September 2, 2020
 
 
Dear Members of Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church,
 
As of August 27, Franklin County’s COVID numbers have followed a downward trend and Ohio Public Health Advisory system moved the county from level 3 to level 2. Following this change, the Reopening Task Force met and determined that on Sunday, September 13 we will resume singing the Psalm during worship services which will be led by the Cantor. The state mandates masks be worn in public indoors at all times, with the exception of a residence. With the reintroduction of singing at services, proper mask wearing during services and singing continues to be required in compliance with the state mask mandate. We will sing the Psalm for a couple weeks before hymns are reintroduced to worship services. When hymn singing resumes, we will only be singing verse 1, easing back into singing to see how it goes.
 
Also, on September 13 the Nursery will reopen. A professional company called Sitters Unlimited will resume staffing the nursery with 2 professionals who will wear masks and follow our deep cleaning guidelines posted in the Nursery. When children enter the Nursery they will be asked to use hand sanitizer. There will be two stations of hand sanitizer available for the sitters and children, as well as soap and water. The toys and surfaces will be cleaned before and after each service. Any toys that go in a child’s mouth will be put in a separate container and washed after the service. If your child has a fever, is not feeling well or anyone in the family is sick do not use the Nursery.
 
The Reopening Task Force continues to meet with the goal of providing a safe and healthy worship environment.
 
If you have any questions you can contact anyone on the taskforce.
 
Molly King, Chair                    Pastor Nicholas Hopman
Jodie Arreguin                         Fred Pfanz
John Hicks                              Linda Hoch
Sarah Odum                           Tom Seamon
​

No singing has been extended and will be revisited by their July 28 meeting.
 

June 15, 2020
 
Dear Family of Grace,
 
The past thirteen weeks, in-person worship has been on hold. Much of life has been on hold as we worked as a community to stop the spread of COVID-19. Worship online has been a new experience for all of us. Thanks to Eric Bush for his hard work and creativity for making this happen for us. Also thank you for your words of encouragement during the quarantine.
 
At our May Council meeting, Council appointed a Task force for reopening Grace. The Task force has been meeting and we will be reopening Grace on Sunday, June 21, 2020. Things will look different than what we have done in the past. Below are Worship restart guidelines. Keep in mind that this list may continue to change as we start worshipping together.
 
Things we will suspend until June 28, 2020

• Singing

 
Things we will suspend until July 5, 2020

• Holy Communion

 
Things we will suspend until further notice:

• Passing of the Peace
• Fishes and Loaves Café
• Opening and closing procession
• Greeting the Pastor after the service
• Greeters
• The Baptismal Font will be empty
• Busy books for children
• Attendance books
• Extra offering envelopes
• Acolytes
• Nursery
• Drinking fountains
• Children’s Message.

 
Things that will look different:

• Worship will start with leaders at the front of the church.
• No passing the offering plate (offering basket will be available at rear of church before and after the service.)
• Every other row of the seating will be roped off and unavailable
• Bulletins will not be passed out. They will be set out in the church lobby and sanctuary for pick up next to hand sanitizer. Please recycle your bulletins at home.
• Kids will not go to the rear of church for the closing.
• Ushers will dismiss from the rear of church for the first few weeks until people are familiar with the new procedure.
• Doors to stay propped open to reduce the need to touch the handles
• One person or family at a time in restrooms.

 
 
What we ask of the congregation:

• Take your temperature before leaving home and stay home if you have a fever or if you are not feeling well.
• Everyone over the age of two is asked to wear a mask at church. Masks and gloves will be available if needed.
• Use hand sanitizer prior to picking up the bulletin, and frequently while in the church building.
• Keep all children with the family unit while in the church building.
• Come in and sit in the sanctuary upon arrival. No congregating in the lobby before or after the service.
• Leave immediately after the service.

 
Our goal is that our return is safe, and all are protected. We have faith in our congregation to be responsible, safe and respectful. Thank you for your cooperation. We look forward to seeing you in person.
 
