December 22, 2020. Sheltering at Home Week 41
St. John’s Episcopal Church in Oakland, California, has not met in the flesh since March — thanks to state and local pandemic restrictions.
St. John’s is not alone. Churches, synagogues, mosques and temples across the country are feeling the loss of their in-person gatherings. Some insist it is their right to continue holding congregate services. A few are taking their cases to court, asserting that religious liberty trumps public health concerns.
But over at St. John’s, the challenge of adhering to pandemic guidelines has given the community new life.
Attendance at its video-conferenced church services and adult ed get-togethers has been robust. Some members (count me in) have been only too happy to show up at church a little late, wearing pajamas and sipping a cup of tea.
Yet St. John’s’ close-knit congregation has chafed under the pandemic restrictions. How can you invite folks to your church or do service work in your community when the place is pretty much closed down?
As Christmas approached, “we all had a knot in our stomach thinking about what we should do,” reports the church’s pastor, Scott Denman.
“We were worried about our young families whose lives have become nearly impossible to manage with online school and working from home.” What kind of Christmas celebration could the church offer its children and the surrounding neighborhood?
Denman says that a few months ago he “woke up in the middle of the night with an idea. What if we created the Christmas story in a drive-through format?”
The St. John’s campus, with its hills and trees and ample drive-through parking lot, would be the perfect setting for a “stations of the Nativity” — using Christmas lights and still life scenes from the first Christmas.
The congregation leapt into action. One member painted a mural of Bethlehem. Another set up a local radio transmitter to broadcast a running narrative to visitors’ car radios. Others volunteered to direct traffic and hand out gifts to visitors.
Getting more visibility in the community has been a decades-long struggle for St. John’s. Its 66-year-old sanctuary is tucked away behind a patch of trees on a small side road in the Oakland hills. Which means the church often goes unnoticed by its Montclair district neighbors.
And so, this holiday season, the people of St. John’s are addressing their church’s obscurity head-on. They are lighting up the parking lot and inviting neighbors to drive on through.
It’s been “a great way to let people discover the church behind the trees,” says Denman.
St. John’s “Drive-Through Christmas Story” is socially distanced and open to the public. There is no charge for admission. It’s held from 5 to 8:00 p.m. every day through December 29, at St. John’s Church, 1707 Gouldin Road, Montclair, Oakland, California.
Around the corner, the Thornhill Coffee House has joined in the drive-through Christmas festivities with special 5 to 8:00 p.m. hours through December 29. Hot cider, eggnog and kids’ hot chocolate are included on the menu.
At the end of the drive-through, you can donate spare blankets and warm clothing to be passed along to local people without homes.
And, yes, it’s OK to go around the block and drive through the drive-through again!
Post-Christmas update: The folks at St. John’s tell me that they had fifty to seventy cars passing through the church parking lot most nights of the Drive-Through Christmas. One visitor, realizing that she hadn’t thought to bring used clothing to donate, took off her sweater and gave it to the St. John’s volunteers to pass along.
Can Christmas be Christmas without the kids? That’s a question I have given some thought to. Can Christmas be Christmas without the miraculous? I pondered that one in “Witnessing to the Light With Tinsel and a Plastic Santa.”
Thank you. It did warm my heart.
It was a nice outing for Jon and me. We also drove by some neighborhood houses lit up for the holidays.