NEW YORK (AP) — As in-person worship services are canceled or downsized amid the coronavirus outbreak, some churches across the U.S. are bracing for a painful drop in weekly contributions and possible cutbacks in programs and staff.

One church leader, Bishop Paul Egensteiner of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s Metropolitan New York Synod, said some of the 190 churches in his region were unlikely to survive because of a two-pronged financial hit. Their offerings are dwindling, and they are losing income from tenants such as preschools that can no longer afford to rent church venues.

“As much as I’d like to help them, everybody’s reserves are taking a hit because of the stock market,” Egensteiner said.

At Friendship Baptist Church in Baltimore, a mostly African American congregation of about 1,100, the Rev. Alvin Gwynn Sr. bucked the cancellation trend by holding services last Sunday. But attendance was down by about 50%, and Gwynn said the day’s offering netted about $5,000 compared with a normal intake of about $15,000.

“It cuts into our ministry,” he said. “If this keeps up, we can’t fund all our outreach to help other people.”

There was a brighter outcome at the Church of the Resurrection, a large United Methodist Church congregation that operates out of five locations in the Kansas City area.

Cathy Bien, the church’s communications director, said about 25,700 people logged in to join online worship last Sunday after in-person services were canceled. That compared with normal Sunday participation of 14,000 worshippers — 8,000 in person and 6,000 online.

“It blew our minds,” Bien said. “They were coming from all over the country — a lot of Methodists from other churches.”

The huge turnout didn’t translate into a larger than normal offering, although the church is still processing checks that were sent by some of the worshippers, Bien said. She expressed hope that financial support will remain robust as the church stresses the need to bolster food pantries and other community programs in the face of COVID-19.

At Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, Virginia, giving was down modestly last weekend as the church canceled in-person worship and made the service available online.

The pastor, Walter Kim, said some of his roughly 1,000 congregants have grown accustomed to online giving in recent years, but many worshippers still give in person at the services — an option not available for now.

“We’ll be asking them to sign up (for online giving) or mail a check,” said Kim. He will be urging congregants to bolster the church’s “mercy fund” for use assisting hard-up members of the community as job losses multiply.

In addition to his pastoral duties, Kim is president of the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents more than 45,000 evangelical churches. The NAE will co-host a two-day digital summit next week featuring videos from church leaders advising other pastors nationwide how to respond creatively and effectively to the virus outbreak.

The co-host is the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College in Illinois, which already has offered resources to churches in response to COVID-19.

“Some changes are going to be required,” Kim said. “The church is a very creative institution. In the end it will find ways of fulfilling its mission.”

In Western Massachusetts, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Springfield has indefinitely canceled all public Masses, and it recently rescinded permission for parishioners to pray individually at their churches.

Funeral Masses were still allowed, with a maximum attendance of 25; the diocese said the times of those Masses were not to be shared in the media.

“Lack of access to the churches and Eucharist is particularly difficult for many older parishioners whose entire daily routine is built around getting up, out of the house, and going to Mass,” said the Rev. Mark Stelzer, who has served in the diocese as a parish priest and college chaplain.

The Rev. William Tourigny, pastor of Ste. Rose de Lima Church in Chicopee, Massachusetts, said his parish had a solid financial foundation and expected it could maintain all programs and staff payroll for the time being.

“For smaller faith-based communities with little or no reserved funds, difficult decisions will need to be made,” he said.

Joe Wright, executive director of the Bivocational and Small Church Leadership Network in Nashville, said many pastors in the network have been holding regular in-person services, while monitoring the spread of the virus.

“Once the coronavirus rises to the level where it starts hitting smaller groups, then we’ll see even the smaller groups back away and seek ways to gather, probably electronically,” he said.

When that happens, Wright said, financial giving will depend on the church, especially the age of the congregations.

“Some churches with older congregations do not give electronically so the transition to that will be a little bit harder,” he said.

Ron Klassen, executive director of Rural Home Missionary Association, said it’s too early to say how the rural churches he represents are being impacted.

“My sense is that in the past, people rise up and, if anything, the giving might increase,” he said. “People are going to give. They’ll take care of their church and their community.”

In Baltimore, pastor Gwynn worries that tensions might rise past the point that church outreach programs can help.

“With all the uncertainty, I’m afraid this could turn into anarchy,” he said. “Not everybody’s patient. Not everybody’s law-abiding.”

He even envisioned the possibility of a stampede toward the goods being doled out after a church’s annual food drive.

