Albion First United Methodist Church issued the following announcement on Nov. 24.
Good afternoon. Grace and peace to you in the name of our Savior, Jesus Christ.
I come to you with a certain sadness to share the recent information from Bishop Beard, instructing us to suspend in person worship and all in building church meetings and gatherings of any size.
Below is the portion of his pastoral letter to me and to all churches and pastors in the Illinois Great Rivers Conference.
As you are aware, the entire state of Illinois is seeing alarmingly high positivity rates. All of the state is under mitigation measures and two of the six regions in Illinois have moved to a second, stricter, stage of mitigation and the possibility of the remaining regions could come any day.
For the good of our 800 congregations and communities where they reside, I am instructing our churches not to meet for indoor worship for the next four weeks (Nov. 22, 29, Dec. 6 and 13). On Dec. 9, a determination will be made for Christmas Eve and Christmas services in the weeks to follow.
Using the information from the Pressing On document which was developed recently by the IGRC Extended Cabinet:
• Indoor or outdoor in-person church services and gatherings should not be held.
• Churches may gather for drive-in worship services of any size with proper distancing.
• For the purpose of producing or broadcasting worship, groups of 10 or less may gather with facemasks and proper social distancing
• Church buildings should close, and staff should work from home, except for essential and minimum, basic operations that need to be conducted in the building such as social service ministries.
What this means is we will not be holding any in-church gatherings of any size until at least after December 13, depending on the reevaluation of the situation on December 9. Our office will also be closed, and all phone calls made to the office will be transferred to my phone that way we will not miss any calls from you as members or others who may need help.
Please be aware, we will be using virtual worship as we did at the beginning of this pandemic. It will air at 9:00 am on Sunday mornings on Facebook at Facebook.com/albionfirstumc, and on YouTube at Albion First UMC. We hope you will join us there for the services for these next 4 weeks.
If you have any questions concerning this information, please feel free to contact me at 618-214-5510.
Please keep me informed of any prayer requests or needs you may have.
God Bless
Pastor Brad
Original source can be found here.
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