God’s Blessings,
 
Molly King, CLM, Chair Reopening Taskforce               
Pastor Nicholas Hopman
Pastor Tom Phillips                                                          
Tom Seamon
Fred Pfanz                                                                       
Sarah Odum, Business Manager
John Hicks, Council President                                         
Jodie Arreguin
 
 
 
 
 
 

​June 15, 2020
 
Dear Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church,
 
I am writing to encourage everyone not to feel any pressure about attending public worship services when they resume on June 21st. This is an unusual time. The Third Commandment, “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” is a commandment meant to give God an opportunity to give us his life-giving word. It is not intended to put people in danger. Public worship must resume and be available to those who can attend, but it is not mandatory for anyone. We are justified by faith alone apart from works of the law. This justification provides us Christian freedom. We have used this freedom in unusual way this year. First, by cancelling worship for a time. Now we are using our Christian freedom to make attendance at worship optional. This is not all that unusual. Health and mobility problems have always prevented certain sheep of Christ’s flock from attending public worship on Sunday morning, this will now simply include more of us than before. We are doing our best to get God’s word to you in your home. Until further notice, the complete early service will be recorded and uploaded to our website, hopefully around the time of late service. So this is not freedom from God’s word, but freedom in God’s word.
 
Certainly if you are not feeling well, please do not come to church. Obviously it matters little whether you think you have the Coronavirus or some other bug. For the time being everyone is understandably hyper sensitive about being near a sick person. So even if you are at a stage of a cold that you previously would have sucked it up and come to church, now please just wait until at least the next Sunday.
 
If you feel that the risk to your health of attending public worship is unreasonable, do not come. Wait and observe how things go at church and how the public health situation evolves. The decision to return to public worship will be left to each individual and household. There are no right or wrong decisions. As we make such decisions in the midst of varying levels of uncertainty, we have the comfort and the freedom, finally, of trusting that “whether we live or whether we die, we belong to the Lord” (Romans 14:8). Eventually, as always, we will all have to make decisions about how to live our lives, knowing that for each and every one of us, our days in this life are numbered (Psalm 90:10).
 
The Evangelical Lutheran Church has never commanded any particular person to receive the Lord’s Supper, the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, at any particular time. With the Supper being administered every week at many Lutheran churches for the last few decades an unfortunate peer pressure to go forward and receive has developed. No one should feel the slightest pressure, in any way, shape or form, to receive the Lord’s Supper now (or ever).
 
Unlike the oral preaching of the Gospel, which can happen spontaneously anywhere, the Lord’s Supper takes preparation. Bread and wine must be present and prepared. Furthermore, Scripture (1 Corinthians 11:27-30) and the Catechism (The Sacrament of the Altar, Question 4 and Answer) tell us to examine ourselves before eating and drinking Christ. We should come to the altar in the fear of the Lord, meaning the fear of his wrath against our sin. We should also come expecting to receive Christ’s forgiveness in his own body and blood. Christ is a refuge from God’s wrath against our sins. We should not approach the altar in fear of germs. We should expect to receive life from Christ, not death. For a time, many of us will forego receiving Christ’s body and blood, until our consciences are properly prepared to do so. In conclusion, feel free to attend public worship without receiving the Lord’s Supper if you do not desire to do so, or are not yet prepared.
 
For those who are most at risk of suffering serious illness from this virus, staying home is actually a way to serve your neighbors. It will help us resume public worship more quickly and prevent the church from needing to make at least some of the nearly impossible choices that we are now forced to make. Whatever attempts we make to prevent germs from spreading during public worship, we cannot possibly guarantee anyone that there is zero chance of any virus spreading.
 
The church does what it can to try to keep people safe and healthy. This has always been the case. This is why we participate in charitable organizations locally, and why we contribute to international organizations that provide hospitals, food, and clean water to people oversees. At the same time, the church is the one and only organization that believes that life will actually improve after death.
 
For a time it will be quite proper for many of us to receive this good news of Christ’s death and resurrection by means of computer screens and paper. For a time some will prefer to proclaim this good news within their households but refrain from public worship. We trust God’s promise that his Word will not return to him empty, but will make faith, however he manages to reach us. And we look forward to the day when this unusual period is clearly and obviously behind us.
 
