St. Patrick Family,
We find ourselves 18 months into a strange and terrible providence, surrounded by a frenzy of hurt and worry. Now, our own senior pastor and his wife are battling COVID-19. As the Session of Elders called to shepherd the flock of St. Patrick, we understand the unique and urgent anxiety of this moment requires a direct and compassionate pastoral response from us, urging members to draw near to Christ and move toward one another through concrete acts of grace. We hope humbly to model this posture for you.
Therefore, the Session of St. Patrick would like to extend an invitation for a season of special services of prayer and communion, beginning this Sunday, September 5, at 8am in the sanctuary. These services will be a mask-only event, and we want to take a moment to explain why.
First, we still believe that a universal mask mandate is not something we can require from our congregation, as long as it is left up to us. This flows from our commitment to limit the extent to which we exercise our own God-given authority over the congregation to the sphere for which it was given – namely, the purity of the gospel in the hearts and lives of our congregation. Mandating masks for all people would unreasonably bind the consciences of our membership and disallow them the freedom of expression for the love they have toward their neighbors, even when those expressions might appear obvious to us.
However, we also acknowledge with profound sadness that the exercise of this conviction reveals a terrible cost, which some of the more vulnerable members of our congregation have been living with for a year and a half. Many of our people are longing to return to the assembly and to receive communion together: essential elements of worship that are made impossible for those watching our live-streamed services from afar. But they are unable to receive these means of grace, due to a variety of vulnerabilities. It is for this reason that we are, for a season, opening up an opportunity for those members to augment their livestream participation by also partaking in this service of prayer and communion. Any and all members are welcome to attend, but masks will be required in order to set the table well for these precious family members.
We are starting with six weeks, simply because we don’t know what the future holds. We of course hope and pray for a miraculous and immediate end to this pandemic and a return to the robust fellowship of all our members in one service. We also know that in the meantime, we do not want to dishonor the unity of Christ’s body. Hence, our extraordinary reticence to start an entire second service with different requirements, or to place a specific mandate beyond that of Christ upon all our people. But we also know that a natural diversity of needs always exists among us, and to ignore this reality is unkind. We hope that by mitigating the loss of fellowship and communion for those who choose to livestream we can communicate to them our earnest desire to welcome them back when providence permits.
For years, the St. Patrick Maundy Thursday service has included a brief word on the origin of its name: it’s from the Latin, “mandatum,” meaning command. It refers to Jesus’ directive on the night in which he was betrayed, even as he took on the role of servant to wash their feet, that his followers would love one another. Then he broke bread and blessed the cup, signaling to them that the full extent of this mandate is, “my life for yours.” We do therefore mandate that all of our members find tangible, meaningful, self-sacrificial ways to express their love and commitment to one another, despite differences on significant, yet secondary, issues. Because Grace is Everything. Community Is Family. Feasting Is Kingdom Work. And Heaven Is Local.
May the Peace of Christ be upon you,
The Session of St. Patrick Presbyterian Church
