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Video by Tyler Toledo | Asst. Video Editor
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O
n Dec. 25, 2020, Rev. DeCarto Draper was lying in Crouse Hospital, fighting for his life against COVID-19.
As he watched health workers zip up body bags and wheel away deceased patients, he worried about his church. It was Christmas Day and he would’ve given a sermon that Sunday.
“It was difficult because your leader’s down,” said Draper, the pastor at Tucker Missionary Baptist Church in Syracuse’s Southside. “People were like, ‘We need you, we need you to get well, we need you to be here’ … but the church still rolled on.”
Draper, like faith leaders across Syracuse, has led his congregation through a pandemic that sent shockwaves through religious life and created lasting impacts on how people practice their faith. Many houses of worship navigated that crisis at a time when their services — like food donations, religious guidance and support networks — had become vital to the communities they call home.
Now, two years after they saw their doors shuttered and congregations dispersed, Syracuse houses of worship have begun a gradual reopening process, which has presented its own challenges.
“For 18 months, nobody had been in the building,” Draper said. “So now that it seems like we can come back in stages and phases, the adjustment is, how do I go from preaching to the camera to preaching to people.”
Together at a distance
After a year of giving pre-recorded sermons, Pastor Alicia Wood of Syracuse’s University United Methodist Church was eager to address her congregation in person.
She wanted to get back into the sanctuary, even with New York state capacity restrictions that would limit attendance. But when she stepped up to the altar to face the near-empty pews, she hesitated, realizing she’d almost forgotten how to speak to a live audience.
“When I went back, it was almost like my first time giving a sermon in public again,” Wood said. “It was very nerve-wracking.”
For Wood and UUMC, the transition to online services in spring 2020 was jarring. The church, which advertises its welcome-to-all message on massive banners slung over its front doors, had to limit visitors and staff. Staff also had to figure out how they would reach elderly or immigrant congregants who may have lacked access to technology.
UUMC was one of many. Across neighborhoods, faiths and denominations, the pandemic disrupted traditional practices, forcing Syracuse faith leaders to sacrifice theological significance in the name of safety.
After years preaching in his church’s call-and-response tradition, Draper found himself questioning his presentation when he had to speak to a camera.
Thekchen Choling, a small Tibetan Buddhist Temple in downtown Syracuse, had planned in 2020 to host a visiting monk from India — until the pandemic struck, consulates closed and the monk was unable to travel, only able to join the temple over Zoom.
“We had to make decisions over and over again on the fly,” Wood said. “But none of them were easy, and none of them were simple.”
Megan Thompson | Design Editor
As the state began lifting restrictions on houses of worship, leaders had to make decisions about which guidelines, such as mask or vaccine mandates, they would retain, if any. In some cases, those decisions led to rifts among congregants.
Babette Teich-Visco, the temple’s vice president, said the choice to mandate vaccines for temple visitors created a schism among its regular attendees.
“We’ve lost people because of that, and I don’t know if when this is over they’ll ever come back,” she said. “We really want to open up, we want people to come and we want to welcome them. But at the same time, we want everybody to be safe.”
At the same time, faith leaders have seen benefits from the religious transformation the pandemic brought on.
Virtual worship has created gathering spaces that extend beyond sanctuary walls since their congregations are no longer limited to those within driving distance, Draper said.
“Everybody became equal, because people could watch you from all over the world,” he said, adding that his congregation has swelled since TMBC began live streaming services. “Now, people just click in and some churches end up growing.”
For the Buddhist Zen Center of Syracuse, live streaming meditation enabled students who had moved away to participate again, said JoAnn Cooke, a senior student at the Zen Center and Syracuse University’s Buddhist Chaplain.
Viewers have joined in from other states and countries, even as the center’s Zendo — where members gather for in-person meditation — remains closed to the public.
“It’s really been, in some ways, great, because we miss those people and now we get to see them on a regular basis,” Cooke said.
Supporting communities in crisis
Before the pandemic, UUMC’s food pantry — a long-running part of its outreach ministry — fed about 50 families a week. When the pandemic hit, that number rose to 300, Wood said.
For Vineyard Church, it went from about 60 families to 400, according to Chris Honess, site pastor at the church’s State Fair location.
Megan Thompson | Design Editor
Draper estimated that TMBC has provided tens of thousands of meals during the pandemic, including to local students who were left without school lunches during the transition to remote learning.
“It wouldn’t be uncommon to come down here and the line would be wrapped all around, down the street,” he said.
