Quarantined But Not Quiet - Stories of Hope: Dan Davidson

COVID - 19 Stories from the Church

The vast majority of people in the United States have been ordered to stay at home as the novel Coronavirus threatens to cripple our healthcare system and take thousands of lives. Throughout this crisis TogetherLA will be bringing you stories of how God is moving in the midst of so much uncertainty.

DAN DAVIDSON
Lead Pastor, Rose City Church in Pasadena, CA

TogetherLA: How are the government bans and calls for social distancing affecting your congregation?

Dan Davidson: Our world has been turned upside down over the last few weeks. We’ve been hit doubly hard. First, our congregation is no longer meeting on Sundays for worship. And second, our social enterprise cafe “Rosebud Coffee” has been reduced to a coffee cart making 90-80% less than our shop. 

Our congregation is quickly having to adapt to a new normal of social distancing and our cafe is trying to keep the doors open for one or two employees to stay afloat. We’ve filed for a Shared Work Program for the baristas to see unemployment without being let go.

TogetherLA: What unique ways are you “doing church” in this uncertain time?

Dan Davidson: So we decided yesterday to play to our strengths and not our weaknesses. We are not a “theatrical” mega-church in our style. We will not be hosting services live and online. This would play into us trying to be a theatrical church (which we aren’t) that people sit back and watch. This is not our strength so we did not want to try and learn this within a week's time. Plus we feel like there’s too much screen time already with social distancing. 

We are a neighborhood church. Our strengths are two-fold: contextual hermeneutics and community. For example, our Lenten theme for this year that was set before the coronavirus hit is Selah: Pause and Rest from the Psalms. We started preaching from the Psalms and asking our congregation to take a time to pause. Lo and behold, the whole world is on pause now. And praying the Psalm is especially helpful in this uncertain time. To play to our hermeneutics we are now focusing on high quality sermons via podcast. The sermon in podcast form allows our people hear our contextual hermeneutic without having to get on a screen and “watch tv.” They can listen and process. 

Our other strength is community. We are still setting aside time on Sunday morning from 10:30am-11am for our people to gather together via Zoom. In our usual Sunday worship service we have a time of prayer of the people and Holy Communion. We are asking our congregation to be randomly assigned a zoom group of 8-12 that will take 30 minutes to check in, pray and partake in Holy Communion from their homes. 

We’ve also come up with a long list of unique ideas but we are first doing an assessment of our congregation’s needs before enacting them. 

TogetherLA: What do you need help with most right now?

Dan Davidson: Finances - we know that soon our finances will take a hit because we also share our facility with other congregations. They also are not able to meet and as this continues they most likely will not pay rent. So to keep things afloat we will be looking for grants, donations, and loans to keep up with payroll and operating costs. 

Communicating this request for support in the midst of a lot of “noise” will be difficult. - so ideas on how to communicate our needs would be helpful. 

TogetherLA: In what ways are you seeing your church become the hands and feet of Jesus? 

Dan Davidson: Our church has already responded to the elderly in our congregation. We started reaching out to see what needs they have and how we can assist them so they don’t need to be overly exposed. We’ve also planned to keep everyone on payroll so that funds still flow to the people. And we are seeking to do the best we can with our barista staff. Lastly, we are helping organize the efforts to care for our most vulnerable homeless neighbors - this includes plans for put out hand washing stations around the city, helping churches change their food programs, and raising money from the city to support efforts of homelessness prevention.