COMMENTARY: BY OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., April 24, 2020 – It is extremely difficult not to be cynical about the rationale behind a letter sent to Prime Minister the Hon. Dr. Hubert Minnis by the Bahamas Christian Council (BCC) seeking to have churches in The Bahamas “reopen next month under strict guidelines to keep congregants safe from contracting the deadly coronavirus.”
As noted in an article written by Tanya Smith-Cartwright on Thursday, April 23, in The Tribune, one of The Bahamas’ leading newspapers, BCC President Bishop Delton Fernander said: “We have a letter we would have written to the Prime Minister about our phased approach to opening and so we just await the date. It’s a letter on what we would do in terms of seating, sanitizing stations, no gathering, or welcoming or touching. Once we get a start date, we will then start our denominational training for churches.”
The letter apparently was sent to the Prime Minister on Monday, but Bishop Fernander said the Council had not yet received a reply.
Bishop Fernander was quoted as saying: “We know he is considering opening the churches and when he decides on the date he is planning opening then he will communicate that to us. All that is depending on the numbers (of COVID-19 cases) and how the country is going. We need to determine if it’s community spread or it’s institutionally spread. Both of them have different connotations and I don’t want to put that out there, but those two parameters will determine whether we can open sometime in May.”
The Tribune’s article stressed that the Council’s letter to the Prime Minister made it clear its members were aware of the importance of preventative measures.
“… We propose the phased re-opening of our churches for corporate worship during the month of May, 2020. We are not ignorant to the fact that we all will have to coexist with the virus for the foreseeable future and therefore a new operational normal has to be established. The normal must incorporate the introduction and enforcement of new sanitation procedures as well as adherence to physical distancing protocols,” the letter noted.
According to The Tribune’s article, “The council’s proposed operational guidelines for churches are: operating with a maximum occupancy of 30 percent of a church’s normal seating capacity to allow for social distancing; provide markings along the pews so that there is clear delineation of the required spacing between individuals; worship spaces with chairs will be required to arrange seating so that physical distance standards are maintained; sanitation stations placed at every entrance to the facility and congregants will be asked to wear masks when entering churches.”
Clearly, these “operational guidelines” for the churches to return to “business-as-usual” have a great deal of merit. Indeed, according to The Tribune’s article: “The Council says it believes with the introduction of these new operational standards, churches will be able to maintain their civic mandate as the ‘moral standard bearers’ for The Bahamas while fulfilling its divine mandate as ‘heaven’s representatives’ on the earth.”
Although I do not question the sincerity of the BCC in wanting to establish an atmosphere for its member-churches to resume their “divine mandate as heaven’s representatives,” I simply can’t erase from my mind the conclusion I reached a long time ago that there are far too many spiritual charlatans in The Bahamas who shroud themselves in religious vestments and purport to be servants of the Lord. I strongly believe that what some of them are mostly concerned about are the restrictions COVID-19 has imposed on their “businesses” that are denying them their lucrative weekly tithes from devoted church members.
Undoubtedly, there are some church leaders in The Bahamas who have made a genuine and total commitment to being “disciples” of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, but because The Bahamas has a well-established reputation of being a Christian Nation, there are some so-called Christian leaders who could not possibly make the kind of money they are making weekly preaching the gospel from the pulpit.
Another factor that should be considered is that there is no governing body to determine who is and who is not educationally qualified to use the titles Bishop and Reverend Doctor before their names. Under established religious guidelines, a Bishop generally is considered to be a person who is “a senior member of the Christian clergy, usually in charge of a diocese and empowered to confer holy orders,” according the a dictionary definition, and a Reverend Doctor is someone who has completed a range of educational studies that resulted in he or she obtaining a Bachelor’s Degree, Master’s Degree and a PhD in a religious-related discipline.
There are indeed some “genuine” Bishops and Reverend Doctors in The Bahamas, but there also are many so-called religious leaders in the country using these undeserved titles, so much so that The Bahamas probably has more Bishops and Reverend Doctors per capita than any other country in the world. Some of them, I am sure, may be bold enough to argue that they were ordained by God, and there is no greater power from whom to receive a “license” to preach the gospel.
According to information gleaned from the Internet, “More than 91 percent of the population of the Bahamas professes a religion, and anecdotal evidence suggests that most attend services regularly.”
Clearly, statistically speaking, The Bahamas is indeed a Christian nation. In New Providence, the three largest denominations are Baptist, 32 percent; Anglican, 20 percent; and Roman Catholic, 19 percent, respectively.
However, according to the information gleaned from the Internet, “Since 1976, over 60 percent of the children born in the Bahamas were born to mothers out of wedlock. According to the Christian Bible, sex before (and outside of) marriage is forbidden.”
Given the fact that “sweethearting” is also ingrained in Bahamian culture, what does this say about The Bahamas’ status as a Christian Nation?
Nonetheless, the BCC has wielded a lot of power politically over the years, and I suspect that Prime Minister Minnis, who announced on March 18 that churches had agreed to temporarily suspend services in an effort to stop the spread of COVID-19, will respond positively to BCC President Fernander’s request for the churches in our Christian Nation to resume worship services. Let’s all pray that the Prime Minister makes the right decision, as COVID-19 continues its deadly assault on The Bahamas and other countries around the world.
