YouTube has become the new DIY (Do It Yourself) manual. In my early days of playing bass guitar, I accessed tutorial videos on YouTube to learn songs like “I Want You Back,” “Red House,” “The Weight,” “Girl from Ipanema” and “Silly Love Songs.” I have a friend who tiled his bathroom via video lessons. I’ve known young people who learned to tie a tie and older people who learned to program their smart phones using this media venue. For visual learners, it is a favored path to reading a manual. For those who hate being put on hold, it beats the customer service line. Our present culture learns a lot via video.
Our church’s COVID-19 Leadership Team (Deacon officers, Chairs of Personnel, Finance and Property Committee, Senior Minister and Church Operations Coordinator) have decided to reopen the Sanctuary on Sunday, April 18, for masked, socially distanced, limited seating, multiple in-person worship services. The building is ready. Pews are marked, air circulation and filtration have been approved, cleaning equipment for use between services have been purchased, and safety protocols have been determined. Rather than communicate all this information to you in written form alone, we have created a new ‘welcome video’ for the homepage of our website to both welcome worshipers to First Baptist and give detailed instructions about our gathering protocols. The protocols include registering for the worship service of your choice, entering the buildings through appropriate doors, socially-distanced seating in the Sanctuary, participating in worship with limited parameters, and exiting the Sanctuary safely. This video will be posted on the homepage of the church website this Thursday, April 8. More detailed written instructions will be emailed to parishioners next week. If neither the video nor written instructions make sense to you (I never make assumptions regarding my communicative skills), feel free to call the church office next week, and we will help you register and prepare for these worship gatherings.
Your patience during this past year has been a gift to our church community and our broader community. We will never know the illness, death and pressure on the medical community we avoided. At no time did First Baptist become the source of a viral spread, and we want to keep it that way. We are much more interested in spreading the idea that love of neighbor is a priority in our faith. We have loved well this past year. Thank you…
—Jim

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