We are heartened to announce that CGS is providing prudent “mask-optional” opportunities during our weekly gatherings on campus, effective Sunday, February 20! We are joyously accommodating broad spectrums of age, healthcare considerations, and fellowship opportunities!
For the encouragement and care of those attending, we have crafted multiple seating and masking options:
- Seating is available with — and also without — social distancing between households, and
- Seating is available with — and also without — masking requirements.
This approach has been fashioned with humility, and is prayerfully intended to allow us as a church family to shepherd each other in Christ Jesus:
- If you would understand more deeply the yearnings of Pastor Chuck’s heart as they pertain to this decision, we encourage you to revisit this letter to the CGS church family (originally posted on Dec 31, 2021): Congregational Letter from Pastor Chuck.
In our shepherding approach to this CGS church family over the past 2 years, we have attempted to be earnestly mindful of all of your many and varied concerns.
- If you would like to review in detail some of the medical rationale underlying portions of our decision-making, we invite you to explore here: [ February 20 FAQs ]
Finally, for additional details regarding the options that best suit your particular needs, follow these links:
We are deeply grateful — Coram Deo — that the cases of Omicron are now dropping sharply here in North Carolina and across the country. And we are additionally grateful that the degree of serious COVID illness (i.e. illness requiring formal medical intervention and/or hospitalization) has remained substantially less with Omicron than was true of previous COVID variants. However, we do not presume upon God’s grace going forward:
- When COVID strikes hospital workers themselves — even if causing only minor illness in this highly-vaccinated demographic — it can nevertheless force quarantine among those healthcare providers and thus degrade hospitals’ ability to care for patients.
- Our local Duke-UNC hospitals serve as high-acuity referral hospitals from around the state, which increases their occupancy rates and stretches available resources.
- And new mutations with unpredictable degrees of virulence are highly likely to emerge in the future.
We are tracking all these factors — as well as many others — closely, and reevaluating every week. The continuation of “optional masking” at CGS beyond February 20 thus remains contingent — every week — upon these types of factors remaining favorable. We will keep you faithfully updated if/as factors change.