“My biggest fear right now is what’s happening to the minds of our people,” Gwynn said. “How long can we hold them together?”
___
AP Religion Editor Gary Fields contributed.

Source: Religion News Service

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The wife an Anglican bishop and a church secretary have regained their freedom just over a week after they were kidnapped by gunmen in the Kano state of Nigeria.

The Rev. Nicholas D. Okoh, primate of the Church of Nigeria, announced last Friday the release of Saratu Zubairu, the wife of Bari Diocese Bishop Idris Ado Zubairu, and a diocesan secretary identified as Deborah.

According to ACNNTV, the television outlet of the Anglican Church in Nigeria, Okoh made the announcement during a live broadcast of a consecration service honoring five new bishops and two archbishops at the Cathedral Church of Holy Trinity in Kogi state.

The two women were reportedly abducted by gunmen on March 10 when they attacked and looted the Bari village of Gidan Mato, where the Anglican Cathedral and bishop’s court are located.

According to Christian Solidarity Worldwide, a human rights organization that advocates for Christians in over 20 countries, the alleged attack was said to have occurred at a time when Bishop Zubairu was traveling to Plateau state.

CSW reports that it is unclear whether a ransom was paid to secure the abducted women. It’s also unclear as to who abducted the women.

“CSW welcomes the release of Mrs. Saratu Zubairu and her colleague and wish both women a speedy recovery from this shocking ordeal,” CSW Chief Executive Mervyn Thomas said in a statement.

The abduction and subsequent release of the two women from Bari come as kidnappings for ransom by armed militants have become all too common across Nigeria.

According to CSW, 2018 and 2019 saw a “marked increase” in the number of church leaders, family members and lay Christians targeted for abduction or murder. However, no religious or ethnic community has been immune to the kidnappings as many Muslims have been victimized as well.

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TOKYO (AP) — The IOC announced a first-of-its-kind postponement of the Summer Olympics on Tuesday, bowing to the realities of a coronavirus pandemic that is shutting down daily life around the globe and making planning for a massive worldwide gathering in July a virtual impossibility.

The International Olympic Committee said the Tokyo Games “must be rescheduled to a date beyond 2020, but not later than summer 2021, to safeguard the health of the athletes, everybody involved in the Olympic Games and the international community.”

It was an announcement seen as all but a certainty as pressure mounted from nervous athletes, sports organizations and national Olympic committees — all confronting the reality that training and qualifying schedules, to say nothing of international anti-doping protocols, had been ruptured beyond repair.

Four-time Olympic hockey champion Hayley Wickenheiser, the first IOC member to criticize the body’s reluctance to postpone, called it the “message athletes deserved to hear.”

“To all the athletes: take a breath, regroup, take care of yourself and your families. Your time will come,” she wrote on Twitter.

IOC President Thomas Bach and Japanese prime minister Abe Shinzo met via phone Tuesday morning, and they, along with a handful of executives from the IOC and Japan’s organizing committee, agreed to make the call.

Other Olympics — 1916, 1940 and 1944 — have been canceled because of war, but none have ever been postponed for any reason, let alone a renegade virus that has accounted for more than 375,000 cases worldwide, with numbers growing exponentially. The Tokyo Games would still be called the 2020 Olympics, even though they will be held in 2021.

“The leaders agreed that the Olympic Games in Tokyo could stand as a beacon of hope,” the IOC said in a statement.

The decision offers a sense of relief for athletes, who no longer have to press forward with training under near-impossible conditions, unsure of when, exactly, they need to be ready — and for what.

“Thankful to finally have some clarity regarding The Olympic Games. A huge decision but I think the right one for sure,” British sprinter Adam Gemili said on Twitter. “Time to regain, look after each other during this difficult period and go again when the time is right!”

One reason the IOC took longer to make the decision was because it wanted to figure out logistics. It will be a daunting challenge. Many of the arenas, stadiums and hotels are under contract for a games held from July 24-August 7. Remaking those arrangements is doable, but will come at a cost. Tokyo has already spent a reported $28 billion to stage the games.

There’s also the matter of the international sports schedule. Virtually all 33 sports on the Olympic program have key events, including world championships, on the docket for 2021. Perhaps the best example of what a disruption this can cause would come from track. Famous Hayward Field at University of Oregon was rebuild and expanded at the cost of $200 million to hold next year’s world championships. Now that event could be postponed, canceled or see its stature greatly diminished if its run within months of a rescheduled Olympics.

