Church services could look different for a while

No plan in place yet, but distancing and other precautions will be key

As COVID-19 cases start to dwindle in more rural areas, such as Peterborough, and the province moves toward opening things up again, meetings with faith-based leaders are starting to ramp up. Peterborough-Kawartha MPP Dave Smith spoke with reporters on Thursday morning about what faith leaders in the community have said to him about church services in the coming weeks.

The province has not made public any play to reopen churches.

“Most of those communities have been doing zoom meetings or online meeting with Facebook live to conduct their services,” he said.

“One of the things that came out of that was most of the faith communities have said they’re OK with having the virtual services right now,” he added. “They would like to continue down that path.”

Smith said faith leaders asked how they could responsibly move forward with things such as funerals in order to keep everyone safe.

When you are talking about funerals, people tend to be closer together and want to be able to share their grief with others, said Smith.

It is the social norm now to wear a face mask, so we should be able to have larger groups for a funeral, if people respect physical distancing and wear a mask, he said.

He compared funerals to churches, in that people who all come from the same household, drive in the same car and apply physical distancing could be counted as a group with the same exposure.

These groups of people from different households could distance themselves in the church, so a service could potentially have 50 people, 10 groups of five people, for example, all distancing.

The churches would be able to put protocols in place to protect family-to-family opposed to individual-to-individual, Smith said.

Smith spoke about how physical distancing could be used first in churches to see how it works in a smaller setting versus a larger one like a concert or sporting event.

“When you get together at a church, you have multiple families there, it is not a great deal different then getting together for a concert, for a live performance or a sporting event,” said Smith.

He thinks the answer is yes, it can be done in a responsible fashion that can be tested that will not create much of a problem.

“We will have a chance to see what the effect of that is, without it happening every single day that week, so it is a much easier way for us to test,” Smith said.