In Christ,
 
Pastor Hopman

The staff and Council have put together a Reopening Task force. As noted in President Hick’s note in the June issue of The VOICE of Grace, the Task force will be putting a plan together for Grace members to be able to safely come back to church and feel safe worshiping. Our first meeting was Wednesday, May 27th at noon and it was a virtual meeting using Go To Meeting. Plans and details for reopening will be coming soon.
The Reopening Task force members are:
Molly King, Chair
Pastor Nick Hopman
Pastor Tom Phillips
John Hicks
Jodie Arreguin
Tom Seamon
Fred Pfanz
Lora Moore
Sarah Odum

As of the writing of this note, Gov. DeWine has just released the plans for “Responsible Restart Ohio”. In the spirit of being responsible, while also being reasonable and using common sense, we are not yet ready to announce a date for resuming worship services. The leadership of Grace are currently working on what our worship services will look and sound like when we reopen. We are also evaluating how to make our environment as safe as reasonably possible. In addition to the State of Ohio, we are considering guidance from the NALC and our faith community. Thank you for all of your support of Grace during this time.
John Hicks
Congregation Council President

So whether we seem to be poor and dead to ourselves, or in sin, or lying prostrate before the pestilence [a fatal epidemic disease] or some other sickness, let us, in spite of all this, believe that in God’s eyes things look quite different. And let us say with a merry heart, “though poverty, pestilence, and death are before me, yet as a Christian I know no poverty, no death, no pestilence. For in the eyes of Christ my Lord there is nothing but riches, health, holiness, and life.” But if I do not see this yet, it is only for him to speak the word, and I shall see it, even with my very own eyes, that it is true, and the end of all things shall certainly be as He has said.
May God, for the sake of Christ, our redeemer, and his Son, through His Holy Spirit, grant us also such spiritual eyes, that we may look upon all adversity differently than the world, hold fast to this consolation, and at last be saved. Amen.
 
—Martin Luther, 1533
 
 
This quote was also the beginning of my last communication. This time I want to discuss where it comes from for the sake of identifying resources to use at home. The two paragraphs above are from the end of a sermon in Luther’s House Postil. It was a sermon on Christ’s raising the little girl from the dead and healing the woman, Mark 5:21-43. This was the appointed Gospel reading for the twenty-fourth Sunday after Trinity in the old one-year lectionary. In the early decades of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, from 1521 on, Postil’s were collections of sermons, generally corresponding to the Sunday readings of the church year. Especially in the earliest years, Lutheran clergy were poorly educated. On Sunday mornings many of them would simply read from Luther’s postils in the pulpit. This seems strange to us today, but many congregations were supportive of their pastors reading these very good sermons. I confess that throughout my life, especially when I’ve been attending school and looking for a church in a new town, I have heard more than one Sunday sermon that definitely should have been replaced with the reading of a postil sermon.
Reading postils also became an effective of means of teaching the faith in homes. Although the literacy rate was very low, if one member of a household could read, all the others could listen. Luther encouraged the father and mother of the house to preach to their children as well as servants and apprentices that might be living in the house. Those less confident could simply read from the postils. Those who were more comfortable could read them and then add some of their owns words.
We can use these postils the same way today. A section of a postil sermon can be read during family worship. We often refer to family worship as devotions, which is fine, but we should remember that the preaching of God’s word is just as real and authentic as the preaching of God’s word on Sunday morning. I speak about this in relation to the forgiveness of sins in my sermon for the Second Sunday of Easter, April 19th.
To that end I offer some resources. These would be especially helpful now and there will be no reason to stop using them when public worship resumes. Baker Books has published the postil I quote from at the beginning of this post in three volumes, Sermons of Martin Luther: The House Postils (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1996). Unfortunately, this edition seems to be near $150 on Amazon. If you want to use it, it is well worth the price. It is a total of over 1,000 pages that could be used daily in the home for multiple years before repeating any pages. Thankfully, there is an older version, published by J. A. Schulze in 1884 in Columbus, Ohio. It is available for free on archive.org. Here is the link to volume 1: https://archive.org/details/Dr.MartinLuthersHouse-postilVol1Ohio1884secondEdition/page/n9/mode/2up
Other versions of House Postil sermons can be found in various places on the internet.
In Luther’s Church Postil the sermons tend to be longer as many of them were sermons written specifically for publication that were never preached (he preached almost all the House Postil sermons in his home on Sunday afternoons). Concordia Publishing has recently published a new translation of the Church Postil covering five volumes of the new volumes in the Luther’s Works series. Each volume is about $50 but provides a great deal of reading. Whether using the Church or House Postil, you’re probably going to want to read a few paragraphs or a page rather than whole sermons during one family worship service.
Day by Day We Magnify You (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 2008) and Faith Alone: A Daily Devotional (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009) provide shorter excerpts from Luther that follow a daily reading regimen. These are just a few suggestions and options for hearing God’s word during this interruption in public worship. That being said, this is a tremendous opportunity to develop a plan for learning the word at home that we carry on, long after the pandemic is over.
Those who studied the word on a daily basis in the past were well prepared for at least this aspect of life today. While the early Lutherans certainly wanted everyone to hear God’s word at home often, they also emphasized preaching at home because of the tense political situation in many Lutheran lands throughout the sixteenth century. Either at a ruler’s whim, or as the result of war, Lutherans could suddenly be deprived of their ability to worship in public, and their pastors wanted the church to be prepared for such circumstances. Although the current situation is very different, we have suddenly and unexpectedly learned that public worship is not guaranteed in absolutely all circumstances for us either. Hopefully, this situation will lead to a new birth of worship in the home.
 
