Pestilence is nothing new for the church of Christ. I have found especially enlightening the record of the work of Geneva’s company of pastors during the periodic plagues that struck the city. They granted the right of the believer to flee pestilence, so long as they “fulfilled their duty of piety toward God and charity toward their neighbors.”¹ The pastors meant what they said, as a 1571 incident shows. The account is graphic.

A daughter of the [Bourgeois] family contracted the plague while in the final days of pregnancy. Fearing infection, the young woman’s mother, brother, and sister abandoned her. Even when the pains of labor overcame the sick woman, neither family members nor neighbors responded to her desperate cries for help. In the end, she delivered her baby alone, all the while screaming for water and assistance. Both mother and infant died within hours. The woman’s family, listening to the entire ordeal outside the family’s house, had already dug a grave for the woman. The Consistory’s response to this horrifying account was more than perfunctory: in addition to suspending the family members for their inhumanity, the ministers sent a delegation to the city magistrates…so that no one would suffer a similar thing ever again. (216)

In their calling to the people to do their duty, the ministers did not exempt themselves. Theodore Beza, successor to Calvin in Geneva, stated in uncompromising terms the calling of the officebearers in the face of a plague: “It would be something very shameful, indeed wicked, to even imagine a faithful pastor who abandons one of his poor sheep in the hour when he especially needs heavenly consolation” (288–89). This from a man who in his Treatise of the Plague showed his understanding that the plague was contagious and that to contract the plague almost invariably led to death. 

The official work of the church carries on in the face of pestilence.

God promised that pestilence is one of the signs that will accompany the coming of Jesus Christ. Pestilence has always confronted the church. Pestilence will confront the church more and more as the end draws nearer.

What must be the church’s response to pestilence?

This question has been given new urgency today in light of the federal and state governments’ responses to the current pestilence. 

The pastors in Geneva also faced the government’s intrusion into the work of the church regarding visiting plague victims. The company of pastors “rejected with strong words the magistrates’ efforts” (287). 

In our day to protect the citizenry, the government prohibits gatherings greater than a certain number. That these laws may also apply to other large gatherings does not take away from the fact that they do apply to the church. Such orders do prohibit—on pain of the breaking up of the church’s assemblies, fines, imprisonment, or being pilloried in the public eye—the gathering of the church for worship. Currently, in many states it is illegal to worship God in public with the church.

The government simply reinforces its position that it has the authority to determine when and how the church meets for public worship by granting permission to meet again. The granting of permission to gather, however welcome that may be, hides an ominous implication, namely, that the granting of permission implies the right to withhold permission. It is simply the same issue in another form.

Because of those orders and the fear of infection, many speak and pray that the church at present is “unable” to worship together. But is it a matter of the church’s inability to worship, or rather a matter of the church’s decision not to worship? The church can, in fact, worship. We have cars, buildings, ministers, and sermons. We are able to have a worship service. Rather, consistories have made concrete decisions not to worship. 

The question is, what is the thinking that has gone into those decisions?

What are the principles that must inform the church’s thinking and thus her response to pestilence? Does the church make her decisions about public worship based on modern science, knowledge of disease transmission, an overwhelming concern for the physical health of her members, and government orders about the size of gatherings? Does the church base its decisions about worship on image management, a fear of rousing the hatred of the community, or bad publicity? Does the civil government have the authority, under any circumstances and for any reason, to prohibit gatherings of the church for public worship? Must the church conform to those government mandates simply because they are government mandates? Is the church’s coming together for public worship during a pestilence a reckless, dangerous, and hateful act toward the neighbor?

The answer to these questions begins with the confession of what the church is. The church of Jesus Christ in the world is a spiritual institution governed by Christ as her only head, king, prophet, and high priest. Christ exercises his royal government in his church through elected officebearers in consistories. The calling of the church is to preach the gospel, administer the sacraments, and care for the poor. She stands at the very center of all history. The world continues to exist only because God’s church is in the world. The preaching of the gospel by the church is the greatest activity that takes place in the world and that to which all world history is subservient. Her overwhelming concern is the spiritual health of her members.

The public worship of God is the highest calling and sacred privilege of the church of Christ. In that worship she publicly manifests herself as church. In the fourth commandment God calls his church to worship him. Answer 103 of the Heidelberg Catechism says regarding the command to worship God, “That I, especially on the sabbath, that is, on the day of rest, diligently frequent the church of God.” The manner in which God calls his church to worship him is publicly as an assembly of the people of God every Lord’s day. Worshiping God in homes via livestreaming is not a legitimate substitute for public worship for the church.

The church derives her right to assemble freely from God himself. The church does not derive her right to assemble from men or the laws of men. The calling to worship God publicly in the assembly of the people of God is especially the meaning of the Belgic Confession in article 28: “It is the duty of all believers, according to the Word of God, to separate themselves from all those who do not belong to the church, and to join themselves to this congregation wheresoever God hath established it, even though the magistrates and edicts of princes be against it.”

The civil authorities are an institution ordained by God. Referring to civil government, Romans 13:1 says, “There is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.” According to article 36 of the Belgic Confession, we believe that it is the will of God “that the world should be governed by certain laws and policies, to the end that the dissoluteness of men might be restrained, and all things carried on among them with good order and decency.” It is the calling of God to the civil government “to have regard unto and watch for the welfare of the civil state.” Furthermore, it is the calling of God to the civil government to “countenance the preaching of the Word of the gospel everywhere, that God may be honored and worshiped by every one, as He commands in his Word.” It is the calling of God to the civil government to allow the church to exist and to worship as God calls her to worship. The consistories also “take care that the churches, for the possession of their property and the peace and order of their meetings, can claim the protection of the authorities” (Church Order 28).

