed, please feel free to reach out to me. Give me a call, text me, email me, and I'll be happy to answer those questions. Until then, we pray that the Lord give you a good rest of the week, and that we can come together to worship on Sunday. Take care.