Dear Emmanuel Family,
A week of not having worship in the sanctuary on Sunday and not going into the office at the church has me thinking about all the things I took for granted about my job as your pastor. Before the sequestering experience caused by the virus I could make an assumption that I was going to see most of you on Sundays. And if I didn’t see people in worship I could make a mental list of those whom I needed to check in with. I had a certain rhythm in the way I organized my week and each day had its list of tasks. I could talk with Sue Hendrix or Marin Kaetzel or Sharon Concha by simply getting up and walking to my office door or making a trip down the hall. My commute home from the church in the afternoons gave me a built in buffer between work time and home time.
All of these things have gone away. Their loss means that I am now thinking about new ways to stay in touch with you, administer the workings of the congregation and lead us in worship. Like it or not, my cell phone and the Zoom video conferencing platform have become my primary tools. They are a distant second to the joy of personal contact, but they are what I have and I am glad I have them.
We’ll have our second worship gathering on Zoom on March 22nd at 10am. We’ve spent a good bit of time this week trying to address the glitches of last Sunday. There will be some new things we’re doing and I’ll be interested in your thoughts about our gatherings so that we can continue to improve what we are doing. I’ll be sending you the link to the meeting in an email tomorrow. All you need to do is to click on that link and it will take you directly to the meeting. If you have never used Zoom before it will take a little extra time to download the application.
I also want you to know that even though I am not in my office and not booking lunches or making pastoral calls to people’s homes I am available to engage with you as your pastor. We can easily schedule a phone call or a face to face meeting on Zoom or on Face time. Just send me an email (daver@epcbothell.org) or give me a call or send me a text on my mobile phone 206-715-3007, and we can set up an appointment to get together.
My hope is to write regularly about what God is teaching me in this time. I’ll send you those reflections via email and post them on our website on the “Coming together while we’re staying apart” page (https://www.epcbothell.org/covid19). You can reply to those posts either by replying to the email or leaving your comments on the website and I will respond to those emails and comments.
Finally, I need to continue to ask for your help in staying in touch with the people of our congregation who will neither have access to this message nor the ability to view our worship gatherings because they either have no computer or limited connectivity to online resources. If you know of someone in that category please tell me and we will make sure that they are receiving a regular phone call from someone in the congregation. Thanks for your help.
Dave