Also according to article 36 of the Belgic Confession, “it is the bounden duty of every one, of what state, quality, or condition soever he may be, to subject himself to the magistrates; to pay tribute, to show due honor and respect to them, and to obey them in all things which are not repugnant to the Word of God; to supplicate for them in their prayers, that God may rule and guide them in all their ways, and that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.” The believers’ calling is to obey the government’s orders in their ordinary lives. The church detests any sedition, subversion, or rebellion against the God-ordained authority of the magistrates.

However, “for the sake of peace and material possession they [the consistories] may never suffer the royal government of Christ over His church to be in the least infringed upon” (Church Order 28). The calling of the church for public worship belongs exclusively to the royal government of Christ and is the sole prerogative of Christ, as God says in Psalm 50: 

The mighty God, even the Lord, hath spoken, and called the earth from the rising of the sun unto the going down thereof…He shall call to the heavens from above, and to the earth, that he may judge his people. Gather my saints together unto me; those that have made a covenant with me by sacrifice…Hear, O my people, and I will speak; O Israel, and I will testify against thee: I am God, even thy God…Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the most High: And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me (vv. 1–15).

No order of the civil government for any reason may interfere with that exclusive right of Christ. Especially is this true in the day of trouble, as we live in at this present time. The church must worship God publicly as the church assembled by Christ.

To call a congregation to worship is no act of civil disobedience. It is obedience to God rather than to men. Civil disobedience is a political act to make a political statement, to achieve a political and earthly end. The church’s gathering for worship is a wholly spiritual act in obedience to Christ her only Lord. That act is not rooted in a right granted by the Constitution of the United States. That act is rooted in the command of God and the calling of God to his church in scripture.

Such an act is not reckless either. I observe that those who have a newfound regard for human life and chastise the church for meeting and supposedly threatening human life, at the same time fight for, sanction, and support the butchery every year of millions of unborn human beings and in some cases, born human beings. The hypocrisy is glaring. The gathering of the church for worship is not a callous disregard for human health and life. It is no more reckless than going to the store or working in a factory, which many willingly do six days out of the week.

In a call to worship, the church can recognize and take seriously the reality of disease transmission. The church can recognize the freedom of the individual, according to his conscience, to avoid plagues and pestilences and even to flee from them and so to stay home from church. The church can recognize the calling to love our neighbors, including a regard for their health. Measures can be taken at worship services to minimize dangers to health, so that meeting together will not put the members of the congregation at more risk than going to work, shopping in stores, or engaging in any other activities necessary for human life.

Granting that the government does not have the authority to limit the worship of the church, does the consistory have the authority to cancel worship services, sometimes for weeks on end, in light of the reported danger of some pestilence? The consistory does cancel a service in response to other dangers, such as a threatening tornado or some winter storm. The danger of some plague may make it prudent for the church to do that for a time. However, what Calvin said of pastors really applies to the whole church: “So long as we are in this ministry, I do not see that any pretext will avail us, if, through fear of infection, we are found wanting in the discharge of our duty when there is most need of our assistance” (285).

But there is more thought that needs to go into the question of the church’s response to pestilence. Does the church not realize that she prays for pestilence and that God answers her prayers? She constantly prays, “Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly.” That prayer involves all these upheavals in the world that will increase both in frequency and intensity as God moves the world toward his determined goal.

In Revelation 8:1–5 the prayers of the saints are offered up as sweet incense before God. These are not prayers of a general nature, but prayers specifically for the coming of the end. The Lord answers these prayers. The answers to these prayers are the casting of the golden censer into the earth and the voices, thunderings, lightnings, and an earthquake—judgments on the earth.

Still more, the very testimony that the church bears in the world brings judgment on the world of unbelief and apostasy. Revelation 11:6 says, “These have power to shut heaven, that it rain not in the days of their prophecy: and have power over waters to turn them to blood, and to smite the earth with all plagues, as often as they will.” When God honors the church’s faithful testimony in the gospel by doing to the world exactly what his word says, does the church then retreat with the rest of the world into isolation? Does she cease being in that case the witness that by her public testimony and preaching brings these things on the world? If the church tries to escape the displeasure of the world by not meeting because the world does not want her to meet, wait until the world discovers that the church is praying for all these things and that her testimony brings all these things on the world. When the church has finished her testimony, she will quickly become the two witnesses slain in the streets of Sodom and Egypt (vv. 7–8).

The church must also understand that pestilence is one of the many means by which God brings the antichrist. That is one reality that is on massive display at present. How quickly men will give up all their liberties, and how quickly the government will take those liberties. The government is a God-ordained institution, but that institution is destined to become the beast out of the sea of Revelation 13. That beast is the deified state, at the head of which will sit the deified man, antichrist, who will demand and receive from the whole world worship as God. Should not the church in the face of that reality be on the lookout and on guard against precisely that reality in every pestilence? Satan does not miss his opportunity to aggrandize the state, which he intends to be worshiped as God, and by which he intends to destroy the church. There is something exceedingly ominous in the bold decrees against gathering for the worship of God.

Besides, the church as a spiritual institution is called to have an overwhelming concern for the souls of men and the glory of God. Her overwhelming concern is not for the bodies of men, but for the need of men to hear the preaching of the gospel, to have the sacraments, and to call on the name of God. When it comes to the question of one’s physical health or spiritual health, then spiritual health must take priority every time. When it comes to the question of fear of infection or one’s calling to worship God, the calling to worship God takes priority every time.

In the face of pestilence, the church can and may come together for worship. The danger can, as much as in us lies, be addressed by all the common means employed in other areas of life. The church’s coming together for worship over against government prohibitions is not a rebellious act but a spiritual act of obedience to Christ. It is a worshipful response to pestilence, which the church herself called for on the world.