Worship in the Wake of Covid

In the height of the covid pandemic life as a preacher turned upside down. Pews where parishioners sat week after week were now left empty. Hymns felt thin without the voice of the congregation singing in unison. The sea of familiar faces are now confined to rectangles on a zoom call. 

This was the reality for Rabbi Renni Altman and Reverend Michelle Meech. Both women are worship leaders in the Hudson Valley, navigating their congregation through uncharted waters. 

“My thoughts were very scattered at the time because I kind of didn't know what to make of what we were about to go through,” Reverend Michelle Meech said. “I remember back in January my dad started talking about how this is going to be huge. We're not going to be able to fly anymore and he was right.”

Meech began serving the small congregation at St. John’s in Kingston in 2016. When she moved to the area the church was going through many transitions. After losing their longtime priest, the church’s membership split leaving the small group even smaller. When the pandemic hit, Meech was worried.

“When the bishop announced we were going to be out for two months until May, my first thought was, the congregation is not going to make it,” Meech said.

Rabbi Renni Altman had only been at the Vassar Temple in Poughkeepsie for 2 years when covid hit America. 

“Covid hit overnight, we had to figure out what to do quickly,” Altman said. “We had my laptop, the temple sound system was able to get plugged into it, connected to a webcam on a tripod. That was how we started.”

Both leaders were able to step in quickly and create solutions. Both were very tech savvy and ensured weekly services could be found reliably on the internet. 

Meech opted for Zoom right away. She had been familiar with the platform using it for work and seminary in the past and felt comfortable guiding her congregation in using the software. 

Altman had a unique experience. Initially members of the synagogue were able to access their services through a live stream, but not an interactive zoom format. However, the set up at Vassar Temple was advanced for such a small community. In the previous months, a dedicated matriarch in the community had passed away and left a portion of her savings to the temple. With the support of her children, the synagogue set up a technology fund in her name and upgraded from a laptop to a multiscreen set up and a mounted camera to capture the services. 

However much of the magic of worship was lost to the online format.  

“One, you can't sing together, right, which is totally missed. The other is that I'm not a singer,” Altman said. 

Singing is a guiding force in a Shabbat service, the congregation singing together moved Altman, but she couldn’t hear her congregation over the livestream. Even when they switched over to zoom, singing in unison is not really an option. Altman was often left to lead the singing herself due to the Cantor of the temple being immunocompromised. 
Some people in these older congregations struggled to attend virtual services altogether. 

“Brenda Semmens, for example, is not a computer person,” Meech said. “She's older so her neighbor across the street would come over to her house and her neighbor would log her in to zoom with us.”

St. John’s faced an issue that is not shared by Vassar Temple. Pledges, money given to the church to maintain it, are received weekly or monthly in the Christian tradition. At the synagogue, pledges are yearly and had already been collected by March when covid swept New York. St. John’s set up a paypal to collect pledges virtually adding a new system to maintain. 

Despite all of the hardship, Altman and Meech both found hope in the response from their community. People began to connect in new ways and took advantage of all that technology had to offer them.
“I was heartened to see the congregation organizing Starbucks runs, creating their own feeding ministry,” Meech said with a smile. She found that the congregation was always checking in with each other. Texts and calls were exchanged daily, supplies were brought to those who needed them. Meech felt hopeful that her congregation was not lost.

Altman saw an increase in attendance to services when they went online. 

“A normal Friday Shabbat might have twenty participants,” she said. “We began to see up to fifty viewers in our services. I think people in covid were especially desperate for any kind of connections. A lot of people who didn't come before and some from far away were with us.”

Online service even provided opportunities that were previously impossible. 

“One of the things that was hard but wonderful with COVID and stuff was things like funerals,” Altman said. “I'd have my phone with Zoom, and people could attend from anywhere. In the Jewish tradition we have after death is Shiva and the tradition to have a service in the mourners home, so that they could say the memorial prayer and people come to support them. On zoom people could sit Shiva from anywhere. We would have break out rooms for the son or the daughter.”

Today, the effects of covid are still present in the way that the two lead their congregations. 

Rabbi Altman continues to open a zoom meeting to her community for every service. She even brings the zoom into the post service reception, Oneg Shabbat. She tries to engage with the online audience and people in person, but it’s a challenge. She knows that she prioritizes the in person attendants. 

At St. John’s, the financial effects of covid are felt. Reverend Meech’s hours were cut in half in order to afford clergy and the cost of running the church. However, Meech counts herself lucky. She works for the Transition’s Office for the Episcopal Diocese of New York, and she has seen how the pandemic has affected rural towns. 

“Mohegan Lake, who I work with, has been without a sitting clergy person for a number of years and Granite Springs also just lost their full time clergy person,” Meech said. “The writing was on the wall, the congregations couldn’t each afford a full-time clery person, now they’re looking for one together.”

The congregations at each establishment held strong. Despite trends of thinning congregations across the country, both groups held strong. However, building has been difficult in a post covid world. 

“Congregations are actually called to be disciples in some way, right?” Meech said. “What does discipleship look like after all of this time apart?”

However building must happen, the two leaders aren’t dwelling on the hardships of the past, but looking forward to the future. 

“We can see that maintaining the church isn't what it used to be, and we're not quite sure what it's supposed to be yet. But we know we can't go back. We have to recreate something.”