In Christ,
 
Pastor Hopman

Dear Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church,
 
So whether we seem to be poor and dead to ourselves, or in sin, or lying prostrate before the pestilence [a fatal epidemic disease] or some other sickness, let us, in spite of all this, believe that in God’s eyes things look quite different. And let us say with a merry heart, “though poverty, pestilence, and death are before me, yet as a Christian I know no poverty, no death, no pestilence. For in the eyes of Christ my Lord there is nothing but riches, health, holiness, and life.” But if I do not see this yet, it is only for him to speak the word, and I shall see it, even with my very own eyes, that it is true, and the end of all things shall certainly be as He has said.
May God, for the sake of Christ, our redeemer, and his Son, through His Holy Spirit, grant us also such spiritual eyes, that we may look upon all adversity differently than the world, hold fast to this consolation, and at last be saved. Amen.
 
—Martin Luther, 1533
 
            Christians have different eyes because we have hope in Christ’s death and resurrection. Too often Christianity has been confused with the Greco-Roman Platonic worldview. This Platonic view of the world says that what we see and feel around us in not real. Reality, it claims, is in some higher invisible realm of being.
            This is not the true biblical Christian faith. As Christians we understand how real God’s creation is. The eternal Son of God really became real flesh. He really died a physical death. His tomb was empty. His real human body rose from the dead, transformed into eternal life. He gives us his real true body and blood to eat and drink unto the forgiveness of our sins.
            Therefore, when Luther writes that we Christians have begun to see the world with God’s eyes, that though our eyes see poverty and death, our spiritual eyes in Christ see only abundance and life, Luther is not saying that pestilence are death are fake. We believe God’s creation is very real and we love His human creatures around us. Their fear, sadness, poverty, sickness, and death greatly troubles us just as Christ was greatly troubled and wept when he came to raise Lazarus from the dead. To pretend that the pain that fills the world is not real would be to blaspheme the world’s creator, and to abandon our fellow human creatures and the world.
            However, we do have spiritual eyes. We have eyes that see the world differently, and that finally don’t trust the death that we see surrounding us. The Christian faith is not a metaphysical Platonic faith; it is a biblical Jewish historical faith. The Bible is filled with stories of God’s acts in history. At one point in history he chose Abraham, at another point he freed his people from Egypt, at another point he put Abraham’s seed, Jesus of Nazareth, on the cross and then raised him from the dead.
            How are we able to look at death and see only life? Because we believe that death is not real? No. We look at death, real death, and see only life, because of Christ’s historical resurrection. We see life in the midst of death because we have heard the good news that Christ beat death once and for all (for all eternity, and for all who trust in Him). We see reality and history differently because we have already heard how this story, this history, ends. It ends in resurrection and eternal life for those in Christ Jesus.
One of the key lines in the end of Luther’s sermon quoted above is, “I do not see this [eternal life and abundance] yet.” The “yet” shows us the historical nature of our faith. We already “see,” actually we already hear, eternal life, but we wait to see it. This is faith’s struggle. Faith trusts God’s promises, but it sees death where life was promised. The good news is that Christ has promised us that the Holy Spirit, the comforter, will nourish our faith. In the end faith in Christ will win, and we will fully see and feel eternal life. As Luther preached, “the end of all things shall certainly be as He has said.”
 
In Christ,
 
Pastor Hopman

I am pleased to officially announce that Pastor Nicholas Hopman has accepted the Letter of Call that was issued by the congregation on March 1. We welcome Pr. Nick and are looking forward to this new chapter of Grace's history. A special thank you to the members of the Call Committee for their service to our Church throughout this process. 

John Hicks
Congregation Council President