Since the onset of COVID-19, houses of worship across the country have become avenues to get food, vaccines and other forms of community assistance to neighborhoods hit hard by the virus. The same was true in Syracuse.
“The local religious communities really put forth very heroic efforts to help people,” said Michael Watrous, agency relations manager for the Food Bank of Central New York. “It was just really a tremendous outpouring of support.”
Though houses of worship have long been a part of the Food Bank’s distribution network, they became increasingly vital during the early days of the pandemic, when a surge in demand placed a strain on resources.
Houses of worship stepped up to meet those needs, Watrous said.
A glimpse at the Food Bank’s online Food Finder shows that a majority of its partners in Syracuse have religious ties — as many as 75%, according to Watrous. He attributes this to a shared mission of service that spans across different faiths and traditions.
“Many of them organized additional distributions. Many of them recruited additional volunteers,” Watrous said. “They’ve been really just invaluable.”
Watrous described houses of worship as community centers that are capable of reaching neighborhoods and populations other food distribution networks sometimes can’t.
For the Southside, one of those community centers was TMBC, where outreach efforts went beyond food distribution.
The church held pop-up vaccine clinics and helped residents apply for rent assistance. It continued offering up its sanctuary for funeral services, at a time when funeral venues in Syracuse were overwhelmed by both the rising tide of COVID-19 deaths and an onslaught of new restrictions.
“We were one of the places, because of the size of our sanctuary, where people had space,” Draper said. “We still tried to do that, to yet provide something normal for people, because when COVID hit people were dying at an alarming rate.”
Support from religious organizations went beyond food donations. In addition to collecting non-perishable food and menstrual products, Temple Adath Yeshurun launched a pen pal program with residents of a local nursing home who couldn’t have in-person visitors, said Sonali McIntyre, the temple’s Media and Public Relations Coordinator.
Wood remembers when social distancing restrictions forced UUMC to stop welcoming community members inside for a hot meal — an adjustment she said was difficult to make. To-go meals took the place of sit-down breakfasts as staff adapted to feeding hundreds of people in two or three hours.
But even in the pandemic’s darkest days, the staff continued to serve hot coffee. Wood insisted on it, if only as a sign to their neighbors that the church was still there to support them.
Strength in scripture
At Honess’ Vineyard Church — which has five locations in the Syracuse area — sanctuaries were replaced first with laptop screens, then with parking lots and playgrounds. Congregations would meet outdoors when safety and weather permitted, and virtually when they didn’t, until in-person worship resumed on a limited basis.
Honess remembers it as a time of uncertainty, when he had to put aside some of his favorite parts of the job. To get through it, he fell back on a familiar piece of scripture — a Biblical parable about two houses, one built on stone and the other on sand. In a storm, only the house built on stone, the stronger foundation, remains standing.
“That’s what I would come back to, that scripture ringing in my ears,” Honess said. He asked himself whether he would base his life on the stone — his faith — or on sand, the “shifting of culture and the shifting of politics and the shifting of this virus that happens every day.”
Several Syracuse faith leaders said they’ve also made pandemic-related decisions guided by scripture and religious principles.
In charting its COVID-19 response, Temple Adath Yeshurun relied on two guiding principles, McIntyre said. Those were pikuach nefesh — a Jewish principle that places the value and protection of human life above other religious commandments — as well as its own mantra, kulanu b’yachad, a call to unity meaning “we are together as one.”
Draper rattled off a series of Bible passages — Psalm 40, 2 Chronicles 7:14, Isaiah 40:31 — which he believes speak to the struggles congregants have endured during the pandemic and offer hope for the future.
Teich-Visco said that Tibetan Buddhists around the world turned to their faith during the pandemic, some praying to specific Buddhas known for their “power to quell pandemics and rescue people from disease.”
It wasn’t just the virus leaders sought spiritual guidance on. Honess, Draper and Wood all mentioned the role of scripture in approaching heavy issues, like politics and social justice, that may have divided congregations.
On Dec. 26, 2021, one year after his stint in the hospital, Draper addressed his church in person and live on Facebook.
He spoke frankly about his COVID-19 experience, the dangers of the looming omicron variant and the benefits of the vaccine. He also explained his decision to keep certain restrictions in place for in-person worship, even if some congregants disagreed.
“I want to do the things we used to do too, but we cannot, for your safety,” he said. “I want y’all to understand: COVID is for real.”
He added: “I love y’all, and death hurts.”
