Faith vs Virus

  17th April 2020

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-africa-52079447/coronavirus-in-africa-christians-urged-to-worship-from-home

In The U.K. we have all had to adjust to living and dying with the Coronavirus, social distancing has played a key part in terms of the Governments attempts to apprehend the spread of the pandemic. Distancing could however be seen as a privilege in many respects and in many countries around the world the potential for effective distancing is diminished. The impact upon people’s religious lives when it comes to communal worship is, as the above article suggests, substantial. In a ‘secular’ country like the U.K. with all of its established and ordered infrastructure we have witnessed the cracks in the fabric of society in terms of mental health and increased pressure on living arrangements but the impact upon people in countries such as Nigeria, where faith is often the glue that keeps body and soul together and ways of living are necessarily more precarious, must be felt far more acutely as churches close and people are left with no choice but to worship from home. We should not underestimate the importance of any form of communal worship in any tradition…but it is not yet known what impact faith has and will continue to have upon people’s ability to get through the current health crisis and flourish upon the other side.