Dear CGS Family,
After extensive and prayerful deliberations (involving our pastors, members of our Re-Gathering Team, and our Session), CGS is again offering “mask-optional” opportunities during our weekly gatherings on campus. These options are available as of Sunday, February 20, 2022.
Here is a quick summary of how these opportunities will be managed, beginning in February and moving forward:
- All persons who are more comfortable remaining masked on campus are of course welcome to continue that practice, and are invited to sit in seats of their choice anywhere in the sanctuary.
- Moreover, there are seating areas in the sanctuary that are reserved exclusively for persons wishing to exercise additional caution (e.g. those areas on the right front of the main sanctuary floor, plus all of the balcony). In these areas, social distancing will be preserved, and masks will be required. Approximately 50% of our entire seating capacity will be initially devoted to providing these spaces!
- Those persons working directly with nursery and preschool children (< 5 yrs of age) will continue to be masked and vaccinated at present, as vaccines are not presently available for our youngest.
- Persons who enter the nursery area (e.g. parents dropping off or collecting their children, persons exiting the church via the nursery wing, etc) are requested to be masked while in that area.
Masks will be otherwise optional for persons attending our services and serving in our church, as of February 20, 2022!
- Despite the continuing presence of SARS-CoV-2 variants in our community – including Omicron — the degree of serious COVID illness (i.e. illness requiring hospitalization) in Durham and Chapel Hill is currently modest and diminishing. The virus is still present in substantial numbers, but the disease burden is now falling steadily. The continuation of “optional masking” at CGS is contingent upon these factors remaining favorable.
FAQs: For those who would like to explore in greater detail the rationale for our current masking practice, here are representative samples of the types of “point-counterpoint” discussions that were engaged in by your elders and pastors as we reasoned through our decisions: FAQ
Parting Reflections:
We are offering this “mask optional” approach from a posture of prayerful optimism. Though we are trusting otherwise, we do recognize that local circumstances may yet create obstacles – particularly if COVID-related hospitalizations increase sharply yet again. This notwithstanding, your pastors deeply long for our CGS church family to worship together in as unfettered a fashion as is feasible, and they are cautiously confident that there are now safe and flexible ways to make this possible for all of us.
We are also very aware that some of us in our congregation would prefer a more delayed approach to this “mask-optional” strategy: we humbly acknowledge and respect those differing perspectives, and have sought to share openly with you the considerations that have led the pastors and other elders to an admittedly different consensus (see FAQ).
On balance, we recognize that COVID is evolving from an acute pandemic into an enduring fixture within our public health landscape. As such, our approaches to ordering our own daily lives in dependence upon God – including our approach to worship at CGS — must of necessity evolve as well.
We offer this decision to you with full transparency, and in awareness of its imperfections. Please know that we covet your continued prayers…
Godspeed –
Glenn Jordan
(Originally posted December 23, 2021: Updated February 16, 2022)