“A lot can happen in one year, so we have to think about what we have to do,” said Toshiro Muto, the CEO of the organizing committee. “The decision came upon us all of a sudden.”

But for weeks, it was becoming increasingly clear that pressing on with a July 24 starting date was no longer a choice.

Virtually every sport across the globe has suspended play in the wake of the pandemic. The worldwide economy is faltering and people are increasingly being told it’s not safe to congregate in large groups or, in some cases, even to leave their houses. Gyms are closed across America. Holding Olympic trials in a matter of months was becoming a virtual impossibility.

Olympic committees in Canada and Australia were saying they either would not or could not, send a team to Tokyo in July. World Athletics and the three biggest sports in the United States — swimming, track, and gymnastics — were calling for a postponement.

As recently as Sunday, the IOC was saying it would take up to four weeks to reach a decision. Four weeks ended up being two days.

The decision came only a few hours after local organizers said the torch relay would start as planned on Thursday. It was expected to start in northeastern Fukushima prefecture, but with no torch, no torchbearers and no public.

Those plans also changed.

The flame will be stored and displayed in Fukushima. Like everything else in the Olympic world, it’s next move will be determined at a later date.

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LONDON (AP) — Global stocks surged Tuesday while U.S. futures raced ahead so much that trading had to be halted, after U.S. political leaders said they were nearing a deal on a massive government stimulus package to offset the damage inflicted by the coronavirus pandemic.

Stock markets around the world, from Japan’s Nikkei to Germany’s DAX, have spiked by more than 5%. Wall Street was also headed for similar gains at the bell, which according to regulations means that trading is suspended temporarily. Despite the gains, most indexes are down around a third from where they started the year.

In the U.S., sentiment appears to have been boosted after top congressional and White House officials emerged from grueling negotiations over a nearly $2 trillion coronavirus rescue package saying they expected to reach a deal Tuesday. That aid would come on top of the Fed’s announcement Monday that it would buy as many Treasurys and other assets as needed, including corporate bonds for the first time, to keep financial markets functioning.

Governments and central banks in other countries around the world are also unveiling unprecedented levels of support for their economies in an attempt to limit the scale of the upcoming virus-related slump. Germany, a bastion of budgetary discipline, is also mulling a big fiscal boost.

A raft of economic surveys released Tuesday, including from Japan and Europe, provided clear evidence of the scale of the recession the world is in as many countries around the world impose draconian lockdown restrictions on economic activity, the latest being Britain.

“Everyone was prepared for a set of shockers, and that is precisely what we got, but they are not a surprise,” said Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG. “It is at times like this that the market’s propensity to look forward is demonstrated most effectively.”

A further boost to sentiment has come from the news that China is preparing to lift the lockdown in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, and from Italy reporting a reduction in the number of new cases and coronavirus-related deaths.

“It’s still early days, of course — perhaps investors can start to envisage life beyond the coronavirus,” said Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at OANDA Europe. “That could make stocks look a little more attractive, although anyone jumping back in now will need to have nerves of steel.”

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In Europe, Germany’s DAX was up 6.6% at 9,321 while the FTSE 100 index of leading British shares spiked 4.2% at 5,202. France’s CAC-40 soared 5.7% to 4,139.

Before the trading suspension in the U.S., Dow futures and the broader S&P futures were up by the maximum 5%.

Earlier in Asia, Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 rose 7.1% to 18,092.35 and the Kospi in Seoul surged 8.6% to 1,609.97. The Shanghai Composite Index was 2.3% higher at 2,722.44 and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng gained 4.5% to 22,663.49.Australia’s S&P-ASX 200 gained 4.2% to 4,735.70 and India’s Sensex added 3.1% to 26,776.71. New Zealand rose 7.2% and Singapore added 5.3%.

Whether the gains can be built on in coming days will likely hinge on how the effectiveness of the measures taken by governments to get on top of the outbreak. The number of known infections worldwide jumped past 380,000. After just a few weeks, the United States has more than 46,000 cases and more than 600 deaths.

For most people, the coronavirus causes only mild or moderate symptoms, such as fever and cough. Those with mild illness recover in about two weeks. Severe illness including pneumonia can occur, especially in the elderly and people with existing health problems. Recovery could take six weeks in such cases.

In energy markets, benchmark U.S. crude rose $1.40 to $24.76 per barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange, while Brent crude, used to price international oils, added $1.17 to $28,20 per barrel in London.

In the currency markets, the euro was up 1.5% at $1.0876 while the dollar fell 0.7% at 110.45 yen.

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