Hitting the Bar

The Government’s decision to allow public worship to continue even under the current ‘lockdown’ caught me so much by surprise that, reading the details on Monday night only from the BBC website, I changed the church website to inform the public that services were suspended only to have to change it back after finding the actual regulations. I am deeply torn. If I were responsible for public health policy, I would have closed places of worship in Tier 4; but equally I know that worship at Swanvale Halt is as safe as anything else you might choose to do, including doing your shopping at the cramped village supermarket or sending your children to school. More importantly, I've argued over and over again in all sorts of contexts that private judgement is hazardous. We take decisions, these sorts of decisions anyway, as a whole society so that they carry weight and authority. People are different, so their own individual decisions will inevitably lead them in awkwardly different directions.

Not only have I met the entire range of opinions from ‘churches should have been closed since March, it’s obvious’, through to ‘churches don’t have to close, so we shouldn’t, it’s obvious’, but I also find that people almost universally find it very hard to distinguish between the risk for individuals in a particular setting, and wider considerations of public health. So I am sure that coming to worship at Swanvale Halt church carries a relatively low risk of infection, say, 1 in 300. Every time you attend, the risk is the same: it’s always 1 in 300. But add up a whole set of ‘attendance events’ over the course of a pandemic and it will be much higher. It’s like tossing a coin: every time, the chance of getting Heads is 50% (or as near to 50% as makes no odds), and always will be, but the chance of getting Tails at some stage in a long run of throws is much greater than that. Multiply the ‘attendance events’ across thousands of churches, perhaps, and someone is going to be infected, somewhere, sometime. It could be you. People in general seem to find that very hard to grasp: talk to them about it and they almost invariably gravitate back to the question of how safe it is to do this particular thing in this particular setting.

Not only did the Government throw the choice whether to stay open or close back to us, so did the hierarchy of the Church of England. The Church’s response to the lockdown announcement came from the Bishop of London, former Chief Nurse Sarah Mullaly: ‘the government has chosen to allow public worship to continue’, she said, a weird phrase which sort of implied that the bishops wanted to disassociate themselves from the decision without publicly dissenting from it, ‘but we understand any churches that decide to suspend it’. I was frankly furious at being put in this position. I’m not a virologist, and, going back to the previous paragraph, while I might be qualified to decide on the safety of the venue I’m responsible for, I am definitely not qualified to take decisions on matters of public health. That’s the government’s job, and at least the bishops could give me a steer.

It took a day before the bishops began writing to their clergy. ‘The government has calculated that only a tiny number of infections have occurred in worship settings’, +Andrew told us in an ad clerum. Other bishops were prepared to quote figures: 47 since the pandemic began, apparently. This at least drew a little of my anger as it demonstrated that there was evidence behind the decision, and someone was asking the question I wanted asked. But it didn’t resolve the matter. First, the figure of 47 is misleading as very few people know how they were infected; secondly, we don’t know how the new version of the virus changes things; and third, there’s still the public-health landscape to take into account.

I proposed – and the PCC accepted – that we should suspend public worship when local infection rates topped 500 per 100,000, and then resume when they fell below 300 for a fortnight. Then a church member pointed out that you can drill down to a lower level of data than the local authority here and that shows, in our area, that infections are considerably lower in Swanvale Halt’s immediate vicinity than elsewhere in the district. So I ended up defining a region of seven Middle-layer Super Output Areas (basically, postcode areas amended to net roughly 7000 souls each) based on Hornington, the local ‘catchment area’ that includes everyone who uses the supermarkets and other facilities in town. That’s our Valley of Decision.

Up the figures tick every day: we’re at 401 today, as opposed to 368 yesterday. We celebrated the Holy Epiphany today, but I suspect Sunday will be our last face-to-face worship for some time.