​Dear Friends:

Today, July 1, 2020, our state's governor, Gavin Newsom, has once again had to close many businesses and places we had hoped to have open. The spike in Coronavirus (COVID-19) cases has put a sudden and frighteningly-large number of people in the hospital and has once again strained an already taxed and exhausted health system.   

The positivity testing for the virus has risen from 4.6% to 6% in just one week. Failure to "flatten the curve" makes shut downs of newly opened operations necessary.  Hospitalizations are up 51% and ICU admissions up 47% over the past week. 

The closure will affect mostly 19 counties in Southern California where the spikes in cases have occurred.  The shutdowns will impact about 70% of the state's population. 

Indoor restaurants, movie theaters and concert venues, wineries, and other similar enclosed spaces that were gradually opening are now slated to close yet again.  If the business can operate outdoors, it can continue to function.  Churches are still asked to proceed with virtual services, and large gatherings of all kinds are discouraged, even outdoors when social distancing cannot be assured.  

Bars are being traced as a key factor in increased exposure and are being shut down. This led to a demonstration at the Capitol building by bar owners today. Nevertheless, the order stands.

In Southern CA Orange County has been put back on the 'watch' list with Solano, Merced, and Glenn counties also added. Imperial County, another "hot spot" of virus increase is moving to close all non essential businesses as well as public parks.

Beaches from San Diego to Sonoma County will not be closed by the state for the upcoming holiday weekend. However, parking will be restricted, and no traffic will be permitted.  Counties are taking the initiative to close their own in many cases.  Also, counties that have not discontinued fireworks displays are now being asked to do so. 

The state's requirement that everyone wear masks while out of their own homes or cars is the single best way to regain normality.  We learned that former California Governor, Arnold "The Terminator" Schwarzenegger has abandoned his favorite gym in Southern California since he found people not wearing masks. 

We would argue that if The Terminator can wear masks, anyone can. It's a symbol of strength, not weakness.  Please make mask wearing a positive thing among your friends, families, and congregations.  The sooner masks and social distancing become the norm, the sooner we can regain some semblance of our former lives.

In the meantime, honor the restrictions, wear a mask, and definitely wash your hands.  Have your 4th of July celebrations outside with sufficient social distancing, and remember that Independence Day comes every year. These problems shall pass if we work on them together now. 

Thank you and stay safe. 

Dear Friends,

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld Governor Gavin Newsom's order suspending in-person religious gatherings.  What was asserted by opponents was the violation of First Amendment Rights.  However, the court found that the greater good was protecting the general welfare in preserving social distancing and public health.

Soon we hope this will change.  To that end, Governor Newsom's office has put out a PDF we can use.  From the Department of Public Health, we are, oddly, part of the "COVID-19 Industry Guidance" with specific reference to places of worship.  Being part of our state's "industry" is rather appealing from the standpoint of reminding us we are to be as caring of those who pack our frozen foods as of our neighbors in the pew next to us.  So with that illumination, we link you to our specific  "industrial" guidelines for reopening here  

In the meantime for everyone worshipping via Zoom or web pages or Facebook or however you're doing it, remember the pandemic is not over, and life will not go back to "normal".  It will take some adjustment by us all, but if we truly keep the faith, we will prevail.

Thanks to all of you who have written back concerning these email observations.  It's lovely to reconnect with many of you. You're a blessing to us here in Sacramento. 

Our last advice today from the sign on the elementary school in East Sacramento:  "Keep calm, and wash your hands."

Thank you.

Dear Friends,

As the president moves to force states to declare places of worship "essential", we offer viewpoints on the topic of resuming services in our churches, temples, mosques, and meeting houses.

We have received, through our allies at San Francisco Interfaith Council, the guidelines from California's Governor Gavin Newsom:

​We also received a thoughtful observation from Rev. Dr. William Barber, the founder of the Poor People's Campaign regarding our obligations to one another in this crisis. He pointed out that our first duty is the care for and of those around us. We need to put our longing for church community in the context of what harm it could cause to those whom we love and then to the broader communities around us.

In the opening verses of Matthew 10, Jesus sends his disciples to find and heal the sick. That takes precedence over preaching the Word. In the Age of Pandemic, our considerations need to be made in light of both faith and science, of our immediate beloved community and the broader reaches of our interactions with the world.  Early church, very primitive church, took place in the home. We can find our roots that way as well as in pews in our buildings. God is where the heart is. The rest is for deliberation. 

We hope the guidelines are useful. We know your good sense will help you find your individual and collective ways forward.

