California has the second-highest number of coronavirus cases and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention is pointing to singing as one of many ways the virus can spread.
As a result, the state’s department of public health required churches to “discontinue singing and chanting activities.”
ChristianPost.com reports: The new guidelines come as “California’s positivity rate – a key indicator of community spread – is trending modestly upward in the 14-day average. Hospitalization rates are also trending upwards in the 14-day average. California has 240,195 confirmed cases to date,” the California Department of Public Health announced. Thus far, church-led lawsuits alleging First Amendment violations contesting the original mid-March state government-issued stay-at-home order have been unsuccessful in court.
“The critical issue is this: the state of California is trying to dictate what kind of worship may or may not take place within a religious assembly. This is a flagrant and appalling transgression of essential American rights,” Minnesota Pastor R. James King wrote in The Resurgent.
Sean Feucht, a Bethel Music worship leader and pastor in Northern California, notes that “for the last several weeks, tens of thousands of people have been gathering outdoors in cities all across California and they have been screaming and chanting and protesting, and all the while state officials are encouraging them as they do this. And then now, as the church wants to gather just like we’ve been doing for thousands of years to simply worship God, they bring the hammer down against us. It’s just, can you see the hypocrisy and how insane this is? … It really is time that we take a stand and that we fight back.”
What say you? Do you think churches should be allowed to continue sing while the coronavirus is still spreading?