Responding to crisis well requires planning and practice, something I learned the hard way as Code Captain, in charge of the coronary care unit resuscitation team. Our task was to provide immediate response for in-hospital cardiac arrests. When Code Blue was called out on the overhead paging system, we were the ones commandeering elevators, racing down hospital hallways, puffing and pushing the crash cart, white coats flapping and stethoscopes flying. Sometimes we were successful, and sometimes not. But regardless of the outcome, it was our regular practice to debrief afterwards; to sit down together as a team and review the event record, acknowledge what went well, highlight any errors that occurred, and discuss how we might improve our response for the next time, which always came, sometimes even during the debriefing process.
By analogy, since the pandemonium part of the pandemic has passed, and we have entered what appears to be the wake of the COVID crisis, a debrief seems timely. Even though the dust hasn’t fully settled on issues of masking and vaccination mandates, and we medics still remain masked, gowned and seemingly one-disease minded in the hospitals, a certain level of normalcy has returned to society. Workers have returned to work, schools are back in session, restaurants are busy, air travel is possible. So, there’s opportunity for some introspection, and a dire need – for the Christian community in particular – to learn from the mistakes made these past number of years and to bolster ourselves for a better response next time. The ambition of this essay is to critically consider the role of the Christian church – defined as the locally gathered body of Bible-centered believers, tasked to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ, observe the ordinances, and make disciples[1] – and its relationship to the state and its laws, as well as to the kingdom of God and its realization. My hope is to emphasize the absolute necessity of Christ’s church at all times, and in particular, during times of duress.