In addition, many of our member denominations have issued guidance and protocols for reopening and strongly encourage congregations to err on the side of compassion and safety.  For example, the California-Nevada Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church provides the following guidelines:

New Local Church Protocols for Preschools and Drive-in church gatherings

As new cases of coronavirus and deaths as a result of COVID-19 begin to decline in Nevada and California shelter in place restrictions are beginning to ease in phases. As we venture out with masks and hand sanitizer into our new normal, the Conference staff has been preparing new protocols for local churches so that as we begin to gather we continue to protect our faith family.

Many churches have wanted to take advantage of gathering for a 'drive in' worship in which folks gather in the church or alternate parking lot and stay in their cars. This may sound simple yet there are still necessary precautions to consider that keep folks safe and protected.

The drive-in protocol is posted on the conference coronavirus page. Click here to access the protocol.

Blessed be.

Dear Friends:

One of the scariest parts of being in lockdown to fight the coronoavirus in California is the possible lack of access to food. This is particularly hard for elders with limited mobility and incomes. Deliveries are great, when they exist, but they cost much more and strain limited budgets.

Here are resources that have been established in various counties to provide three hot meals a day to eligible seniors through June 10 of this year.  Please share this information widely in your congregations and communities.  

We want to share this information from our allies at In Home Supportive Services with you in case you want to participate or know others who could benefit from the "Great Plates" program that supports local restaurants and seniors on home isolation due to COVID-19. Here are the numbers to call or consult: 
 
http://211.org/ (Put in Your Zip Code to Find Number to Call)
 
L.A. County Joins Great Plates: here
 
Sacramento Zip Codes Call:
Dial 2-1-1
Or Toll-Free (800) 500-4931 Or Alternate (916) 498-1000
 
Sonoma County Zip Codes Call:
2-1-1
Or toll-free (800) 273-6222 or Text Your Zip Code to 898-211
 
Your income must be less than $74,900 to participate.
 
See main link & PDF: here
 
Main Link to All Senior Food and Other Programs:  Here  

We hope these resources will help you help others.

Stay safe.  Wash your hands!

Dear Friends,

For many years California Council of Churches and California Church IMPACT worked with an outstanding organization, the Applied Research Center. Originally based in Oakland, CA, they created several powerful programs to examine racism in our nation particularly in California.  We found their work to be of the highest standards as they examined legislative voting records, bias in our state budget and bills, and followed factors in our society that too often barred both equity and equality for communities of color.. 

Renamed Race Forward their programs have become truly national in scope. We now invite you to explore one of their new webinars looking at racism as a factor in how our nation is responding to the coronavirus pandemic, and how the pandemic is revealing the racism that already exists.

Please feel invited to share their work May 8 in the first of a series of webinars on this important topic.  Whether your concern is the unduly high mortality of Black and Brown people dying from COVID 19 or the rise of anti Asian hate crimes, these webinars hold important information for those of us dedicated to justice in our world.

To learn more please go here  We think you will find their in-depth analysis as helpful as we always have. 

Please stay safe and practice the best in pandemic prevention and in the creation of a humane society.

Thank you!

Dear Friends,

We are posting a statement from our former Council of Churches board member, Rev. Dr. Art Cribbs, Jr.  We found it insightful and want to share it with you.

 An Open Message:

Don't let the worst of us lead the rest of us!   

Nobody is a lesser or worse person than any other person, but, some of us are worse in our thinking.  When it comes to the pandemic and all the opinions and protests expressed across the nation along with pronouncements emanating from the White House, we are being bombarded with poor thinking broadcast through a mega microphone captured on radio, television, and across the Internet.  We need sound and sane leadership.  No compromise!  We can ill-afford to follow leadership that is laden with poor judgment and inexperience.

We need a commitment to pay close attention to the medical scientists who are NOT obligated to any political party or person.  We need to heed the directives of medical scientists whose lives are dedicated to the health and wellbeing of every person.  We don't need to follow the advice and misdirection of politicians or corporate business heads who place a higher value on money, the bottomline, and the economy than on the quality of our lives, Mother Nature, and the welfare of every person on Earth.  We need leadership dedicated to the restoration and preservation of our ecology, including air, water, and soil.

We are witnessing a public display of lesser minds in powerful positions.  On the one hand we need to pray for sound leadership rooted in compassion and good judgment.  On the other hand, we need to discern the voices and seek the truth without compromise.

This is the time when the past is behind us, the future is ahead of us, and only now is what we have and when we are living with reality.

