Elon alumni ministers are leading communities to find beauty in simplicity, comfort in online connections and holiness in new places.
Before dawn Easter morning, the Rev. Jonathan Chapman drove his truck to a secluded area outside Killingly, Connecticut.
Alone on a quiet hilltop, he logged into Facebook and pointed his cellphone camera east at the glowing sky above the ridge where the sun would soon appear.
“Good morning. Happy Easter,” Chapman began, the early morning still in his throat. “I know we can’t be together, but we have lucked out on a sunrise and we’re going to read together.”
He read from the Book of Luke the story of the women visiting Jesus’ tomb to find the stone rolled away and his body gone. One by one, congregants of Westfield Church United Church of Christ joined the half-hour broadcast until the sun shone golden across the valley.
“It was just a camera and me there talking, but I had this strange sensation of being alone but together. It was really beautiful,” Chapman, a 2007 graduate who majored in religious studies, reflected Wednesday. “We are keepers of the story. This is what it means to keep the story in this time, and people need the story now more than ever.”
Faith communities across America and around the globe are adapting to a physically distant world, one where rites and rituals have been postponed or compressed to fit a screen. In the Christian faith, it’s meant the cancellation of Holy Week traditions leading up to Easter Sunday. Instead of gathering around a cross or packed into pews singing jubilant anthems, many worshipers found themselves huddled around computer and phone screens.
A number of Elon’s Religious Studies alumni are navigating the church’s new terrain and ministering to people where they are: through live webcasts, personal chats and phone calls, handwritten letters, and carefully measured community volunteering.
“The church moves rather slowly,” said Rev. Caleb Tabor ‘09, and that shields religion from swift social and political movements, but can keep it lagging in some areas. “I think this gave us all the push we needed to use what’s available to us: We could have been engaging on social media before this.”
Tabor is the young adult missioner for Episcopal Campus Ministry-Raleigh with the Episcopal Diocese in Raleigh, N.C. He works with college students and young adults on campuses in the Triangle area, and realized in early March that his duties would be shifting online as students left for spring break. Still in his first year in the position, he described his job as “laying the groundwork on shifting sand.”
Since then, he’s been leading prayer services on YouTube and Facebook, guiding meditation in Zoom chats, and reaching out to students online. A student helped him revamp an app already in use to become a hub for at-home spirituality and devotions.
“Common spiritual practices are of real value for (the Episcopal Church). Doing things as a community is really important for us,” Tabor said. “A lot of this has been about letting go of expectations. What does it mean to be connected to more than what’s right around us?”
Episcopal churches have moved morning, noon and evening prayers online, leading to different audiences becoming involved in those services, Tabor said.
“It helps your daily life to have regular, daily spiritual practices,” Tabor said. “This is helping us to grow. It’s deepening the quality that always been there. It’s building a corpus of work to demonstrate a direct connection to people’s lives and giving us more places to direct people.”
In Havelock, N.C., a coastal city of 20,000 that houses Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, the world’s largest Marine Corps air station, Rev. Sarah Majors ’16 leads the congregation of Cherry Point United Methodist Church. The shift from sanctuary to her living room has led to a stripped-down, abbreviated form of worship.
“I can’t create a video with all the bells and whistles,” Majors said. “There’s no band. It’s just me, a tripod and a selfie light.”
Though most of her congregation has internet access, the broader community in Havelock is vulnerable to income and food instability, she said. In some ways, the distance has brought people closer together. The shift to home-schooling led the church to organize a school supply drive to send to children’s homes. Majors and others have volunteered to deliver school meals to children and families there. Older members and those at a higher risk from COVID-19 infection are in touch with a network of volunteers to shop and run errands for them.
“It was a difficult Easter, but it was so incredibly beautiful how strange it was,” Majors said. “There was none of the decadence. All of that was stripped away, but Easter still happened. The tomb was still empty, and there’s so much beauty in that.
“One of my hopes is that we come out of this with a new understanding of what ‘holy space’ is. Without access to the physical space of the church, how can our homes be transformed as the place where we see God? How will we find God in the places where we sleep, eat and live?”
Chapman has found himself in a similarly stripped-down place. His husband plays piano, but the services are short and austere, largely from the couple’s living room.
“I don’t write sermons anymore,” he said, “but I talk to people. There’s a sermon-moment, but I’m there to connect with people. We just talk about what they’re doing, how they’re doing. We have story time for the kids twice a week. In some ways, I feel more connected with the church in my day-to-day life than before.”
He is thankful for that new perspective, though it comes with costs. Comforting grieving families forced to hold tiny, private graveside funerals for their loved ones during the pandemic is the most difficult thing. He feels their heartbreak, but there is little he can do. He looks to history for guidance.
“We are the oldest church in town, we were founded in 1715, so there’s a role for me to play,” Chapman said. “It’s to tell the story of how we’re going to be OK. We have been through hard things and done hard things, and we can do hard things.”
Tabor echoed that, saying the endurance of faith and the church offers comfort and context to worshipers. The world will change, sometimes drastically, but people and faith find ways through chaos.
“Life will change after this. The world we go back to will not be the same as it was before,” Tabor said. “What kind of world will you make it when you go back out into it? That work starts now. We are planting those seeds now. That’s going to be your harvest. That’s something we all need to think about, and the church needs to think about now, too.”