Dear friends,

I hope everyone is managing well considering the circumstances. It is disheartening to see the cases continuing to rise in Honolulu. At the beginning of the pandemic, Hawai’i was a success story. Sadly, many times in life when we find ourselves at the top, we soon find ourselves falling. New guidance is given to the community every week, and the media is full of conflicting information and political finger-pointing. Amidst all of this human drama and failure, let’s hope that things will move forward, and that cases will start to decrease again. Until then, we continue to practice all safety precautions vigilantly at St. Mark’s.

Since the beginning of August, and due to the rising community infections, we have suspended in-person worship at St. Mark’s. I was surprised to discover this week that many churches in the community continue to meet in-person on Sunday mornings, and some even have congregational singing! As you know from worshiping at St. Mark’s, we have not had in-person congregational singing since we began the lockdown in March. When we regathered for in-person worship in June and July, we only had a soloist sing for us in church, and the soloist was always masked and appropriately distanced. The guidance that our Episcopal churches have been following has been much more conservative than the other churches in our wider community.

There has also been confusion about the number of people that may be present in our churches at a given time. Some community leaders have said we must limit our gatherings to ten people. Other community leaders have said that churches may have more people, as long as they are physically distanced. Needless to say, this is confusing for all of us, and I have chosen to have us limit all gatherings to ten people, and now to five people, according to this week’s guidance.

For the time being, our worship will continue to be online obviously. We are fortunate to have many archival recordings of service music from St. Mark’s available to us, and so our Sunday morning worship will continue to have music. We also continue our outreach ministries with all safety precautions in place. Even in a pandemic, we are called to serve the least among us, perhaps even more so now.

Please join us online this Sunday. We continue to worship the living God each week, and we continue to enjoy each other’s presence, even if it has to be virtual for the time being.

God bless,
Father Paul Lillie +