Spread knowledge, compassion, love, and kindness.  Be gentle and stay safe!

Committed to Faithfulness,
​
Arthur 

Rev. Dr. Arthur Lawrence Cribbs, Jr.
Pastor
Los Angeles Filipino American UCC
Ethics Instructor for Law Enforcement Executives
California Department of Justice
Executive Director Emeritus
Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity
Former Broadcast News Director and Journalist

Dear Friends,

Despite the continuing gloom from being locked down and at risk of serious illness, today had two bright spots.

The Paycheck Protection Plan that was supposed to offer small businesses loans that became grants when used to help employees, has been fully funded for a second time.  Despite the abuses of the first round - money given to large corporations rather than small businesses and non profits - this round seems as if it will actually help us and our communities.  Never say never, but the public outcry was sufficient that several large firms gave their money back.  Your voice does matter here.

If you have an application in or need to start one, it will be through your bank or (I'm unsure of this, sorry) credit union.  They will have the applications and will walk you through them.  Remember, if the money goes to your employees, the loan converts to a grant. And that is very good news!

Second good bit of news is that the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act at this point by authorizing (demanding, but we're being polite) that the federal government pay insurers for the coverage they provided the last few years for people with pre-existing conditions.  The petitioners who wish ACA to die claimed Congress had ended ACA. That is not actually true, and the justices upheld the continued operation of the ACA.  That's particularly good news for states that continued to enroll and support their residents. It means the states, already stressed from covering pandemic costs, will not have to pay insurance companies themselves.

Small steps. But big ones in their way. 

Take heart from success.  It's too easy to miss it these days!

But still - wash your hands.

Peace.

Dear Friends,

In this new Plague Year, we are being confronted with decisions and actions that rarely impact people in civil society.   The hardest burden of fighting this pandemic is falling on every person in the medical community. It is for them we wish today to speak.

In addition to the techniques we all must manage to stay healthy and out of harm's way, our brothers and sisters in the medical community now face, day after day, decisions about who will live, who will die.  This is qualitatively different from the norm.  In our usual life and death encounters in cities and towns, medical personnel rarely have to triage - make instant choices about who is pretty much OK, who desperately needs medical intervention, and who is too grievously hurt for our medical actions to matter.  These are the stuff of rare emergencies such as 9/11.  It is the experience of the battlefield and MASH mobile hospital units.  It's not the experience of urban or rural practitioners, practitioners on reservations,  who are now overwhelmed with patients, many of them desperately ill, but for whom there are far too few treatments.

California Department of Public Health, at the request of hospitals, has created a checklist on standards of care in a world of pain coupled with a shortage of supplies.  Chief on the checklist is "longevity expectation" of the person in question. What this means is that older people, those with pre-existing conditions, those with disabilities, and various others will rate lower on the scale of treatment than will others.  California Church IMPACT, our sister organization that does advocacy, has protested, along with many allies,  the original plan ranking people almost exclusively be age and disability. The protest was entered at 6:00 last night. Some of our concerns were met by 8:30 this morning. But removing life expectancy as a factor was not.  

We know these are harsh conditions. We understand that there are often no good decisions. If you have 20 patients needing ventilators but only 15 ventilators, choices will have to be made.

And here is the moral injury.  There is not a doctor, nurse, anesthesiologist, respiratory therapist or any other provider who was taught to accept allowing someone to die as an answer to a shortage of supplies right here in America. 

We are now asking our medical professionals, the people also risking their own health and safety, to do what they were trained not to do, what society does not want them to do: let people die.

However much we understand the real dilemmas today, when this is over, we are going to have tens of thousands of people who were on the front lines of medical care now suffering from both PTSD and acute moral injury. 

It will be up to us in the faith community to help with the latter.  We should begin now to learn how to intervene, to help, to nurture and treat those who have served us sl valiantly but who were too often forced into choices no human being, much less a trained medical person, should ever have to make. Helping our fellow congregants, our neighbors and friends, cope with their own suffering will be acts of both trained professionals and of us, compassionate allies. and friends.  

There are numerous books on moral injury after war.  While this is in some ways worse since it's actions taken on home ground, the findings may be useful to you. One of them, Soul Repair, by Gabriella Lettini and Rita Nakashima Brock, has set a standard for our future understanding and our work.  Many others exist and may help guide us in our efforts to help make our medical community whole.

We hope we can begin now, even in the midst of the physical crisis, to prepare for the spiritual and soul-devastating impacts being experienced as part of the solutions. 

Thank you.